Bob Sparks outlines the latest manoeuvres by state Labor Party leaderships to impose their own choice of parliamentary candidates against the wishes of the membership and calls for this to be turned on its head.
State Labor Party executives don’t need too much of an excuse to delay and scrap parliamentary preselections. It seems that almost any excuse will do. In Victoria, it is the threat of One Nation grabbing once safe Labor upper house seats. In NSW, it is the threat of unpopular state ministers being deselected by local Labor Party members. Either way, Labor Party administration committees have once again moved swiftly to quash the right of ALP members to preselect their elected representatives.
With the Victorian state elections just over a month away, Victorian Labor is scrambling to finalise its upper house candidates. Fears are gripping party apparatchiks that Labor is facing the prospect of losing almost half of its MLCs, including senior ministers, to the One Nation “orange wave”. Faction leaders are now racing to protect their own.
The Victorian Legislative Council (the upper house) is divided into eight regions that elect five members each. Victorian Labor currently holds 15 of these 40 seats, with two MLCs in seven of these eight regions. However, recent polling suggests that many of those that are number two on Labor’s regional upper house tickets will now miss out on election.
The threat posed by the “orange wave” has spurred factional heavies into frantic wheeling and dealing. At least one agreement has already been reached, with the Victorian minister for finance Enver Erdogan set to switch spots with fellow MLC Tom McIntosh. Erdogan, Australia’s first parliamentarian of Kurdish descent, will move to the top of the Labor ticket in the Eastern Victoria Region, while McIntosh moves into Erdogan’s previous number two spot on Labor’s Northern Metropolitan Region ticket. The two MLCs belong to different Labor Right sub-factions, with Erdogan linked to the “Shoppies” of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association.
This deal has pissed off hundreds of local Labor Party members. Over three hundred have signed a petition to keep McIntosh at the top of Labor’s Eastern Victoria Region ticket. The petition was launched in August by Sonny Stephens, Labor’s candidate for the lower house seat of Gippsland East, and sent to the ALP national executive earlier this month. Stephens told the ABC that this factional deal has left ALP members feeling “disappointed” and “powerless” and hoped that the petition was “one way they can vent their frustration”.
Factional leaders are also moving to shift Ingrid Stitt up into an upper house ticket top spot. Stitt from the Victorian ALP’s Socialist Left faction is the current minister for health and the former long-serving Victorian branch secretary of the Australian Services Union (ASU).
If other handshake agreements can’t be reached soon, the ALP national executive will step in and impose candidates of their own choosing. The ALP’s national leadership will finalise the order of Victorian Labor’s upper house tickets sometime between 21 October and the end of the month. Any final announcement will take place just weeks out from the state elections set for 28 November.
In New South Wales, it’s not the fear of losing seats to One Nation that has led to party democracy being stifled. It’s the fear of losing sitting ministers that has done the trick.
NSW Labor leaders are currently holding back the preselection of two state ministers, Steve Kamper and Anoulack Chanthivong. Head office is fearful that both could be deselected by disgruntled local Labor members if their nominations go to a membership vote.
Kamper is an ally and close friend of NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns, both of whom are part of the state’s Centre Unity (Labor Right) faction. The two also hold adjoining seats in Sydney’s south, with Minns in the seat of Kogarah and Kamper in the neighbouring electorate of Rockdale.
Chanthivong also belongs to the Centre Unity faction. Born in Laos, Chanthivong grew up in Sydney’s outer south-western suburbs and served on Campbelltown City Council before becoming the member for Macquarie Fields. Between Kamper and Chanthivong, the latter is said to be in the most danger of being deselected. Chanthivong is so unpopular that one local ALP member has even quipped that “he’d lose [preselection] to an empty chair”.
At the time of writing, it is unclear whether these two preselections have only been delayed, or scrapped altogether.
Unlike its Victorian counterparts, NSW Labor has already sorted out its Legislative Council ticket for next year’s state elections. And it did so behind closed doors. After weeks of factional negotiations, the upper house ticket was finalised the night before the Labor Party state conference began on 4 July. The eleventh-hour backroom deal removed the need for any ballot at state conference, and thus denied hundreds of delegates the power to preselect NSW Labor’s upper house ticket.
NSW Labor’s Legislative Council ticket for the March 2027 elections follows the same right-left-right-left pattern that they have for decades. First on the ticket is treasurer Daniel Mookhey, second is energy minister Penny Sharpe, third is SDA official Bernard Govind, fourth is “Soft Left” MLC Anthony D’Adam, fifth is Unions NSW Secretary Mark Morey, sixth is former Byron Shire councillor Asren Pugh and in seventh spot is agriculture minister Tara Moriarty. The latter was demoted from the top spot she held in 2019 and is now at serious risk of losing her upper house seat next year.
This factional deal will avoid any repeat of the internal brawl that took place over upper house ticket positions back in 2019. That year’s state Labor conference saw a tussle within the Labor left end in a conference floor vote that pushed frontbencher Mick Veitch from the official NSW Left out of a winnable spot on the ticket and propelled former NSW Council of Civil Liberties head and “Soft Left” member Cameron Murphy into third place. Minns and Co. clearly don’t want the semblance of state conference democracy embarrassing them once again.
These denials of Labor Party democracy in Victoria and NSW have taken various forms. But their essence is the same – the belief held by Labor Party leaders that the party membership is there to serve the parliamentary party. This state of affairs needs to be turned on its head.
Most MPs seem to think theirs is a job for life, a job where you cannot even be questioned on your activities of representation, let alone be held accountable. A lifetime’s entitlement to a parliamentary seat is utterly undemocratic but seems hardwired into how the ALP operates. It is an essential part of the manner in which the membership is a necessary adjunct to the parliamentary focus of the party, either as a loyal opposition or a managerial party for capitalism.
The rules of the ALP Victorian Branch state that candidates for the Victorian Legislative Council will be preselected by a combination of voting members in each upper house region and delegates elected by state conference. The rules of the ALP NSW Branch state that candidates for the NSW Legislative Council will be directly elected by annual conference delegates. But these rules mean nothing while State Labor Party executives can flout them at will. If rank-and-file ALP members are ever going to entrench the right to preselect their own upper house tickets, they will need to fight for that right.
What we see is ‘convention’ trumping democracy. It is a convention that sitting ministers can’t be subject to pre-selection – but it’s not in the rules. Ministers can’t be treated as ‘protected species’ but be subject to accountability, recall and when needed, overthrow.
If they are not up to the task, ALP members should have the right to deselect and replace them.
Labor Tribune supports all moves to ensure that the party is open, democratic and accountable at all levels; and to ensure that all levels of the party leadership, and all aspects of the work of the party, are fully responsive to the wishes of the membership. Labor must become a democratic united front of the workers’ movement, not the private property of party apparatchiks and career vehicles for lacklustre hacks.