A squeaky wheel on the ALP machine

NSW Labor Party boss Jamie Clements.

Judged even by the rough-and-tumble standards of the NSW Labor machine, the saga engulfing party boss Jamie Clements is rated widely as a new low point.

Many of Labor’s “mates” — a term used with both affection and derision to refer to NSW party powerbrokers — are astounded at what they see.

After a revolving door of party secretaries in recent times, they wanted Clements to take the ALP’s largest state branch in the nation to a position of strength in the wake of election defeats.

Instead Clements, who inherited the job from now Labor senator Sam Dastyari in late 2013, finds himself in a daily bog of scandal and office conflict with no end in sight.

The NSW Labor Party head office based in Sydney’s Sussex Street is not a local bowling club: it is meant to be the powerhouse of the party that offers an alternative government to the Coalition.

Labor’s NSW machine receives taxpayer funding under public donation laws to run election campaigns. Rules of proper governance and accountability apply.

The pantheon of Labor heroes from NSW is one of the party’s key selling points: it runs from Neville Wran to Paul Keating, and long ago from Jack Lang to Ben Chifley. There are campaign heroes, too, among the bosses who ran NSW Labor well before Clements: Graham Richardson, John Della Bosca and the greatest party kingmaker of them all, the late John Ducker.

The credo inside Labor goes like this: if the NSW party head office is not working properly, then the party cannot succeed electorally. Labor’s NSW branch is considered the party jewel and its decades of governing at a state level — last interrupted in 2011 — are advanced as proof.

The NSW branch is critical to federal election mathematics too: Labor cannot win nationally without NSW because this state with a Labor voting disposition accounts for almost a third of 150 seats in the House of Representatives where a majority determines the federal government of the day.

The NSW Labor Party is on alert that popular new Coalition Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull could call a federal election at any time. So how can it be that the jewel in the party crown, now under Clements’s nascent leadership, is in a state of crisis at such an important time? And all because NSW Labor’s head office is in a state of war with itself?

The immediate problem for Clements — the one that has thrust uncomfortable scrutiny upon him — is the allegation he made unwelcome advances to a female parliamentary staff member earlier this year.

Two years ago Clements did sleep with the woman, Stefanie Jones, but he vigorously denies her further claim that he shut the door of a parliamentary office one afternoon during NSW budget week in June this year and tried to kiss her.

Jones wants what is currently an interim apprehended violence order against Clements extended to a full 12 months at a court hearing that is set down for January 13.

The matter is complicated by the fact Jones is now engaged to David Latham, a party organiser at ALP head office. Clements is Latham’s overall boss. Apart from the thick of election campaigns when numbers swell, they work in a relatively small office. Relations are so strained between the pair that Latham has been operating out of a local Haymarket cafe to avoid contact.

The wider claim levelled at Clements — which he also disputes — is that he is running a “dysfunctional” organisation across the board because communications among staff meant to be working as a united team are strained or non-existent.

Sources with close knowledge of operations say relations between Clements and his deputy, Kaila Murnain, are tense. Several months ago Clements allegedly wanted to move Murnain to the party’s national office, a claim Clements also disputes.

Relations between Clements and other NSW Labor officials such as Tara Moriarty and Dom Offner are reportedly difficult as well. While Clements plays down the strains, accounts of his outbursts of temper abound. Staff at the ALP’s HQ are currently undergoing mediation and counselling.

“You can’t run a company when no one talks to the managing director, and some senior executives don’t come to work,” says one Labor insider with close knowledge of office operations. “Clements is at war with the assistant secretary. There is a poisoned well.”

There is more to this unhappy ship. Contained in a report commissioned by NSW ALP president Mark Lennon and handed to the party’s head office last week is potentially damaging information about alleged misuse of ALP credit cards by officials.

Concerns are also raised about how a former head office staff member, Courtney Houssos, kept an ALP office car after she moved to a Labor seat in the NSW upper house. Clements and Houssos insist the legitimate plan all along was for her to buy the car using an unpaid long service leave entitlement.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that Houssos’s husband, George, a former NSW ALP organiser, was paid $50,000 as an outside consultant while Clements was in charge before this year’s NSW election. Houssos has emphasised the five months of around-the-clock consultancy work he performed before the election. People with long memories of head office say they cannot recall former party organisers being brought back on this type of consultancy. They have raised questions about the contract, terms, tasks undertaken and approval process.

Still more questions have been raised about how a Sydney apartment, not far from Labor HQ, has been used by the general secretary on the NSW party’s tab when he has chosen not to make the nightly commute back to his central coast home.

In Clements’s defence, he does need to attend city functions that can run late, and he lives far away compared with others.

The report on ALP head office workplace practices and procedures, written by independent lawyer Simone Farrar, and former Gillard staffer Jack Whelan, has been restricted to certain eyes so far: ALP office holders have received only an edited briefing. Clements has declined to comment on the report’s contents, instead referring to an NSW ALP media statement saying that a related “range of allegations” published in the Telegraph were “completely without basis”. A further report, also commissioned by party president Lennon, is still to come that will explore the NSW ALP’s impediments to women and treatment of staff. Why this additional report, written by former NSW Bar Association president Jane Needham SC, was thought necessary is not clear.

Defenders of Clements insist he will triumph over what is essentially an office hiccup, and that the NSW party is in fact well prepared for the federal election campaign thanks to its general secretary’s work.

