Sorry doesn’t cut it for decades of abuse

Illustration: Johannes Leak

Daniel Andrews was right to apologise. Labor is right to attempt serious reform to the parliamentary integrity system because it’s long been a self-managed farce.

But let’s not get too carried away. The wrongdoing exposed and articulated in Operation Watts is not unprecedented; it’s not even rare.

Anyone with working knowledge – even shallow working knowledge – of the Victorian ALP knows that for decades it has been run like a suburban cock-fighting operation.

Hidden from view but in the knowledge of hundreds of people, Labor has scratched itself to near death, carving up the spoils and rewarding almost all of its fellow travellers.

The qualifier “almost all” is important because there are times when promises are made but not delivered.

This tends to lead to life-long enmity and bitterness; Victorian Labor is exactly like the roosters trained to kill, except there is quite often more blood.

The fighting and rorts have been going on for so long they have developed their own rhythm, usually tied to preselections, party conferences and other internal ballots.

To that end, it’s entirely disingenuous for the Premier to suggest the Adem Somyurek sting was any worse than what’s happened in the past.

It’s also disingenuous for Andrews to adopt a that-was-then, this-is-now political strategy.

Because what happens today is little different to what was happening in the late 1990s, when Labor was gearing up to finish the Kennett government and the young turks rising through the ranks were roaring around the back streets of town trying to exert their influence.

This is not to say these youngsters were doing anything illegal or improper.

But it is to say they must have had intimate knowledge of the ALP’s ways. Common sense says they did.

Where the Somyurek debacle is different is that he was recorded in action in the offices of a man he thought was one of his closest friends.

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission was keen to point out that the recordings in former ALP federal MP Anthony Byrne’s office were legal, but they took things to a whole new level when 60 Minutes dropped its mother lode of evidence.

Despite all this evidence, Somyurek’s misdemeanours have largely been boiled down to political parking tickets because of the legislative framework in Victoria.

Daniel Andrews and Adem Somyurek in 2012.

Anthony Byrne.

Being whacked by the state parliament is hardly analogous to doing hard time in Port Phillip prison for political corruption.

Andrews’s plan to tie some of the integrity reforms to political donations for rival parties is spectacularly cheeky, given the dysfunction that is the Victorian ALP.

It has been so bloodied by its failures it is being run federally.

Now Andrews wants to force the other major parties to sign up to integrity measures or risk not receiving campaign funding.

Sure, the Liberal Party has its problems but when you spend most of your life in opposition, the stakes are hardly very high.

Therefore, the indiscretions tend to be in proportion to the ­potential gains.

The Operation Watts report needed to state the obvious; that while it looked almost exclusively at the Moderate Labor faction, these issues were systemic.

“Although it is not possible to say that all of the unethical practices followed by members of the ML faction have also been employed by other factions, there is cogent evidence that these underlying factors are not limited to the ML faction or to the period covered by this investigation,’’ the ­report found.

Alleluia.

Yes, Somyurek and others in his group did wrong.

But let’s not pretend it was unprecedented or limited to him or his supporters.

It’s been going on for decades.