Political bloodsport is back and Premier Dan’s government is doing all the bleeding

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: Getty

In hindsight, I wished I had accomplished more from the membership of the Labor Party in the Bayswater, Frankston and Cranbourne branches that I didn’t know I held.

But credit where it’s due. The Victorian Right showed itself to be a class act. Not for them the ugly NSW Right model of cash piled into bacteria-laden Aldi bags. No. A pristine blue manilla folder was the preferred vehicle for the carriage of some allegedly black folding stuff.

One must maintain standards after all.

For those of us who love a bit of political bloodsport, these are great days. Footy might be back but Labor factional brawls are so captivating surely it is only a matter of time before they go to pay per view.

What now for Adem Somyurek, the man who had boasted that he would anoint the next premier of Victoria, run the party, the state, the country and possibly outer space?

It was suggested to me yesterday that Somyurek could join the Greater Western Giants and raise their membership from its current lamentable 25,000 odd to well … the sky’s the limit. Check your letterbox. You might just have joined the big, big sound from the west of the town.

All jokes aside, the odious revelations, including coarse profanity-laden threats and allegations of branch stacking on an industrial scale, which Somyurek denies, the real sin of branch stacking is not that it idealises numbers men and toe-cutters plotting in smoked filled rooms.

At its worst level, it exploits vulnerable people. Vulnerable people often from ethnic backgrounds who may have been duped or coerced into joining not just a party but herded into a faction they know nothing about and that has no interest in them other than as line entries on a membership roll.

Now the National Executive of the party has taken over, three ministers have resigned, the IBAC and the police are investigating.

In order to understand what has happened and why, we need to descend into the murky and little understood business of Labor factionalism in Victoria.

There is the Right and the Left. That’s the easy bit. On both sides there are sub-factions but the right-left divide runs strong in Victoria. The Left is run by senator Kim Carr. The Right by former senator Steven Conroy with a little help from Bill Shorten and others.

The unions run along factional lines, too, and in Victoria generally, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association known as the Shoppies, the National Union of Workers and the Australian Workers’ Union (Bill Shorten’s old mob) are affiliated with the Right.

On the Left, there’s the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union and United Voice, the union representing cleaners, security staff, restaurant and hospitality workers. Historically the Left has also been supported by the CFMMEU (recently merged with the Maritime Union, hence the extra ‘M’), the Transport Workers’ Union and the Electrical Trades Union.

Balance and counterbalance. Yin and yang. All things in perfect harmony with only a few shovels left outside people’s front doors in the dead of night.

But recently the CFMMEU severed its ties with the Left and formed a splinter group known as the Industrial Left which includes the Rail, Tram and Bus Union and the Financial Sector Union and coalesced with the Shoppies (normally hard right but with its factions fracturing) and was supported by a right-wing breakaway group run by guess who? Adem Somyurek.

That group threatened the sometimes uneasy but workable balance between the factions.

As it stood, that faction had a lot of votes on the floor of state and federal conferences. It carried a heap of influence and the ability to preselect candidates and make appointments.

Former Labor powerbroker Adem Somyurek. Picture: AAP

When the alleged branch stacking is thrown into the mix, it would make it even easier to preselect greater numbers of factionally preferred people who are not only loyal to the faction but owe their political careers to the people who put them there.

Incrementally, the influence and numbers had grown almost to a tipping point where the breakaway faction dominated the party currently in government.

And everyone knew about it. Everyone.

Somyurek’s influence was everywhere. In November 2017, Clare Burns ran as the Labor candidate in a by-election in the Labor heartland seat of Northcote after the death of the sitting member, Fiona Richardson. Burns managed to lose the seat to the Greens with a 12 per cent swing against her and a collapse in the Labor vote. One might expect that would see Burns heaved off to Coventry at least for a political cycle or two. But instead Burns was appointed state secretary, the most senior position within the party’s administrative wing, largely with the backing of Somyurek.

Any calls for a national outpouring of sympathy for Somyurek will be met with the low hum of crickets and the gentle swish of tumbleweeds. But, on what we’ve seen, there have been at least two ministers of the crown with their phones bugged and a hidden camera set up in the office of a federal MP, Anthony Byrne.

No one I’ve spoken to is suggesting the member for Holt had any knowledge that his office was ‘off’ as they say in the dirty tricks business.

The how is a question we should not spend too much time on. Concealed cameras are tiny, often Bluetooth activated and thus not normally picked up by electronic sweeps. You can pick one up for $80 at Alibaba.

Still it beggars belief that a couple of blokes in grey overalls could wander into an MP’s office and start drilling away in the ceilings of meeting rooms without someone noticing. By the way, how did the 60 Minutes crew know when and where Somyurek would be hitting an ATM so they could film him there?

So many questions. Many will never be answered because Fairfax journalist Nick McKenzie isn’t telling (nor he should) and his sources are hardly likely to put their hands up.

The real question is why?

Anyone with a passing interest in the game of politics will see one very big loser in Somyurek and that his factional grip on the party has all but gone. One winner is Victorian Liberal leader, Michael O’Brien but to be fair the Victorian Liberal Party is in arguably worse shape than the Andrews’ government. Besides, when it comes to political street fights, the Liberal Party could never hope to match Labor for calculated acts of bastardry and sheer rat cunning.

Once you look past the obvious choices, it becomes clear the real winner is Labor’s Left.

It is likely, too, that this scandal was driven not just by the Left but involved people on the Right who shared a common view that they would wear the heat of scandal and crisis in order to be rid of Adem Somyurek once and for all.

This might get ugly and stay ugly for a long time. No one can tell you what might happen now with the Industrial Left and how the factions might realign. No one besides Somyurek, who still has influence within the party, knows what his next move might be.

But if you ask me, I’d say the take home message from the mayhem is don’t mess with the Victorian Left. They play for keeps.