Revenge isn’t always swift, but it sure can be brutal.

Today, using The Age
as her forum, ALP member Roxanne Bennett has made branch stacking
allegations against her former boyfriend, ACTU assistant secretary
Richard Marles, as well as former Bracks adviser David Feeney, both
senior members of Victorian Premier Steve Bracks’s right-wing faction.

In a statutory declaration, Bennett claims that Marles used Labor funds
improperly to stack party branches. This included money raised from a
“Desperate and Dateless” fund-raising event and a 1999 business lunch
attended by
Treasurer John Brumby (then in Opposition).

She says that, as ALP state secretary, Feeney gave Marles $3,000
from a safe at ALP headquarters to buy party memberships in
Geelong. And additionally, a special branch-stacking account was held by four
prominent Labor Right figures, including Marles, Feeney, and
“and two other people, one I believe to be Andrew Landeryou.”

It’s a story that Bennett has sat on for five years. And she doesn’t
have any qualms about revealing why she waited for the big reveal:

The allegations come as the ALP prepares for what is likely to
be a fiery round of federal and state preselections. Geelong is a
particular hot spot, with Mr Marles expected to challenge the
sitting federal member for Corio and Independent faction member,
Gavan O’Connor.

Speaking to The Age, Ms Bennett acknowledged that
five years after her split from Mr Marles, the timing of her statement
was intended to harm his preselection chances. She said that, while
still a party member, she was no longer active and that Mr Marles had
shattered her belief in the social justice credentials of the ALP.

Marles and Feeney both “strenuously denied the allegations,” but not before Marles fired a parting shot – Bennett is “clearly
embittered. Our relationship had a very difficult ending that
related to my concerns about Roxanne’s drinking.”

This morning, Andrew Landeryou is running an “OC special investigation” into the story on his Other Cheek blog.

The Age’s front page fable
denouncing Labor moderate union leader Richard Marles is a monument to
their evil. It contains lurid, fanciful and outrageous lies, including
an utterly false claim that the OC was involved in a secret
branch-stacking account. The whole article is a fiction of which Dan Brown himself could be proud.

This is just another reason why Age editor Andrew
Jaspan “should be sent home by
Christmas,” Landeryou told Crikey today. The paper’s “been a disgrace
ever since Jaspan drove it even further to
the left.”

As to the allegations, they’re “total fiction.” So why did she bring
his name into the story? “I wondered that myself,” says Landeryou, but
assume she’s “trying to get her story up by dragging my name into it.”