A number of NSW-based federal Labor MPs contacted by Inquirer have a different view, saying they are getting on with their own races because they have concluded it is not possible to count on a state party organisation that might not be able to help them.

The official view from George Wright, the ALP’s national secretary based in Canberra, is that he is “confident” about NSW head office preparations — and believes that in some cases they are ahead of other states. Some Labor insiders question what Bill Shorten, the alternative prime minister, really thinks about how the head office of his biggest state ALP branch is operating just months away from a possible election. Considering this week’s Newspoll gives Shorten a 15 per cent approval rating, Labor’s federal leader needs all the help he can get.

With NSW Labor so badly divided — the split runs deep through the middle of the dominant Right faction to which Clements belongs, and which still controls Sussex Street head office by lauding its numbers over the Left — there is no shortage of people calling for the general secretary to end the infighting by going now.

Former head office Right faction stalwart and Upper House president Amanda Fazio upset Clements with a Facebook post three weeks ago: “Wonder what his wife feels? Angry, humiliated, disgusted. So many options, including divorce.”

Then, after a Daily Telegraph article this week carrying details of the commissioned head office report, Fazio unleashed: “When will the powerbrokers in charge of the NSW ALP put a stop to this farce?

“How can we recruit women to the party and to run as candidates in this climate? What sort of federal election can be put in place in NSW? For the sake of the party this must come to an immediate end.”

Clements, for one, would certainly like the upheaval to end quickly. He has been saying he intends to stay on. Even if a magistrate finds in January that an AVO order should remain in place against Clements, his backers claim it makes no difference. They point out NSW police chose not to charge Clements with anything related to an alleged incident involving Jones because there was insufficient evidence for a charge of assault. It is the word of Clements versus Jones; no witnesses were in the room.

Clements, 39, is a solicitor from the NSW central coast whose main early claim to fame appears to be the local work he did in blocking controversial former Labor MP Belinda Neal from winning preselection in 2010 for the state seat of Gosford. He is at it again now, backing an alternative to Neal, famous for her blowup at Gosford’s Iguana nightclub in 2008, as she seeks Labor preselection for her former federal seat of Robertson. The recent spat has worsened relations between Clements on one side and Neal and her husband, ex-party boss Della Bosca, on the other.

Clements has worked as an employment lawyer but his entree to the top of the ALP came from serving as an industrial officer for Russ Collison, head of the NSW branch of the Australian Workers Union. He was then slotted into the office of then NSW opposition leader John Robertson as a junior adviser, and shifted to NSW party office. In the head office pecking order, Clements was ranked above his current deputy, Kaila Murnain, a possible sore point say some.

When Dastyari moved to the Senate, Clements stepped up to his former role as NSW party secretary. Three key unions — the AWU, the Shop Assistants Union and the National Union of Workers — are the backbone of Clements’s political support to remain in the job. All three praise his abilities, his conservative Catholic values and his family background as a married father of three.

It would be no small thing for Clements to leave now. Labor is not in office federally or in NSW. There are no obvious government jobs or senate seats on offer as a party parachute.

The stakes for Clements are high: he fought his way to the foreman’s job in NSW, and tossing away this coveted position of power imbued with tradition would be difficult for anyone in his shoes. He also holds an influential position as convener of the ALP Right’s national faction that he would lose if he quit his NSW job.

Labor’s NSW head office has had its share of controversies and tangled relationships. The late Geoff Cahill was pushed out because of his long lunches and credit card use in the late 1970s, but the real reason was Ducker’s revenge after Cahill had plotted to stop him winning the ALP’s federal junior vice-presidency. Stephen Loosley quit as party national president and did not seek another senate term after a kerfuffle related to his former NSW head office car, but it was minor in the scheme of things. Various high jinks involving NSW head office cars and petty jealousies are detailed in Fia Cumming’s “Richo” era book Mates. One recent party boss, Matt Thistlethwaite, seemed to get the job one minute and leave for a senate post the next.

Clements belongs to a new generation of NSW Labor people that includes close friends Chris Minns, the state MP for Kogarah often touted as a future NSW Labor leader; Peter McCabe, a staffer in NSW opposition leader Luke Foley’s office; and Ian McNamara, who works for Shorten.

Predecessors as NSW party boss such as Richardson, Della Bosca and Arbib were hailed for their association with Labor election victories. Richardson and Della Bosca, in particular, led the NSW party when the general secretary was considered king and their word on almost anything was a decree. They also had talent, and went on to political careers in their own right.

More recent party secretaries have not stayed in the job for long — and so the authority of the position has ebbed away. Supporters say Clements wants to reclaim the old-style authority, and could ruffle feathers along the way.

With election losses in 2013 and this year, Clements does not yet have much to show for his efforts. Another federal election loss is likely next year.

Some party elders say perceptions are important and protecting the party is vital, regardless of the truth. “When you become a problem, you’ve got to tap the mat,” one senior ALP figure tells Inquirer.

One of Clements’ most ardent supporters sees it differently. He says Clements is being targeted unfairly after one “indiscretion” several years ago, and to resign now would ensure “the punishment doesn’t fit the crime”.

“He’s only done one thing despite what people say — they should put up or shut up,” the senior Clements backer says. “He married a Catholic girl, never had much experience with women and becomes party secretary. Suddenly he thinks women like him, and he wouldn’t be the only one. He’s doing it tough.

“One of the problems is that the place has a lot of kids in there, and they’re behaving like ALP head office is university politics.”