For political wonks, the IBAC/ombudsman’s report into branch stacking is a riveting read of transferred money, shonky signatures, factional use of staffers, and transcripts of Adem Somyurek’s engaging telephone manner (SOMYUREK: “I NEED YOU TO CALL ME BACK IMMEDIATELY ALWAYS!” SNOTLEY JONES, ORGANISER: “I WAS ON THE BOG!” SOMYUREK: “ON YOUR OWN TIME!”). But for civilians, amid about 1000 paragraphs, it could do with a car chase or two:
501. After detailing the exchange of invoices between the SAVCOL and the Mods, Mr Somyurek and Ms Kairouz leapt on to a waiting motorbike and sped away. IBAC staff jumped into four Minis in different colours and gave chase through Melbourne’s vibrant laneways, making heart-stopping turns and demolishing a fruit stall before running into a St Patrick’s Day parade.
That would do it for the general public. For the rest of us, the report fills out in great detail a very narrow part of the ALP story over the past decade or so: a grand series of factional realignments, dictated not only by the shifting plates of political history, but also by the needs of other forces within the ALP. To call these latter forces “the deep state” would be to exaggerate it, but not by much.
The story told by the report necessarily does not concern itself with this. It is solely focused on former Labor, now independent, MLC Somyurek’s grand plan to build a faction, “the Moderates”, on the ALP right, and to do so with a heavier emphasis on branch control rather than major unions.
Somyurek was a Monash graduate who built a power base in Melbourne’s south-east. He had been fostered within the SDA faction, whose leadership was slowly conceding that the union/faction had no future as a coalition of bug-eyed Dutch Calvinist nutters and potato-faced Irish Catholic nutters. So around the 2000s it had been reaching out to Muslim and Eastern Christian leaders, whose communities shared its basic social conservatism.
After a few years, Somyurek and others twigged that, while they were welcome in the faction, they were going to be locked out of the higher power structures and safe federal seats they controlled, possibly for decades. This was not much better than the deal that ethnic groups had suffered for decades. Turkish-Australian members, and many, many new members, were vital to a faction of the right gaining control of the seat of the Corio.
And what did they get? Richard Marles — Mr Anglo — got Corio, and John “Butterdish” Eren got the state seat of Lara, pretty much the definition of a consolation prize. (Although, as a perk, tombs for Somyurek and Eren have been prepared there, currently being run as The Sphinx Hotel, North Geelong.) (Additional shot here.)
Somyurek jumped out of the SDA faction in 2015, though the move had been a while in preparation. The “Moderates” tag was designed to indicate that the new faction would be less dogged by the abortion and same-sex obsessions of the SDA. Really it was designed around the legitimate demands of non-European Labor groups for a bigger share of the spoils. It was your little mom n’ pop start-up factionette, with just a smile on its face and a dream in its heart — and the support of Anthony Byrne, the federal member for Holt.
Byrne’s patriotic love of Australia is expressed in his devoted, decades-long championing of our intelligence agencies as deputy chair of the intelligence committee, so his support gave Somyurek a, well, let’s call it heft that he would have lacked. It also gave the floating “national security” faction another outlet within the ALP, since it too was getting a bit jacked with the SDA.
Somyurek had another ace in his fez. As he himself noted, the non-European ethnic groups had a basic collective solidarity that Anglo-Celtics had lost through social modernisation. If you ask community leaders to get 30 Indians, Somalis or Lebanese to turn up, they’ll do it. Other groups couldn’t be relied upon. Not much of an insight, but in the zombie zone of the ALP, it’s an actual idea! An actual strategy!
The Mods had also gained a couple of small unions, but their real powerbase was in taking over the branches that had once been controlled by the Conroy faction — the “Cons” of the “Short(en)-Con” faction, which was de facto Labor Unity. Somyurek’s success thus took a few people by surprise. When he contracted an alliance between the Mods and the ragged remains of the “Shorts” — contracted through meetings with Andrew Landeryou, the late senator Kimberley Kitching and plumbers union head Earl Setches — and named it the Centre Alliance, people were on notice. With major union AWU (Shorten’s base) now on board, they were now real players.
The question has been asked after the IBAC report’s release: why didn’t Dan Andrews do something to stop it? The simple answer was that he couldn’t. As the report also revealed, Somyurek and his associates (including one Mr Rick Garotti. How do you get a nickname from that? Rick “the garrote” Garotti? Ricky Nickname?) had thrown away the rule book on branch stacking.
Four decades earlier, the left-right factional branch stacking wars, especially in NSW, had become both violent and ludicrous. People were beaten up, meetings dissolved into brawls, thousands of ghost members were “signed up”, the party became utterly dysfunctional. (The NSW state secretary of the time was Graham Richardson, son of a posties union bigwig and twice-unsuccessful NIDA auditionee, who had really needed something to do. Whatever happened to him?)
