Keneally v O’Neill: Labor’s great Senate showdown
Kristina Keneally and Deborah O’Neill are battling for supremacy in the upper house as their party undergoes a bigger ideological struggle.
When Bill Shorten lost the “unlosable” election last year, Deborah O’Neill confided to colleagues, “I’ve got a tattoo on my forehead, don’t I?” The NSW Central Coast senator was coming swiftly to the realisation that she was a marked woman — her fight for survival in federal politics had begun as quickly as the prospects of a Shorten prime ministership receded.
Breathing down her neck at this moment is Kristina Keneally. The former NSW premier turned Logie and Walkley-winning Sky News commentator and show host who was parachuted into the Senate to replace Sam Dastyari in 2018 — but not before a failed by-election bid to oust Liberal MP John Alexander in the lower house seat of Bennelong — has yet to face voters in a federal election.
For O’Neill and Keneally, the prize at stake is top spot on the NSW Labor Senate ticket — guaranteed job security for whomever occupies it.
If it was factional politics as usual, O’Neill would take the top spot with the support of the largest union in the state, the conservative Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association.
But Keneally, whose backing initially was from right-aligned Labor figures but now has a disparate and fragmented — albeit significant — base, is on a mission to steal the spot. The possible ace up her sleeve is her closeness to Anthony Albanese and her position as deputy leader in the Senate.
As one senior Labor source explains: “Where we are at right now, we’re in a cold war between Deb and Kristina.” For months this war was conducted behind the scenes as wrecking, undermining and sniping. That changed when the conflict spilled into the corridors of Canberra, playing out publicly during the August sitting fortnight.
Of the dozens of left and right-aligned MPs and union figures interviewed for this story, few would go on the record, tensions are so high. Even newly independent crossbencher South Australian senator Rex Patrick remarked: “Both Kristina and Deb are passionate, energetic and formidable political players. I’m a former submariner, I’m pretty tough, but this is something that I am not prepared to weigh into. There are limits to my bravery.”
Senate ticket order rarely has anything to do with talent or potential; usually it is the outcome of a spectacularly undemocratic process of deals, favours called in, and backing from the right powerbrokers and, in Labor’s case, unions. In NSW, top spot is owned by the traditionally powerful and socially conservative Right faction of the party. The Left has the second spot, with the third far less secure, going back to the Right.
But in this instance the machinations signify more than run-of-the-mill factional infighting. The O’Neill v Keneally war exposes a bigger ideological struggle within the party. The Labor Right’s old guard fronted by Joel Fitzgibbon is fighting to retain control. Some MPs who made their way into parliament backed by unions from the Right have drifted philosophically towards the Left, embracing progressive causes popular in inner-city seats, turning focus away from the regions and increasingly aligning themselves with Left factional boss Albanese.
Keneally is part of a clique intent on bolstering the “progressive majority” emerging within caucus, with implications for Labor policy across issues ranging from energy policy to border protection, and arguably the fate of the party at the next election. A Keneally triumph over O’Neill would symbolise a further changing of Australia’s centre-left dynamics, as Labor’s Right faction gives way to progressive influences and moves away from its conservative roots.
‘Grand dames’
“It’s really the battle of the grand dames,” one senior Labor source says. “There’s a lot of peacocking going on between the two of them in terms of who has more support.”
With both sides in full propaganda mode, depending on who you listen to Keneally is a fickle “show pony” with no power base, or a talented and strong media performer with a rare and valuable national profile and a bright future; while O’Neill is a loyal party stalwart with a keen policy focus, or a seat warmer who “hasn’t done squat” for the past three years.
O’Neill, 59, the daughter of Irish Catholic immigrants, grew up in western Sydney before moving to the Central Coast. Before entering politics she was a local teacher and a lecturer at the University of Newcastle’s Central Coast campus. She is married to Paul, also a teacher, and they have three children.
After winning the lower house seat of Robertson on the NSW Central Coast in 2010, O’Neill scored a coveted seat in the “noddy” section behind the prime minister during question time. (She can be seen behind Julia Gillard in a YouTube video of the then prime minister’s misogyny speech in 2012.)
But O’Neill lost the seat when Tony Abbott and the Coalition swept to power in the 2013 federal election. With the backing of the SDA, the deeply socially conservative and historically Catholic union known as the Shoppies, she was saved from the political graveyard by scoring the Senate vacancy left by Bob Carr later that year.
O’Neill told Catholic media soon after her elevation to the Senate that she was a “self-confessed chronic optimist” and acknowledged “the journey in politics really isn’t for the faint-hearted”.
