Labor Right in chaos amid hunt for leaders

The NSW Labor Right faction is in disarray after major splits emerged over the party’s next leader.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen in westen Sydney yesterday. Picture: AAP

The once-great NSW Labor Right faction is in disarray after major splits emerged yesterday over who should become the party’s next leader — with many of its senior members intending to back left-winger Anthony Albanese in the fight against one of its own, Chris Bowen.

The internal war for the heart and soul of the Labor Party intensified yesterday as Mr Bowen announced his leadership candidacy outside his old family home in Sydney’s west and Mr Albanese started assembling a team of volunteers to run a campaign aimed at wooing crucial rank-and-file party members.

Adding to the sense of chaos and division within Labor, senior figures last night urged Mr Bowen to pull out of the race against Mr Albanese in favour of Queenslander Jim Chalmers.

Mr Chalmers, 41, was last night still prepared to stand for the leader­ship on a platform of generational change and reconnecting with voters in his home state, where Labor’s primary vote plunged to 27.3 per cent on the weekend.

The deep fissures within NSW Labor’s Right have been added to by the looming state leadership contest following the recent damaging election loss to Premier Gladys Berejiklian’s Liberal Party.

The finger was being pointed at the Sussex Street machine by former and current party heavyweights yesterday for failing to get enough quality people in parliament and for not being able to ­coalesce behind one of its own in either state or federal races.

On Monday, several right-wing union leaders met to discuss who they should back to lead the state parliamentary party between Jodi McKay and Chris Minns and agreed they did not like either candidate, further throwing the faction into disarray.

Central to some of the problems has been a rift between general secretary Kaila Murnain on one side and Mr Bowen and his friend vying for the state leadership, Mr Minns, on the other.

This has meant Ms Murnain has encouraged other candidates to take on Mr Minns, including Treasury spokesman Ryan Park, who has said he would not do so, and the opposition’s transport spokeswoman, Ms McKay, and her colleague, Kate Washington, who have also been urged to run by caucus colleagues who do not like Mr Minns.

It now appears that when nominations close on Friday that the Right will be divided between Mr Minns and Ms McKay as the ­candidates in the contest.

A head office source said Ms Murnain had differed with Mr Bowen on franking credits and on Mr Minns becoming state leader, but had a good relationship with him and was talking to him ­regularly.

The mess is a far cry from the halcyon days of the faction when it produced the likes of Paul Keating, Bob Carr and Graham Richardson and backed in leaders such as Nev­ille Wran and Gough Whitlam.

“This is a complete failure of Sussex Street,” one former senior party figure said yesterday.

“If you take a step back and look at why does the NSW Right not have a serious candidate for leader federally?”

The senior figure said a Bowen leadership was out of the question after his negative gearing and franking credit policies.

“How can they back Bowen after he was the architect of all the policies that lost the federal election,” the former senior party figure said. “He said, if you don’t want our franking credit policy, don’t vote for us. He’s not up to being a leader. I think it’s going to have to be ‘Albo’.

“We’ve got a situation at the state level where the best candidate is Minns.

“[Murnain’s] going to try to get someone to run against him. It’s her duty to serve the party. She thinks the party should serve her.

“Minns’s biggest problem is the general secretary doesn’t like him ... for no other reason than he’s a mate of [former general secretary] Jamie Clements.

“The quality of candidates in the upper house. Many of them are unionists ... The ticket was led by [former union official] Tara Moriarty — who the f..k is she?”

Former general secretaries, speaking on condition of anonymity, were critical of Ms Murnain and the machine yesterday. Some said “millennials” were running head office.

But one former senior figure said the party had produced some talent in the faction at federal level who were still serving — such as Tony Burke, Michelle Rowland, Ed Husic and Jason Clare.

Another said the slide in Sussex Street had begun with the reign of Mark Arbib and continued under Sam Dastyari, Mr Clements and now Ms Murnain.

One former general secretary pointed to the change in superannuation rules in 2003 — which meant generous parliamentary pensions were scrapped and ­people who left parliament got nothing — as one reason people were reluctant to get into parliament and then they left parliament earlier than the eight years they used to have to stay for a pension, denuding state and federal parliaments of NSW Right talent.