ALP’s not-so-high moral ground

Jail “shonky bankers” for 15 years. Fine “corporate crooks” $525m. Make News Corp, publisher of The Australian, answer hard questions about News of the World’s phone hacking scandal 20,000km away in London. Stop mining companies’ “unprecedented political interference and thuggery”, through their “commodities Kremlin” to “fleece” Australians. Greedy bosses “at the big end of town” were taking “obscene” bonuses while wage theft was “rife” among some of the country’s biggest employers.

For years these familiar mantras have been hurled by Labor politicians, past and present, who like to play up the perceived moral dimension in politics and business. Often they use such a broad brush that opponents, companies and industries are smeared because of their tenuous links, if any, to other entities. Few of the outbursts are valid. But we are blown away by the insouciance of Labor MPs, especially in NSW, and their brazen detachment from the party’s Sussex Street nerve centre. A few scapegoats have paid the price when there was no alternative; most of brand Labor seems to regard itself as teflon-coated.

It was ever thus, often on both sides in NSW, jaded observers of the state’s mediocre political scene know all too well. That is the problem. The latest manifestation is a wine box full of $100 notes.

On Wednesday former ALP general secretary Jamie Clements told ICAC how Chinese property developer Huang Xiangmo had handed him a wine box containing $35,000 in cash. The note read: “For your legal bills.” On Thursday Mr Clements denied Mr Huang ever gave him a bag containing $100,000 in cash. They met at his Sydney office on April 7, 2015 — two days before $100,000 cash was banked in party accounts — at Mr Huang’s request so Mr Clements could arrange for him to meet Bill Shorten, then federal leader. Last month Mr Clements’s successor, Kaila Murnain, was suspended after she told ICAC she had been told the money had come from Mr Huang, a property developer at the time who by law was not permitted to make donations to political parties. Ms Murnain had failed to act on the illegal donation. Mr Clements’s predecessor, former senator Sam Dastyari, resigned from federal politics in 2017 over his links to Mr Huang. All three, Troy Bramston wrote recently, made their marks “as clever campaigners, confidants of leaders and powerbrokers on a national scale”. But their “whatever it takes” ethos and lack of judgment when it mattered failed them. The organisation has become a byword for corruption. They exemplify the need for transparency in fundraising.

In its heyday “Sussex Street” was a pragmatic, effective force, producing Paul Keating and Bob Carr and championing Ben Chifley, Gough Whitlam and Neville Wran. It was pivotal in elevating Bob Hawke to power. On the other hand, a couple of generations of its backroom crew were mired in personal and fundraising corruption. The Machine treated preselections, campaigns, council development approvals, fundraising and the NSW government as its personal fiefdoms, making and breaking the careers of Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees and elevating Kristina Keneally. Sussex Street has been Labor’s salvation and its dark heart, its deliverer and its underbelly, sometimes simultaneously. It is also the realm of the unions and their conduit to power. Senator Keneally has suggested the party relocate away from the unions. It could do worse, but that is the least of its troubles.

Anthony Albanese knew he was in enemy territory when he worked there in the early 1990s as assistant general secretary. Being from the Left, he was an outsider and treated as such. As he said last month, NSW Labor is in a “diabolical situation”. The question is, what will the federal party do to intervene and reform the culture? If a bank, a media group or a mining company ran up such a track record the criticism would barely cease. Labor MPs have made an artform of distancing themselves from the very organisation that created them, and sustains them. They must face reality.