It speaks volumes about the chamber they call the “red morgue” that it took an Upper House Victorian Liberal to help shut down what was looming as really uncomfortable allegations against Daniel Andrews.
As Adem Somyurek was slowly winding up to drag the Victorian Premier into the scandal, Liberal MLC Bruce Atkinson actively encouraged the Upper House president to block Somyurek’s address.
Atkinson may have had a technical point but he sure missed the politics of what was starting to unfold. D’oh.
It’s widely known that Andrews was active internally in his Socialist Left sub-faction and it’s reasonable to assume that those in that grouping were interested in maximising their numbers.
This concept is really at the heart of what Somyurek’s demise is all about.
Whether or not Somyurek was the industrial scale branch stacker he is accused of being or more fairly whether he was just one (very active) player on a very big field.
There is no question that Somyurek wielded a lot of influence at his peak but at least some of this must be attributed to his deal making ability to bring other groups together, rather than rely necessarily on aggressive branch stacking.
It’s a fair bet that Victoria’s anti-corruption commission will be having a tough time trying to drill into the byzantine nature of the Victorian ALP factional system.
Somyurek’s other message was that it defies commonsense to suggest that the federal MP Anthony Byrne and his staffer Alexandra Stalder knew nothing about the concept of branch development.
The former state minister was very clear in restating his belief that Byrne and Stalder were well versed in the art of encouraging people to join the Labor Party.
None of this is to say that Byrne or Stalder have done anything illegal.
As the Victorian Liberal Party is starting to discover, it’s one thing to allege wrongdoing, quite another to prove it definitively.
Somyurek was right to concede that he was cooked the moment he was recorded by Sixty Minutes uttering deeply unparliamentary language.
On the broader, and more substantial allegations of branch stacking, it is still unclear, though, whether he had been doing anything other than what many in the ALP do.
Those who have ever looked at this branch stacking question, lament that it’s one thing to make allegations, quite another to prove them to a standard that would survive a proper legal test.
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