Victoria’s anti-corruption watchdog has no choice but to follow the evidence and invite Daniel Andrews into the witness box as part of its investigation into the grubby underbelly of the ALP.
Testifying on Monday, expelled ALP factional war lord Adem Somyurek — described only a few years ago by the Premier as his “good friend” when he welcomed him back into cabinet — placed Andrews slap bang in the middle of geographical, cultural and political world now the focus of IBAC’s Operation Watts.
Somyurek alleged:
1) Shortly before the 2014 election, he raised concerns with Andrews about the “gold standard” Red Shirts rort in which Labor misused $388,000 in taxpayers funds to help win the election. “I went to the Premier. I said, ‘Do you know what John’s (Lenders) doing?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ Words to the effect, ‘Well, you’re either going to – you know, if you want to win an election or not?’.” Andrews has always denied knowing about the rort before it was exposed by the Herald Sun and subsequently investigated by the Ombudsman.
2) Andrews was the operational chief of the Socialist Left faction in Melbourne’s southeastern region who he negotiated a peace pact with in 2002 to end branch stacking. Somyurek didn’t explicitly say Andrews was a branch stacker, but the implication of his allegation couldn’t be clearer. “Mr Andrews and I at that point (2002) were in constant contact about a potential deal locally in the southeast,” Somyurek told IBAC.
3) The Socialist Left, of which Andrews was a key leader during the late 1990s-early 2000s, “invented ethnic branch stacking”.
4) Somyurek said state parliament — all parties were united on this, he said — had deliberately kept new laws responding to the Ombudsman’s Red Shirts report narrowly focused to allow electorate staff to continue doing party political work. As Premier, Andrews is the most senior politician in this place and given IBAC Commissioner Robert Redlich’s exasperation at this collective failure to act on the Ombudsman’s report, he deserves to be questioned on this point.
Somyurek’s evidence provides some context to Andrews’ verbal Twister from a few weeks ago, when he refused to deny engaging in branch stacking, or being aware of it during his life as a young gun in the SL.
“I’ll be 50 next year. There was some stuff yesterday about way back when in 1999 and 1996 and 1997, when I was, you know, 24 years old,” Mr Andrews said on October 12, following the evidence of federal Labor MP Anthony Byrne to IBAC.
“I know that all of us like to think of ourselves as very important when we’re 25, but we rarely are.
“I don’t want to be sledging 24 and 25-year-olds … but I wasn’t the leader of the Labor Party then, so it’s just important that we don’t overplay just how big a role people might have played 25 years ago, half a lifetime ago.”
IBAC has made it very clear over the past weeks that it wants to keep Operation Watts targeted on the Somyurek operation in the Right of the ALP.
But after Somyurek’s evidence on Monday, this is not sustainable. The Victorian people who pay for IBAC deserve the full truth and that can only come by expanding the scope of Operation Watts. If that means weeks of additional hearings, then so be it.
Commissioner Redlich told Somyurek on Monday that Operation Watts’ public hearings were part of an “inquisitorial” process. In that case, there can be no greater failure if this process ends up being remembered for being distinctly incurious.
