As Phil Cleary licks his wounds and Allen & Unwin counts the cost of this week’s ridiculous  $630,000 defamation payout to barrister Dyson Hore-Lacy, the man who took Bob Hawke’s seat of Wills off the Labor Party has been watching some extraordinary events at Moreland City Council with growing interest.

Cleary has long been a passionate campaigner for female victims of domestic violence but this didn’t save him from a six-woman jury on the question of whether his book, Getting Away With Murder, falsely accused Hore-Lacy of manufacturing a provocation defence for wife killer and family friend James Ramage.

At the age of 57 and with long-serving ALP member Carlo Carli retiring as the state member for Brunswick (which covers much of Wills and Moreland) in Melbourne’s inner north, many observers are expecting Cleary will regroup from his court setback and enter the contest as an independent at the November state election.

While the defamation defeat may do some damage to Cleary’s reputation, his credibility with women is high. And in a remarkable coincidence, this was also the week when the ALP appeared to shoot itself in the foot by expelling all three female Labor councillors at Moreland. Check out The Age’s coverage and the Moreland Leader.

There’s an interesting religious analogy here. The Roman Catholic Church was for many years the ALP at prayer, and even since The Split the similarities between the two organisations has been strong. The ever-diminishing congregation of true believers struggles under the weight of a hierarchy dedicated to its own advancement, while mouthing platitudinous high ideals. Both organisations are intolerant of heresy, and both have a history of burning witches.

In character then, a faceless Esmond Curnow, from the ALP Disputes Tribunal, delivered this crushing expulsion order against the three female ALP Moreland councillors this week for not knuckling down to the demands of their five male colleagues.

This Crikey story last December detailed the remarkable events surrounding the election of the mayor of Moreland and allocation of council portfolios for 2010. The women refused to support a stitch-up of positions by the Labor blokes, instead siding with two Greens and a DLP “independent” to form a majority bloc on the 11 member council.

The offended blokes have been itching to burn the women at the stake ever since and four of them “laid charges” through ALP head office.

And thus it has come to pass. Mayor Stella Kariofyllidis has been suspended for three years, and councillors Kathleen Matthews-Ward and Alice Pryor for two years for breaching a caucus decision on positions in what the judgement said amounted to a “flagrant calculated and deliberate breach of the rules requiring severe punishment”.

In the case of Matthews-Ward and Pryor, the message seems to be “stop wearing short skirts and lipstick, come to chapel regularly, and you might get your prefect’s badges back”.

What is particularly hurtful for both women is the fact that they come from old Labor families and are very much of the tribe. Pryor’s father, Simon, was a well-respected mayor of Brunswick before Kennett’s amalgamations.

The really strange thing here is that Labor did not run endorsed candidates in Moreland and the Brumby government has recently been so concerned about inappropriate party influence at Victorian councils that it legislated to force all on-going political staffers to resign as councillors.

This latest heavy handed intervention undermines that message and drives the three women closer to the Greens and independent to form a very capable non-ALP majority at Moreland — something that has never happened.

And with the state seat of Brunswick on a knife-edge 3% margin, the Greens stand to benefit handsomely from the fiasco.

I sat next to Labor’s Brunswick candidate, City of Yarra mayor Jane Garrett, at a breakfast yesterday and thought she was quite impressive.

However, if Phil Cleary decides to take a break from his job at the ETU and run as an independent who preferences the Greens, then Garrett  would face a near impossible task — especially given all the Labor shenanigans at Moreland.