ALP bosses taken to court by Marlene Kairouz

A dumped Labor minister accused of branch stacking has taken ALP bosses to the Victorian Supreme Court.

Marlene Kairouz. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

A dumped Labor minister accused of branch stacking has taken ALP bosses to the Victorian Supreme Court claiming political parties need to be held to a higher standard than golf clubs.

Marlene Kairouz was charged under party rules last month but her barrister, John Karkar QC, told the court on Wednesday that the actions taken by the ALP were “outside of its power and … null and void”.

Ms Kairouz is seeking for the charges to be declared void and for the court to impose an injunction to stop the party from probing the branch-stacking claims at an internal dispute tribunal under former County Court judge Ross Howie SC.

Former premier Steve Bracks and former federal deputy Labor leader Jenny Macklin were appointed party administrators in Victoria last year following widespread allegations of branch stacking, including covert recordings filmed in the office of federal Labor MP Anthony Byrne, a factional ally of Ms ­Kairouz.

The Supreme Court heard the charges against Ms Kairouz related to an incident on March 10, 2020, when Melbourne was in lockdown.

Mr Karkar said the executive’s actions should be justiciable, allowing the Supreme Court to intervene instead of classifying the matter as a “domestic dispute within a voluntary unincorporated association” similar to a golf club. He said the issue dealt with procedural fairness, including the decision to appoint Mr Bracks and Ms Macklin.

The court heard the alle­gations aired on 60 Minutes in June 2020, with Premier Daniel Andrews writing to the national executive two days later.

Mr Karkar said the executive and adopted Mr Andrews’s letter verbatim, “not even correcting for grammar”, instead of forming its own opinion, thus voiding the appointments of Mr Bracks and Ms Macklin as administrators.

“It had all the hallmarks of being a knee-jerk reaction to the Premier’s emotive letter about [Adem] Somyurek … it’s a farce,” Mr Karkar said.

He also said the rules the charges were brought under were invalid and the charges relied on illegal recordings.

He said by trying to stop the matter going to the Supreme Court, the Labor Party was placing itself “above the law … That their organs can do what they like and are not answerable. It is a nonsense to say the rules that apply to golf clubs apply equally to the ALP or Liberal Party.”

Mr Karkar said the two major political parties held a monopoly on parliament and received hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ money at a state level. “Decisions relating to the very governance of our political parties aren’t amenable to court scrutiny,” he said.

He asked the court for an urgent trial, saying there were unlikely to be factual disputes as the case depended on documents.

The legal action includes Anthony Albanese, former CFMEU head Michael O’Connor and ­others.