She is known for sticking to her traditional blue-collar roots and is one of the party’s best marginal campaigners. In keeping with her religious beliefs, she took a stance against same-sex marriage; knowing that she was in conflict with her party’s position, she didn’t do media for nine months and abstained from the parliamentary vote. She was a supporter of Gillard until the party leadership spill in 2013, telling the Good Samaritan website that the day she voted for Kevin Rudd to take the party to the election “was the only day I cried in parliament”.
O’Neill has declined to comment for this piece. South Australian Centre Alliance senator Stirling Griff says: “I’ve worked with Deb on many hearings and estimates sessions, and without doubt she is one of the most sincere, professional and best performing senators in the parliament. Unlike many, she is driven by a desire to achieve the best for people rather than score political points. NSW’s interests are well served by her.”
Yet critics say O’Neill has underachieved during her time in the upper house, which could explain a recent push to expose bad behaviour in the banking sector. Last month she used parliamentary privilege to air damaging sexual assault allegations of former employees at AMP.
Without question 51-year-old Keneally has the star profile of the two. Born in Toledo, Ohio, she is a seventh-generation Australian through her mother, who was born in Brisbane. She studied political science and wrote a master’s thesis in theology. As a delegate to Catholic World Youth Day in Poland in 1991, she met her future husband, 20-year-old Australian university student Ben Keneally — a young Labor member and nephew of author Tom Keneally. She moved to Australia in 1994 and renounced her US citizenship in 2002.
In 2011, a tumultuous 15-month stint as NSW premier ended in state Labor receiving an electoral drubbing. During that time Keneally had to deny being a “puppet” of disgraced former NSW powerbrokers Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi; it was Obeid and Tripodi who supported Keneally to replace Nathan Rees as premier in 2009.
She turned her back on politics to become chief executive of Basketball Australia in 2012 before moving into TV commentary at Sky News. There she won awards for her work as part of the pay TV network’s 2017 election coverage. It was then NSW Labor secretary Kaila Murnain who enticed her to the federal arena and, after the failed Bennelong bid, as a key support for Shorten during last year’s campaign. But within hours of Albanese taking over as Labor leader, Keneally began to manoeuvre herself into a spot that secured her future. A Labor senator recalls: “What she did to Bill was pretty ordinary. Bill made her captain of the bus and she was on the TV every night and of course no sooner than the day goes south than she takes all the photos off social media and replaced them with Albanese.”
The Opposition Leader in turn promoted Keneally to home affairs spokeswoman, a prominent position — a move that, for state faction quota reasons, booted NSW Right member Ed Husic from the frontbench — and appointed her as Senate deputy leader, requiring the sacrifice of SDA powerbroker Don “The Godfather” Farrell, who stood aside in line with the party’s decision that the role go to a woman.
A Labor insider says of Keneally’s career in NSW and federal politics: “She is clever enough to identify who the most appropriate patrons are.” Another senior party figure complains: “She hasn’t actually been elected to anything throughout history. She’s not the great vote winner that she thinks. It’s just been … one carpet ride after another and she confuses that with her own abilities.”
The No 1 spot on the NSW Labor Senate ticket has long been considered owned by the heavyweight SDA with its more than 20,000 members. The SDA’s pick for top spot is O’Neill, and the dominant wisdom is the powerful union is “not for turning” to make way for Keneally.
“This is a union that has taken its hit,” a Labor source says, referring to the sacrifices SDA-backed MPs made for Keneally in the wake of the election. One senior union figure says it would be “fair to say” most right-wing unions in NSW would back the wishes of the SDA. However, as The Australian revealed last week, the Health Services Union is poised to back Keneally with the Transport Workers Union also lining up behind her.
A senior Labor Right source, albeit one not from NSW, says he believes Keneally will prevail, citing her entrenched position in the leadership team and her fierce self-preservation instincts.
“My money is on Kristina,” he says, “because of the desolation that would occur if she is rolled … be under no illusion, Deb does have significant support in the union movement. It will be messy but I think Kristina will prevail. That said, these days inside NSW anything is possible.”
It’s as yet unclear who has the backing of other key right-wing unions, including the United Services Union, the Australian Workers Union and the Electrical Trades Union. A union source acknowledges the movement is bracing for “one hell of a fight”.
Corridor clash
It was a frosty 0.4C outside Parliament House in Canberra as a select few “essential” politicians rolled up for work on Monday, August 24, following a 10-week absence. But, inside, the Right’s cold war was experiencing its own Cuban missile crisis. It apparently started innocently enough. According to witnesses, Keneally asked O’Neill: “How’re you going?”
O’Neill replied: “I’d be better if someone from my own side wasn’t leaking on me.”
