Keneally conundrum leaves Albanese on low road to oblivion

The brawl over the future of Kristina Keneally has exposed party hypocrisy and a lack of transparency on a grand scale as its ‘faceless men’ blow a golden chance.

Labor Senator Kristina Keneally along with President of the Vientnamese Community in Australia Paul Nguyen speak to the media during a press conference at The Vietnamese Community Cultural Centre in Sydney. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Flavio Brancaleone

Just when Anthony Albanese would hope for clear air to advance Labor’s cause with voters ahead of a looming federal election, he is bogged down battling internal party strife.

Labor’s leader is caught in a brawl over the future of Kristina Keneally that has exposed party hypocrisy and a lack of transparency on a grand scale.

It raises questions too about whether federal Labor under Albanese is really serious about winning government next year.

While Scott Morrison weighs up possible election dates, and opinion polls indicate Labor is competitive, even if Albanese is not popular, what is the alternative prime minister doing?

Albanese is wrong-footed, defending the decision of his NSW party’s head office to foist Keneally, Labor’s deputy leader in the Senate and spokeswoman for home affairs, on an electorate in western Sydney to which she has absolutely no connection.

Imposing an outsider on Fowler, an ultra-safe Labor seat in the lower house with a 14 per cent margin, would not be as damaging if it did not come at the cost of disregarding a local with seemingly impeccable credentials.

Tu Le, a 30-year-old Vietnamese-Australian lawyer, community leader and ALP member, grew up in the area as the daughter of migrant refugee parents. Vietnamese make up 15 per cent of Fowler. Le had the blessing of the ALP’s retiring MP, Chris Hayes, not just as a local captain’s pick but as a talented local representative who could match Labor’s avowed support for more elected MPs who reflect community diversity.

Enter Keneally, the ex-NSW premier from Labor’s Right faction who has always relied on head office patronage to get ahead and was parachuted into Sam Dastyari’s former Senate seat in early 2018.

NSW Labor’s head office has now decided to parachute Keneally into Fowler because she was forced to look elsewhere – if she wanted to continue in parliament – after the same head office relegated her to an unwinnable No.3 spot on the party’s NSW Senate ticket for the next election.

The No.1 spot went to backbencher and fellow right faction member Deborah O’Neill. The winnable No.2 spot was not an option for Keneally because it was guaranteed, under a historical agreement, to Labor Left’s Jenny McAllister.

Candidate Tu Le in Canley Park. Picture: Ryan Osland

Albanese wanted Keneally saved. But what he didn’t do, using his supposed authority as federal leader, was to insist to Bob Nanva, general secretary in the ALP Right faction-controlled NSW head office, that Keneally take the No.1 Senate position.

And so Nanva, who is very close to frontbencher and leadership aspirant Chris Bowen, delivered an awkward compromise to Albanese. The ALP leader resorted to lame rhetoric to justify the outcome, which suggested Keneally, a privileged US-born Anglo living in an upmarket waterfront house on faraway Scotland Island, was somehow a migrant equivalent to Le. Albanese might be privately angry and feeling bruised, after declaring he did not want to be involved in factional disagreements as party leader. This is also the same Albanese, incidentally, who always argued as a young Left faction firebrand for rank-and-file ballots, not head office intervention. Albanese’s authority is now looking weak, as a leader from the ALP Left faction who draws support from the Right.

There is, however, another significant factor at work in this saga. Journalist Alan Reid coined the term “faceless men” in 1963 to describe the absurd situation of Labor’s then parliamentary leaders, Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam, outside Canberra’s Kingston Hotel, waiting to be told what to do by unrepresentative union conference delegates inside.

Despite reforms since then to policy processes, the debacle over Keneally’s future highlights why the faceless men analogy is as relevant as ever.

Regardless of her merits, and political baggage, Keneally would be Labor’s No.1 Senate candidate for the next election, and Le most likely preselected in Fowler by rank-and-file party members, except for two men unknown to voters at large.

Gerard Dwyer and Bernie Smith are the national and NSW secretaries, respectively, of the Shop Distributive and Allied Services Association, the largest union in Australia, claiming to represent 200,000 workers. The SDA is the ALP’s biggest affiliate and has been led by conservative Catholic leaders going back to Joe de Bruyn and others.

National Secretary-Treasurer of the STA Gerard Dwyer. Picture: AAP Image/Joel Carrett

Like modern faceless men, Dwyer and Smith backed Deborah O’Neill for the No.1 Senate spot, casting Keneally adrift, because they regarded O’Neill as “one of theirs”. While the SDA no longer pursues a “socially conservative agenda” in public, its leadership sticks to such principles behind the scenes. Dwyer and Smith were able to count on O’Neill to oppose gay marriage, for example, and she abstained when the matter came to a free vote in parliament.

Other right-wing union officials on NSW Labor’s administrative committee backed the SDA position on O’Neill securing the top Senate position, with one notable exception: Gerard Hayes, leader of the HSU and brother of the sitting member for Fowler, backed Keneally to stay where she was in the Senate.

Why did other unions back the SDA? ALP administrative committee members use similar words to describe it: “The SDA is the single biggest union in Australia. They’re not influential on policy and they don’t ask much. But they put their foot down on this.”

Dwyer did not return Inquirer’s call and Smith said he had no comment. Their colleagues say both are “unassuming, decent fellows” and “their use of union muscle is remarkable”.

The Keneally-O’Neill debacle reveals more. In years past, when the NSW ALP had strong general secretaries such as Graham Richardson and John Della Bosca, the edict of a federal leader that he wanted a candidate such as Keneally to remain in place was usually carried out differently. The news would be delivered to the SDA, and to O’Neill, that she would have to take her chances in the No.3 Senate position or seek preselection in a lower house seat.

There is an obvious seat on the NSW Central Coast where O’Neill lives and which she briefly held: Robertson. Yet it seems Labor candidates such as O’Neill and Keneally only want guaranteed positions, not marginal seats they could lose. The outcome is that a swag of marginal NSW seats Labor most likely needs to win a government majority – Lindsay, Banks, Reid, Page, Gilmore, Dobell and Robertson – have been left to drift without candidates preselected early enough to establish themselves. Inside Labor, there is dismay at this situation. “There’s a sense that we’re just trying to sandbag the seats we hold, not win target seats we need to get us over the line in government,” one senior source says.

Meanwhile, Labor is rife with speculation that Nanva, an ex-rail union leader who has served as NSW party secretary since late 2019, would like to leave his post for a safe upper house seat in state parliament, possibly with support from the SDA’s Dwyer and Smith.

Nanva did not return Inquirer’s call. His future is unclear because the NSW ALP’s union-dominated Right faction lost its majority this week when HSU leader Gerard Hayes was so disgusted at the way Keneally was slotted into his brother’s seat that he walked out of the faction and took his numbers with him. The HSU, the second-largest union after the SDA, now controls the balance of power in the NSW ALP. Nanva hangs on as party secretary with minority right support.

What is the message to young hopefuls such as Tu Le?

Unless Labor changes its tune, the warning is blunt: join the party, work hard, represent your community, aspire to go far – but be ready for the party to crush your hopes and install a head office favourite when you’re almost there. More than a few in Labor say this is a road to party destruction.