RELEGATING Finance Minister Penny Wong to the second - and winnable - spot on the party's South Australian Senate ticket may be "grubby and self-indulgent", as Anthony Albanese suggests, but it is nothing new in the annals of Labor history, nor is it likely to be overturned by the party's national executive.
It is a reminder that the party formed by unions in 1891 is still run by union-backed faction powerbrokers - of which Albanese, ironically, is in the top tier.
Senator Don Farrell, who defeated Wong for the top spot - by 112 votes to 83 - is one of the factional bosses who helped topple Kevin Rudd and install Julia Gillard as prime minister.
Gillard's leadership is beholden to some of these so-called "faceless men". If Gillard tries to move against them, not only is she likely to fail; she will also earn the time-honoured enmity that only a Labor factional boss can serve up.
This is not to say that Wong shouldn't top Labor's Senate ticket - she should - but this sort of factional manoeuvre is common in the byzantine world of internal Labor politics.
Farrell is no stranger to this kind of power play - he defeated senator Linda Kirk for preselection before the 2007 election after she supported stem-cell research and Rudd's leadership challenge to Kim Beazley. Kirk had defeated senator Chris Schacht for preselection in 2001.
In 1967, the NSW Right tried to dump Labor Senate leader Lionel Murphy from the Senate, but he managed to hold on to the second spot on the ticket and was re-elected in what was seen as a major rebuff for the Right.
Prior to the 2004 election, the NSW Right worked to deny Labor Senate leader John Faulkner the top spot on the NSW Senate ticket. On that occasion, they narrowly succeeded, and senator Steve Hutchins led the Senate ticket.
To ask the ALP national executive to overturn this decision - as Albanese demands - is a slippery slope for a party that prizes transparent and democratic processes, even though they are manipulated by factions.
NSW Labor secretary Sam Dastyari is scathing of Albanese's call for intervention. "Frankly, you can't have it both ways," he told me yesterday. "You can't support rank-and-file processes when you win and then complain when your candidate doesn't win."
NSW Labor Left elder Rodney Cavalier doesn't support intervention either. "In a democratic party, all MPs - including ministers - are open to challenge," he says.
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