This was a reference to allegations in one article that O’Neill had breached coronavirus restrictions by hosting guests at her Central Coast Airbnb during the height of lockdown, then a second piece, published the day before the corridor encounter, suggesting O’Neill’s colleagues were questioning her travel entitlement claims during trips to Tasmania.
After Keneally replied that she had “no idea” who leaked against her Senate colleague, reports are that O’Neill said “You keep sticking to that line” or “no one believes you any more, Kristina”. Keneally’s spokesman denies the senator leaked against O’Neill.
But the following week Keneally raised eyebrows again, accused of embarrassing Kim Carr, Labor’s longest serving senator, after he appeared to fall asleep in the upper house chamber during one of her vocal attacks on embattled Aged Care Minister Richard Colbeck. “Yes, Senator Carr fell asleep,” Keneally told Sky News. Carr maintains he was not asleep. He was suffering severe back pain, which he had received treatment for earlier that day.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann used yet another Keneally scene-stealing move — this time a legislative manoeuvre that caused delays in the Senate — to pick at Labor’s open wound, telling the chamber: “I would be very interested in what Senator O’Neill … thinks about this particular self-indulgent stunt.” When asked about Cormann’s decision to exploit the moment, one Labor senator tells The Australian: “He was right.”
‘Albo’s clique’
The Senate ticket order will be signed off by the state’s powerful administrative committee between now and the next election. It next meets on October 9.
Albanese will be under pressure to intervene. There is a party tradition that those in leadership positions are protected — it is not a good look when they lose their seat in parliament. Keneally is also considered part of what is derisively referred to as “Albo’s clique” (by those who are not in it), alongside the likes of Mark Butler, Penny Wong, Richard Marles, Andrew Giles, Pat Conroy, Tony Burke and Tim Ayres. What’s interesting about this group is that they comprise MPs backed by a mix of right and left-wing unions.
This group supports the activitists of the Labor Environment Action Network, co-founded by Keneally and left-faction senator Jenny McAllister — who incidentally will be No 2 on the Senate ticket.
One Labor Right MP laments to The Australian that “some MPs in the Right could easily be in the Left” — a reference to Keneally and Burke, as well as others such as Josh Burns, Mark Dreyfus, Anika Wells and Clare O’Neil, most of whom have aligned themselves with LEAN.
With the caucus considerably more left-leaning than during the Gillard government, there’s concern among conservatives that the Right as a whole is offering little resistance to the policy ambitions of the Left. It’s this credo crisis that has led Right faction convener Fitzgibbon to warn the party may split at some point, as it is struggling to be “all things to all people” across its inner-city and regional voter bases.
Given what’s at stake, it’s unlikely Albanese will want to be seen publicly intervening in the Senate ticket contest between Keneally and O’Neill. Doing so, a union source close to Albanese says, would mean “he gets dragged into a fight he may not want to be in. He’s tied into the Right in Sydney; that’s how he got the (leadership) job.”
Lower house roulette
Plan B for whoever loses in the Senate is the lower house. Running for a Liberal seat such as Reid or Banks — as proposed by some Labor Right MPs — is highly risky as Keneally knows well, having failed to take Bennelong for Labor.
O’Neill has been there, too, having won and lost in the house.
A Labor Left MP The Australian spoke to dismisses the idea of consigning Keneally to another lower house tilt, saying Albanese — and most of caucus — would countenance a safe Labor seat alone: “Are we really serious about knocking off the deputy Senate leader?” the MP says. “She is very active, she is a strong media performer … are we really going to put her in an unwinnable position to give another three years to someone who has been in parliament and achieved squat?”
It has been said that Keneally’s forces have been targeting Parramatta, with plans to turf Labor Left MP Julie Owens out the lower house seat she holds by a marginal 3.5 per cent. Fowler MP Chris Hayes, the brother of HSU NSW secretary Gerard Hayes, says he has not decided if he will stand at the next federal election. Hayes, whose western Sydney seat is held with a margin of more than 17 per cent, says Keneally should remain in parliament in a leadership position. “I would like to see them both in parliament,” he says. Macarthur MP Mike Freelander also says O’Neill and Keneally should be accommodated in the next parliament: “They are both very valuable members of our caucus.”
This is the public line, at least for now, with Fitzgibbon telling Sky News last weekend that Labor should find room for O’Neill and Keneally. But with the outcome of the standoff still uncertain — and in the wake of a Newspoll this week that recorded discouraging results for the Albanese and the ALP — it’s this note of caution sounded by another senior Labor source that rings most true: “It will be resolved, but they need to bite the bullet. Labor doesn’t need this distraction.”
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