Labor moves to change rules on vote for national leader

Senior Labor figures will move to change rules around electing a federal leader amid branch stacking allegations in Victoria.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese. Picture: AAP

Senior Labor figures will move to change the rules around electing a federal Labor leader in light of the branch-stacking allegations engulfing the Victorian division.

Labor Right MPs have told The Australian there was growing discontent within caucus over Kevin Rudd’s 2013 reforms that gave branch members a vote in the election of the leader of the parliamentary party.

A Labor MP said the rules in their current form could lead to a “Corbynesque takeover” of the party. “The people who work every day with their colleagues are the people who are the best judge of who should be leader,” another Labor MP told The Australian.

While MPs believe it will be too politically contentious to dump the rank-and-file vote, they will push for stricter eligibility requirements for branch members to have a say. This could include enshrining new rules that allow voting rights only to members who have been attending branch meetings and paying fees for at least a year before any spill of the leadership.

Some MPs think the voting rights in leadership contests should be given only to members who have been active in their branches for two or three years.

The ALP constitution says anyone who is a financial member at the time of a spill can cast a vote in a ballot for federal parliamentary leader. This is despite there being a requirement for members to be ­active for at least 12 months to get voting rights in other areas, such as candidate preselection.

Voting-right rules in pre­selections are stricter in NSW and South Australia, which require members to be active for two and three years respectively. “How can you fix branch stacking when you tell someone they can get a vote in a leadership contest five minutes after they join? That is an incentive to branch stack,” one MP said.

Right faction Labor senator Anthony Chisholm, a former Queensland state secretary, said it would be “appropriate” for new rules that would require members to be active for between six and 12 months before they could have a say in a leadership ballot.

“I think two or three years is a bit ridiculous,” he said.

The rules around leadership contests — which give branch members and caucus members a 50 per cent weighted input in a vote — can be overturned by a ­majority vote of the federal caucus.

Labor Left MPs also conceded that there was likely to be a debate around tightening the rules for voting rights in future leadership contests for rank-and-file members.

But the Left — which has a ­majority support in the branches — will push for any changes to be part of a wider reform of the rights of branch members, ideally giving them more engagement in party policy.

Some right-wing MPs are pushing for caucus-only votes during leadership spills while the voting rights of Victorian members are suspended, potentially until 2023.

This could apply to a leadership spill if Labor loses the next election, which will be held by 2022.

There are also question marks about how a vote would be carried in the unlikely event there was a spill of Anthony Albanese’s leadership before an audit of branch members was completed by party luminaries Steve Bracks and Jenny Macklin.

“If Albo got hit by a bus tomorrow, we would obviously sit down and have that discussion,” an MP said.