Inside the ALP hunger games
The ALP reveals its dysfunctional, power-obsessed side as branch stacking and factional brawls become front-page news.
When Labor’s backroom power games, branch stacking and factional brawls became front-page news, voters must have wondered: is this what we pay you bums to do?
Lawmaking may be messy, like watching a butcher make cheap sausages. But it has nothing on getting a bird’s eye view of the grisly pursuit of power in the Australian Labor Party.
And that’s what turns an otherwise boring story of business as usual within Labor into a political bomb for Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and federal Labor leader Anthony Albanese. We were invited to join a day in a Labor MP’s office and watch the shenanigans of party scoundrels who wield power.
This past week has been like watching a medley of memorable scenes from modern cinema. Ridiculous threats in explosive text messages sent by now disgraced Victorian cabinet minister and Right faction powerbroker Adem Somyurek and his factional sidekick in Canberra brought back memories of a pre-texting age when The Godfather’s Don Corleone left the bloodied, severed head of a horse in the bed of his enemy. Listening to filthy exchanges between Labor MPs was like re-watching Reservoir Dogs where badass characters spit out the F-word 269 times in 99 minutes.
And remember the woodchipping scene in the Coen brothers’ classic, Fargo? One icy winter, near a remote cabin in Moose Lake, Minnesota, one dolt is discovered feeding the dismembered body of his ally into a woodchipper. Welcome to the Victorian electorate office of federal Labor MP Anthony Byrne, where Somyurek’s career was brought to a bloody end with secret surveillance cameras.
Labor’s current political problems, who pulled the trigger on Somyurek and why, and who at the highest levels knew what when about the long and orchestrated campaign to destroy the Victorian powerbroker, could fill a book. For now, the biggest problem is that Labor gave us front-row seats to watch its darkest side spring to life on Nine’s 60 Minutes program. And once seen, we can’t unsee it.
Having seen all the gory details of Labor’s inner workings, it’s much easier now for voters to pull together other episodes, filling out a far bigger picture of dirty games and institutional corruption within the ALP. Which raises the question: which genius or geniuses in Labor imagined that choosing the nuclear option to publicly blast out Somyurek would help their faction, their party and their chances at the next state and federal elections? When you invite voters to watch your party’s internal cage fights, voters will struggle to work out who the good guy is.
From our ringside seat, we read nasty and offensive texts and listened to Somyurek’s braggadocio. But not even the most disinterested voter would imagine that the ousted Victorian minister is alone on this front. When Andrews fronted cameras to express his outrage at Somyurek’s language, it struck a confected note. Maybe because it brought back memories of reports from 2014 when the Premier’s internal enemies claimed that he had told Labor MPs not to worry about Liberal candidate Donna Bauer at the upcoming election because she would “soon be shitting in a bag”. Bauer was being treated for bowel cancer at the time. Andrews denied making the comment, but this week’s political explosion serves as a reminder of past brawls where no one comes out clean.
Somyurek is no Robinson Crusoe when it comes to making threats against factional enemies either. Three days later, Byrne’s equally vile texts became public. The man wanted to cut off an enemy’s head and pee on it. But still, it raises the next question: who among Labor’s factional warlords on the Left and Right and their soldiers could withstand their own texts being revealed?
When we saw the secret and possibly illegal surveillance by Labor operatives of fellow Labor politicians, it was hard deciding who was the dirtiest fiend, the bullyboy being recorded or the traitors and dibber-dobbers who secretly taped him? Every one of them looked rotten.
When we were invited to watch and learn about Labor’s brutish and fraudulent branch-stacking activities, and listen to the Victorian Premier’s indignation on Monday morning, it offered up more memories. This time about the time when Andrews brought Somyurek back into the Labor ministry in 2018 after removing him in 2015 amid allegations that the former taxi driver had bullied his female chief of staff. A bloke in the opposing faction who had amassed two-thirds of Labor’s numbers from branch stacking needed to brought back into the fold, not left outside to cause havoc.
When we learned that political staff members in the Andrews government, paid by taxpayers, were recruited part time to do dirty political work it was a reminder of an earlier scandal with some striking similarities that engulfed the Premier himself. The seeds of the Somyurek scandal could have been sown by the infamous Red Shirts rorts affair.
In March 2018, the Victorian Ombudsman found that Labor MPs misused $388,000 of public money to pay electorate staff — dubbed the Red Shirts — to campaign for Labor during the 2014 election. While Andrews agreed to repay the money, that was after he wasted more taxpayer money challenging the Ombudsman’s authority to investigate the matter, and after all 16 Andrews government MPs refused to co-operate with requests for police interviews. It was happy news for Andrews when, with little explanation, Victorian police decided to drop the investigation into Labor’s scandalous misuse of public money.
By effectively condoning the Red Shirts scandal, the Victorian Premier may have enabled a new trajectory for the misuse of public money by Labor MPs using political staff members for party political purposes in different ways.
It is hard to fathom how the Labor Premier and the federal Labor leader knew nothing, saw nothing, heard nothing about the Somyurek scandal until it aired on 60 Minutes.
After all, the odious branch stacking, fake members, foul language, threats and the misuse of political staff members for party political purposes are just symptoms of a deeper and wider cultural rot growing within the no-holds-barred, whatever-it-takes Labor Party. After this past week, Australians are entitled to conclude that, by ordering this carefully planned, bloody and very public political assassination, political bigwigs within the Victorian Labor government and in the federal Labor opposition are becoming increasingly brazen in their dark arts.
Millions of hardworking Australians who once looked to Labor for representation will surely be disappointed that the ALP has become a hollow political party where good public policy is lost to political pursuits of seeking and rewarding patronage, trading favours, building dynasties, ensnaring and punishing internal enemies, turning on mates, all in the name of wielding factional power for power’s sake.
The federal Labor leader and Labor’s national executive have taken over the Victorian branch. So-called Labor cleanskin Steve Bracks has been brought in to oversee the process.
But note Bracks’s other role. The former Victorian Labor premier is chairman of Melbourne’s largest class action law firm, Maurice Blackburn. The law firm has made large donations to the Victorian Labor Party. On Thursday, the lawyers at Maurice Blackburn were surely quaffing posh champagne and ordering new Bentleys after the Andrews government gave them with a new unlimited cash cow, allowing them to charge uncapped contingency fees to class action plaintiffs. Just another day in Victoria where money delivers policy favours for Labor mates.
The unfolding and unfinished Somyurek scandal that has engulfed so many in Labor points to tanking morality and morale within the party. There are some very good people in the ALP, but not enough to stop this rot.
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