Kristina Keneally is the great survivor of Australian politics, with failure after failure being rewarded again and again. Keneally does not have support to lead Labor’s NSW Senate ticket at the next election. But she always has patrons to call on and this latest failure will be rewarded with a safe lower house seat.
Labor senator Deborah O’Neill was always going to win the support of union and faction powerbrokers to lead the Senate ticket. Keneally never had broad support to be parachuted into the Senate in the first place. She got the position only via a casual vacancy when Sam Dastyari resigned in 2018 and because NSW Labor secretary Kaila Murnain insisted.
With Murnain long gone, Keneally’s only option was to run third on the Senate ticket because the second spot goes to the Left faction – in this case, Jenny McAllister. Keneally does not have the voter support to win from the third position. Michael Forshaw (for whom I worked in my 20s) did it twice – in 1998 and 2004 – and Ursula Stephens was elected from the third position in 2007.
So Keneally has decided to run for Fowler in western Sydney. Incumbent MP Chris Hayes is retiring.
Keneally’s candidature is a slap in the face for the multicultural community of Fowler. This was a chance to have a representative who reflected the community. Tu Le, a lawyer and community leader, was that candidate. Keneally, if she is so good, should run for a marginal Liberal-held seat.
Has there ever been a more brazen carpetbagger? Keneally represented the Sydney eastern suburbs seat of Heffron in the NSW parliament (2003-12). Despite repeatedly ruling out a move to federal politics, she ran for the northern suburbs seat of Bennelong at a 2017 by-election. Now, she is running for the western suburbs seat of Fowler. Keneally did not live in Bennelong and she does not live in Fowler.
In 2011, Keneally led NSW Labor to its worst election defeat in 120 years. She lost the Bennelong by-election, a seat Maxine McKew won for Labor in 2007. She lost a bid to lead the NSW Labor Senate ticket. She was never elected to the Senate, only filling a casual vacancy appointed by party agreement via the NSW parliament.
So disliked by her own NSW Right faction and the broader parliamentary party, Keneally could not win a ballot to be a shadow minister. Ed Husic had to stand aside so she could take an allocated NSW Right spot. She could not win a ballot in the national Right faction to be Senate deputy leader, so Don Farrell had to stand aside.
Keneally, with a monumental ego that never has moments of doubt, relied on Anthony Albanese to secure these twin caucus positions. She relied on Murnain and Bill Shorten to override local Labor Party members to be the candidate for Bennelong and then to be elevated to the Senate. Keneally has never been elected to anything in federal politics without a deal.
Now once more the faction bosses have cleared a rose-petalled path for Keneally, to be the candidate for Fowler. There will not be a local preselection because Keneally would not win it. If the party’s members were given a say as to who they would like to be their candidate, it would not be Keneally. The danger for Labor is that a popular local independent candidate nominates for Fowler and wins the seat with Liberal preferences.
Keneally’s overweening ambition, her constant trampling on democratic processes, her seat shopping and relying on faction bosses have caused deep divisions in the party. The truth is that large swaths of the party – Left and Right – and are baffled as to why Keneally deserves special treatment again and again.
Her candidature is also an unpalatable reminder of the corrupted NSW Labor government. Keneally would not have been premier without the support of disgraced sub-faction bosses Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. Nathan Rees, whom she replaced as premier, famously said any leadership challenger would be “a puppet of Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi”. Keneally rejected this. Yet she returned disgraced Obeid ally Ian Macdonald to cabinet days later.
Several Labor MPs were found by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption to have acted corruptly during her premiership, including Tony Kelly, Karyn Paluzzano, Macdonald and Tripodi. Labor should avoid any association with this scandal-ridden period of government. Keneally hates to be reminded of these facts. Yet in June she labelled Gladys Berejiklian’s government “corrupt” and “sleazy”. That took some chutzpah.
It would be easy to blame Albanese for this mess. In truth, it is a problem for the Right faction to sort out. When Bob Nanva took over running NSW Labor and also the Right faction in 2019, he promised to improve governance and restore confidence in how the party was run. He promised the faction he would provide “stable, effective, respected and quiet” leadership. So much for that.
When the faction met online last Friday night, Keneally was endorsed by Kate Hoang, federal president of the Vietnamese Community in Australia, who addressed the meeting. Hayes told the meeting Hoang had handed out how-to-vote cards for the Liberals at the last election. As usual, there was no vote; Keneally was endorsed for Fowler. It could not be more farcical.
Nanva has not delivered on his promise; he has delivered a classic backroom deal of the worst kind. Labor had a unique opportunity to preselect Le, a daughter of Vietnamese refugees who advocates for exploited migrant workers and lives locally. She has been endorsed by Hayes. Le would be a terrific candidate. It shows disdain for party members and the voters of Fowler.
Keneally’s presumptuous political ambition is a wrecking ball. Le is collateral damage. It has left party members deeply unhappy, divided the federal caucus and split the Right faction. Labor is, yet again, paying a heavy price for Keneally. Worst of all, it demonstrates that Labor takes safe seats with strong multicultural communities for granted.
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