Since those days, with rule changes and informal agreements, branch stacking has been tolerated as a way of shoring up the support for a seat your faction already has, or to crush an independent (Marles’ preselection for Corio was at the expense of sitting member Gavan O’Connor, who appealed to then leader Kevin Rudd, who is reported by O’Connor to have said: “There was nothing he could do.”)
The major factions had nothing to gain by throwing away the rule book. The Somyurek Mods had little to lose. They were upstarts, the “Shorts” were being locked out of power, and with people like Landeryou, Diana Asmar and Kathy Jackson associated, they had been bad actors from the start. (Indeed, I have been so deep in the weeds of this for so long that it occurred to me that the whole thing may be a reverse play by the Shortenati, having talent-spotted and duchessed a career-stalled Somyurek to jump out of the SDA and form a right faction, disguising the “Shorts” leading role. I have been assured by a Socialist left insider that this is not the case. But I don’t know if he’s playing me.)
The major factions knew that the Mods would simply pay for as many memberships as they needed and brazenly rock up to small suburban branches with minivans full of new members eager to join — and there was little they could do about it. To fight it toe to toe would break the whole party open. When the CFMMEU, RTBU (rail and trams) and other unions jumped out of the (Victorian) Socialist left to form the Industrial left, and then did a deal with the Centre Alliance to form a new mega-grouping, shit had got serious.
Trouble was, as Somyurek’s group was hitting the heights, he was going into orbit. As the tapes and transcripts show, he was not a gracious leader. Within spitting distance of controlling the ALP — all he needed to do was convince the SDA to come aboard and he had a majority in several contexts — Somyurek seemed to get more pleasure from bawling out hapless flunkies and spitting out vaguely offensive and also funny bons mots, rather than quietly amassing power by imbuing his team with confidence and purpose.
Somyurek’s hours-long Lady Macbeth act on tape would have alarmed anyone, and it certainly alarmed someone capable of bugging, with professional/military-grade equipment, the office he was doing all the factional work from — which was, of course, Byrne’s. Byrne is a sweet and innocent patriot, but someone with a degree of hidden power in the party, and access to some fun toys, had lost confidence in Somyurek as an agent of right-wing Labor politics and interests.
Once the Somyurek tapes were made public, federal Labor had no choice but to take the Somyurek mega-grouping apart. The Industrial left was being led by John Setka, which is to say it was in disarray — the CFMMEU was being torn apart between the Croatian and “Aussie Dog” factions; Luba Grigorovitch, leader of the RTBU; and the “Hobson’s Bay Venus” had taken up with a mega-rich financier, damaging her union political credentials in the eyes of some (and has now exited to stand for the safe seat of Kororoit, replacing Somyurek ally Marlene Kairouz). The SDA wasn’t coming to the party. Shorten had lost his second federal election. The National left (Albanese’s faction) had gone into alliance with what was left of the Conroyites, now being directed by Marles — who was in turn being directed by Conroy from his floating glass space bubble at lobby group Responsible Wagering Australia (three words, three lies).
With the incipient Centre Alliance now destroyed, the National left-Conroy right alliance could set its sights on the real enemy, the ancient adversary: Kim Carr’s Socialist left faction. The Labor government we have now — willing to accommodate business in every and all ways — would not be able to pursue its current centre-right strategy if the Socialist left was still in existence as a Kim Carr-led outfit. But Carr’s SL command had fallen apart when Andrew “Smilin’ Boy” Giles had quit the faction, taking his supporters with him.
The 67-year-old Carr announced his resignation to make way for youthful energy — 63-year-old Giles left ASU leader Linda White took his Senate spot. The new core grouping now moved against the Shorten remnants, trying to remove Kitching from the number one Senate position on the Victorian ballot. Team Kitching fought back; when she tragically, bizarrely died, the resultant accusations of bullying made it impossible to follow through with this plan, and the number one slot was relinquished to the Shorten faction.
So where are we now? The National left-Conroy right faction dominates. There is no genuine left in the ALP, not one that believes in any sort of national alternative to market forces. The Conroy faction has the national security franchise, Marles is Defence Minister, and Conroy is on the council of ASPI, the Australian military-industrial complex’s mouthpiece-think tank. Giles has the immigration portfolio. Shorten is minister for Theodolites and Counting the Moon. Byrne took the fall for stacking and retired. And Somyurek is out of the party and suing Nine for defamation.
The actual alleged corruption — paying for memberships, getting staffers to do factional work — is small fry compared with the real movement of power. Some national security grouping thought Somyurek was a good bet to replace the SDA in Labor, then it didn’t. The behaviour gave it the wobbles, and was also sufficiently outrageous to be sufficient raw material to get out of the deal. Was that the real reason no one was going to stop any of this? Because they knew there were forces behind it?
The resulting government is one that will offer resistance to neither the market nor the military-industrial complex, even as it struggles with the contradictions it finds itself in because of unswerving devotion to them. Well, that’s maybe how it happened. Fun times, hey? Perhaps we didn’t need that car chase after all.
