Watching Labor internal politics is like being in the aviation industry. If you’re embedded full time, doing nothing else, you can keep up, and know what’s going to land ahead of time. If you just dip in now and again, it’s more like Air Crash Investigation: you follow the circle of bodies inwards until you find the blast zone.
This thought is occasioned by the story dropping on the weekend that Mem Suleyman, state secretary of the Victorian branch of the Transport Workers Union, has been suspended from his position and is under investigation after the union leadership received accusations of “harassing behaviour” by Suleyman.
Oh noes! This keeps on happening! I guess it just shows the integrity of the labour movement that they will be punctilious in reporting this sort of stuff! I mean first there was John Setka, pinged for harassing tweets, and later, his whole state union subject to a massive investigation. Adem Somyurek was accused by a female staffer of bullying behaviour, and lost his ministry in the Andrews government, before being expelled for branch stacking. Diana Asmar of the HWU is under investigation for possible personal misuse of union funds. And now Suleyman! What are the odds?
Odds on, actually. Let’s try that again. John Setka and the CFMEU (industrial Left faction) have been pinged. Diana Asmar and the HWU (ex-close factional associates of Bill Shorten and the AWU faction, the “Shorts” side of the Right) have suddenly been thrown into the deep. Somyurek, ex-SDA and founder of the “Mods” faction, was knocked off his Vespa, scattering that upstart faction.
So someone dropped the state head of the Transport Workers Union in it. The TWU is the centre of the subfaction the “Cons”, originally named thus after its Bonnie Prince Charlie leader Stephen Conroy, who went from the Senate to shilling for the gambling industry to being tied up with the armaments industry through ASPI, the weapons and death industry lobby group posing as a foreign affairs think tank.
Why is the faction still called the Cons? Because inside Labor, Richard Marles is now the leader of the faction, so the name now stands for “Contradiction in Terms”. Conroy remains the “puppetmaster” (though in Labor, that name is reserved for Andrew Giles, not because he has any power, but because his hands are so freakishly large).
Anthony Albanese is prime minister because the Cons broke away from the Shorts and allied with the “National” (i.e. NSW Left faction) against the “rabble right” (Shorts, Mods, SDA) and also against the Victorian Socialist Left. Without the Cons, Albo would be what Shorten is now, minister for theodolites, sadness and the town of Kettering, Tasmania.
So this sudden outbreak of integrity in the Labor/labour movement is less to do with resolute conscience than with clearing the decks for seats and alliances ahead of the upcoming election. How far does this go back? Well, really, most likely the sudden pinging of Suleyman is the latest salvo in the most recent round of such warfare, which has begun not after the exposé on Setka and the CFMEU, but with it.
Doubtless, journalists Nick McKenzie, Ben Schneiders and others worked hard putting together the CFMEU story (and any day now we’ll have something stronger in the story than that some CFMEU officials were also members of motorcycle clubs), but the obvious suspicion is that a lot of material suddenly “came to light” not for reasons of public integrity, but as a result of factional positioning by those doing the dropping.
But wait, it’s more complicated than that. What seems likely is that all of these pings were from within the organisations and factions the pingees were leading. Setka and his team were targeted from within the CFMEU, because Setka was taking the union in a more independent direction, inside or outside Labor, as is the United Firefighters under Peter Marshall.
This occurred after three breakups. The Centre Unity-Industrial Left superfaction that Somyurek was trying to put together (or was the frontman for) collapsed. That superfaction, had they been able to cement it, and then draw the SDA in, would have controlled Labor absolutely.
After it came apart, the Industrial Left collapsed, after Luba Grigorovitch left the leadership of the Rail and Tram Union.
Grigorovitch took the state seat of Kororoit (formerly held by Marlene Kairouz, Somyurek’s loyal lieutenant in the Mod Squad) and also married private equity boss Ben Gray (son of Liberal ex-premier of Tasmania Robin Gray).
Luba was (lightly) pinged herself last week, with a drop to The Australian that she had been on a rented superyacht with husband Ben while she was posting photos of herself at the Alton slurry vats, giving ducks CPR in the Kororoit wetlands, etc.
The third collapse was that of the marriage of John Setka and Emma Walters, of which the two parties were from the CFMEU’s independent “Croatian” grouping (um, Setka) with Walters, ex-Slater and Gordon hotshot, being a longtime part of power networks at the centre of Labor. Doubtless the demise of their relationship is due to personal factors alone. But it does coincide with this strategic split within the heart of the CFMEU. As does Labor’s war on the CFMEU.
So, the conclusion one can draw from this is that all these drops and stories are not merely factional war, nor subfactional war, but positioning wars within the subfactions. Setka and co were pinged from within. And Asmar has been pinged from within the loose crowd of broken toys that form the remains of the Shorts.
Now it is almost certain that Suleyman — whatever the truth or not of the accusations against him — is being pinged by elements within the TWU in alliance with elements outside of it. Those in the TWU allying with those outside it are possibly not happy with its current factional arrangements. On the one hand that’s a little speculative. On the other hand, I’m sure I’m right. So, debate continues.
Why does this matter, I hear a few readers ask, desperate for the old Whitlam spirit, or the unity of the Hawke-Keating Years (© Troy Bramston). Well, first to shatter your illusions about what this party is now. Labor is no more the party of Whitlam than Whitlam’s party was the socialist/Catholic White Australia party of the 1920s.
Labor now is a machine for the representation of capital, plugged into high finance through industry superannuation funds and the wider capital-science nexus. From Gillard to now, it has given us a capital-friendly arbitration body and made strikes illegal. Now it is going to permanently gut a union that developed militant tactics to represent its members, precisely because genuine worker representation had been made virtually illegal, by Labor.
Around that, Labor has delivered us US troops on Australian soil, the surrender of military independence to US command structures, and the commitment to a trillion dollar (oh sorry, just $350 billion, never to blow out) weapons commitment which drains any capacity for social development or lessening inequality for a generation. And $50,000 arts degrees, so anyone without a bank of Mum and Dad must choose between educating themselves to understand society and getting a house.
This is all, in its particular form, because of the factional array, and the position of the Right within government. If the factions were in a different relation, Labor would be different. Hardly socialist, but something more of us could give some form of substantial support to. Labor’s Left used to draw its policy inspiration from Sweden. Now it has a bad case of Stockholm Syndrome*.
Well, we’ll see what drops, in the manner of planes burrowing into the earth and scattering bodies. It might be a fun and illuminating few weeks. Just not for Mem Suleyman.
*yes, i know that’s a myth. But alliteration, mmmm.
