Review into party’s faction friction is crucially flawed

The culture of NSW Labor will not change until the faction stranglehold over the party is broken.

NSW Labor leader Jodi McKay at a press conference in Sydney to announce a review into the administration of the NSW Labor Party. Picture: Jane Dempster

For 40 years, Anthony Albanese has been fighting the NSW Labor Right faction. Yesterday, the Left faction warrior would have relished announcing a review into NSW Labor’s governance and administration that could cause consternation among his factional enemies.

But the review of NSW Labor is fundamentally flawed. Nowhere in the one-page terms of reference for the review to be conducted by former attorney-general Michael Lavarch does it mention factions. The culture of the party will not change until the faction stranglehold over the party is broken.

The Right faction has run NSW Labor, essentially, since the 1930s. Albanese has been a foot soldier (and later the leader) of the Left faction since he joined the party as a teenager in 1979. His loyalty to the Left has been absolute and it has been rewarded again and again. This is the way factions operate.

Jodi McKay fronted the media with Albanese on Sunday. Yet McKay would not have become leader of the state party without the support of the Right faction’s suspended general secretary, Kaila Murnain. So there was a degree of hypocrisy in her calling for cultural change in the party.

Much of the review will consider the role of NSW Labor general secretary. This position is elected by state conferences, along with deputies from the Right and Left (because of proportional representation), and is accountable to an administrative committee.

This structure is largely the same in other branches of the party. The difference is that NSW Labor is more rigidly factionalised than anywhere else and the Right faction is overly dominant with the support of most members and affiliated unions. The general secretary has a dual role as the NSW Right faction boss.

This is from where the “whatever it takes” ethos stems. There is a culture in the Right faction that they can do whatever they want, including skirting the law, because they will always have the numbers to remain in power.

On Monday, the Right faction will meet at the Sydney Trades Hall. A small cabal of union secretaries will have already chosen the new assistant secretary to act in the position while Murnain’s departure is finalised. The party’s administrative committee will make it official days later. This is how NSW Labor has operated for generations.

Nobody can dispute that NSW Labor — having had parliamentary leaders, party secretaries and multiple MPs mired in scandals — needs to change. There is too much power vested in the general secretary, and clearer lines of accountability and greater transparency are needed.

If faction man Albanese was serious about change, he should have called for structural reform.

Moreover, he should step aside from having any role in faction matters. His interventions in the running of the party would then have more credibility.

But until the Right and Left factional grip over the party is loosened by giving rank-and-file members a bigger say and reducing the influence of unions, nothing of real substance will change.