Neat-haired, blue-jacketed Richard Garotti, mayor of Banyule City Council in Melbourne’s north, was in the online witness box of the Somyurek inquiry for two days this week — the unwilling face of branch stacking, sleazy faction Labor.
It’s his bad luck that the Independent Broad‑based Anti‑corruption Commission’s (IBAC) Operation Watts then adjourned for two weeks, leaving him frozen in place as the image of Labor sharp practice. Didn’t help either that the camera magnified his slightly larger-than-normal nose into a magnificent schnozz. It was very new wave, stylish, like Belmondo in Breathless; reprobate but insouciant.
That seemed pretty much Garotti’s view of himself in testimony — that he wasn’t ashamed, but wasn’t that proud either. We’d started with Anthony Byrne, Victorian Labor Right consigliere, a man so grey the camera might have had trouble catching him at all. My colleague Bernard Keane has the details of how Byrne cheerfully detailed how he had set up Adem Somyurek as a mini-factional warrior, having already mentored him as a junior political activist.
But then, oh no, Somyurek had got completely out of control, was proceeding to wreck the joint, and had to be brought into line — which he was, being video-bugged while using Byrne’s office in Melbourne to faction-build, which involves the relentless taking-over of minor suburban branches, one by one.
Byrne got a pretty courteous treatment from IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich and counsel assisting Chris Carr, SC — and the media, which appeared to suggest that copping to 20 years of factional cracking-and-stacking once the gig was up was an act of Mandela-esque courage. Maybe it was his claim to patriotism, and his very public commitment to Australia’s defence — as a fervent supporter of the intelligence orgs — that got him points. There were none for Garotti, who was there to explain the grubby minutiae of faction building.
A day earlier we had had ex-staffer Elle Schreiber detailing day-to-day life in under Somyurek, a not-so glamorous business of crunching lists in offices filled with cobwebs. Another former staffer, Adam Sullivan, told of wads of cash used to renew the memberships of sundry Turkish-, Lebanese-, African-Australians who didn’t know they were in the ALP in the first place.
Now Garotti had to take us through the awarding of a $100,000 contract for community anti-gambling programs, tipped towards factional friend and head of a Somali community association Dr Hussein Haraco.
The commissioner and counsel got tetchy when they came to a part of a memo between Garotti and Somyurek in which the former noted, of the proposed contract steering: “This is what Banyule council wants!”
“Did Banyule council in fact want this?” the inquiry asked. What could Ricky Cheesewire say? He blustered, but the answer was unspoken. He had said it, apparently, because he wanted to impress Somyurek. Touching and pathetic. Of such small victories are factions made.
Schreiber had said she felt like “a lamb being led to wolves”, working for Somyurek. But it’s Somyurek and his gang getting torn apart now. Butchery is an anatomy lesson (for the prehistory, see Crikey‘s Red Brotherhood At War series).
Years ago, MLC Somyurek had jumped out of a position within the religious conservative, right-wing SDA faction, and created his own outfit, the “Moderates”. The name ostensibly described their politics: rejecting the SDA’s ancient anti-gay, anti-communist hocus-pocus — and its domination by the Irish — and creating a modern focus for the new Turkish, Indian and African groups who had growing communities and were sick of being branch stack fodder.
Somyurek’s method, such as there was one, was to use the greater solidarity and collectivity of non-anglo groups to create a reliable suburban army to join branches en masse, on instruction. As the existing form of Labor Unity — the Short(en)-Con(roy) alliance — came apart, Somyurek’s Mods took over the Conroy branches, in a perception that the Cons were fatally weakened by dear leader’s departure (last seen doing some consultancy work for Crown Casino — solidarity forever).
This was the occasion of the famous parliamentary argument between Somyurek and John “Butterdish” Eren, then-member for Lara, which allegedly involved a wielded butterknife (something Somyurek denies).
