By David Crowe, Paul Sakkal and James Massola
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles are seeking formal endorsement for the AUKUS deal from the Labor Party faithful, as delegates air concerns about alleged attempts to tamp down dissent on the floor of the conference.
Jostling over the landmark security pact caused tension on Wednesday after an internal Left faction memo indicated that delegates only – rather than proxy delegates and conference observers – would be permitted to attend Left caucus meetings, prompting concern from two party figures who challenged the party’s leadership.
Defence Minister Richard Marles and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will try to get support for the AUKUS deal from party members.Credit: Rhett Wyman
The internal memo, obtained by this masthead, also included an expression-of-interest form for those who wanted to debate policies on the conference floor.
NSW Left MP Anthony D’Adam said he had never seen rules excluding proxies, such as himself, and observers at previous party conferences. The leading anti-AUKUS campaigner said it was crucial for his faction to be brave and push for ambitious policies to counter the growing threat posed by the Greens.
Firefighters’ union boss Peter Marshall, who said earlier this week that the AUKUS debate had been stifled, claimed the expression-of-interest process represented an example of how the Socialist Left and party hierarchy were seeking to shut down dissent.
“Requiring an expression of interest to be submitted before you’re able to participate in debate is the most graphic example of how democracy in the ALP has been depleted to the point that there’s a screening process before someone can have their say,” said Marshall, who is defying the Labor leadership and forcing a contested vote for the powerful national executive committee.
But a senior figure from the dominant Left subfaction, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, dismissed the concerns and said if each delegate sought to speak at the conference, “we would need to extend conference by a couple of days”.
Marles has been working behind the scenes to shore up internal support for the AUKUS deal amid disquiet from party rank-and-file members over the adoption of nuclear-powered submarines and criticism of the deal from Labor luminaries including Paul Keating and Peter Garrett.
The defence minister has been urging colleagues to back the statement and prove to Australians that Labor is the better party to manage defence.
The new statement, which is the result of weeks of negotiations, includes citing former Labor prime minister John Curtin and his leadership in World War II, to remind delegates that Labor is not a pacifist party.
In a briefing to Labor Party members on Monday evening, Marles said the Coalition was “defence dilettantes” and pointed out the cost of acquiring and maintaining the submarines was 0.15 per cent of GDP, while the defence budget would reach 2.3 per cent of GDP over the next decade.
“If you look back through our history, you know, from [Labor prime minister Andrew] Fisher establishing the navy, [Labor prime minister John] Curtin’s role in the Second World War, Gough’s [Whitlam] role in unifying the services, Kim Beazley, who was a great modern defence minister … doing this, getting defence policy right has been always been our province,” he told the briefing.
Marles and the parliamentary wing of the party are seeking the endorsement of a statement that backs AUKUS, nuclear propulsion, the safe storage of nuclear waste, the non-proliferation treaty, and the Treaty of Rarotonga against nuclear weapons in the Pacific.
The debate on AUKUS on Friday is expected to run for close to an hour and is potentially the most divisive policy issue of the party’s national conference in Brisbane. It is likely an amendment that condemns the AUKUS deal will be defeated.
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