Somyurek’s Mods now proceeded to make a deal with right-wing unions, chiefly Bill Shorten’s AWU. One says “now” because the strong suspicion is that the genesis of the Mods came from within Shorten’s leadership group and was a hands-off way of stitching together a Shorten dominated “Centre Alliance” with friendly unions such as the Health Workers Union (led by Diana Asmar, lead-named plaintiff in recent legal attempts to get the Victorian branch’s suspension revoked), the plumbers, and others.
The Centre Alliance then took a leap across the divide, doing a deal with the new Industrial Left faction, dominated by the CFMMEU and other unions, angry at the Socialist Left’s carve-up of positions (the Industrial Left are also party to the Asmar lawsuit — the whole group is less an alliance than a pirate ship under sail). By Byrne’s account, Somyurek then became the jinn that got out of the bottle, signing up absurd numbers of people to branches in a bid to gain autonomous power, and something had to be done.
The more prosaic interpretation might be that it presaged yet another leadership tilt by Bill Shorten, and that the Centre Alliance-Industrial Left forced the Victorian Socialist Left, the NSW Left and the sad remnants of the Conroyites to get together with a mission to destroy the grouping once and for all. Byrne is being praised for destroying his own political career. Oh no! What will a man with two decades record going into bat for the spooks agencies — a patriotic calling which possibly predates his ALP involvement — do now? Somehow, I suspect he will be alright.
The implicit idea in a lot of what’s coming out is that the Mods-Centre Alliance grouping had lost even a semblance of a faction around political ideas and was, to use a technical pol sci term, a sick unit.
Even so, its foot soldiers may still have thought they were doing good. Thus, Ricky Garotti seemed genuinely shocked that Haraco had, according to tendered court documents, snaffled most of $75,000 of the awarded grant for himself.
“That is a complete shock to me,” he said. There may be quite a lot of that, when the hearings resume.
The Asmar-headed legal challenge to the branch takeover was lost on Tuesday, giving the party centre the opportunity to finalise pre-selections and further lock the remnants out of power (Asmar is appealing).
Labor is hoping it will be finished before Christmas, and that years of instability will be over. The nightmare scenario is that the spectacle of all this will take the edge off the sleaze attached to the Coalition in the outer eastern Melbourne seats federal Labor needs to win and hold to take power.
Have Bill Shorten and his friends performed one last anti-service for the ALP? The nose knows. Ask not who cuts the cheese…
Symptomatic of parties which have become career driven and hollowed out with fewer genuine members then re-engineered/stacked back to consolidate a political position or faction for ease of policy management?
For Labor it’s self defeating not to recruit and grow genuine local community and younger memberships, based outside of traditional unions’ and power brokers’ preferred architecture.
A good reason, if this happened they could genuinely attack with a broader base the Lib’s Achilles Heel i.e. their own membership shrinkage and imported GOP tactics, i.e. concerted shift towards faith group membership (in a secular liberal democracy) whether Mormons in Victoria or Evangelicals in NSW, to pass nativist and/or radical right libertarian policies.
However, Labor needs to be more vigilant as compromised by media which does everything, apart from gotcha moments, to nudge people away from politics, policy, Labor, unions and but promote ‘wedge’ issues, while disappearing the LNP, for daily election campaigning ….
I can’t understand the Labor Party hierarchy “logic(?)”, choosing those rabbits they do along ‘smart-arse factional’ blood lines?
From the side-lines it’s hard enough watching them fighting the Liberal-National-Murdoch Coalition- but to then watch the way they hand-feed that mischief of rats?
Very entertaining thanks, I can’t see A currant Affair being able to work with this, too hard basket..maybe. It feels good to get some fresh air into the place though.
No political party can keep it’s nose clean and that is a sad indictment on this country!
Federally and State alike as each finds a dirty way to corrupt to lie, cheat and just be overall deceitful.
That is where we are at and is a sad reflection on us all!
In caricature terms, Richardo Cheeswire is very close to the Tongue, aka Danby, the Member for Haifa Ports.
Well done.