When Anthony Albanese stood with Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak before that warship announcing Australia’s full commitment to the AUKUS alliance, Australia took a fundamentally new path.
True, former PM Scott Morrison had made the first commitment, in usual skulduggery mode. But Labor could have repudiated or modified that. Instead it reaffirmed the truth that things only happen when they’ve happened twice.
As with the disastrous Northern Territory intervention, which was redoubled and embedded by the Rudd government after John Howard’s opportunistic, electorally oriented dodging up of it, it is Labor’s efficient, focused capacity to implement social policy that does the real work. The decade of waste and indifference of the intervention was the result of that. As we’ve seen, the Coalition isn’t actually interested in governing well, or at all.
So with Labor expecting two terms at the very least, the process has begun, one of comprehensive integration of multiple systems, from embedding our defence capabilities into moment-to-moment US command to the creation of nuclear vessel infrastructure, and then full nuclear production.
The tight circle of the “permanent committee” is in session: the foreign policy and defence public service, the tame academics, the defence forces themselves, the think tanks (Lowy), and the death industry lobbyists (Australian Strategic Policy Institute — ASPI), News Corp and the hawks in Nine, and nationalism branding such as the War Memorial and the new culture policy, are all being integrated into this process.
Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong’s address to the National Press Club on Monday simply repeated the absurd mantra of the permanent committee: that the US is not in fact an overextended power claiming global special privileges and causing mayhem, but a force for peace in the Indo-Pacific, and the rules-based global order.
Labor once had a left capable of some independence of foreign policy during early eras of regional US peacemaking, such as the Christmas Hanoi bombings in 1972. No more.
But many will say it is necessary if we are to contain and limit the progress of a ruthless and wily operator, intent on grabbing territory. I speak of course of Bill Shorten.
Factions at war
Yes, AUKUS is driven by national and global interests and ideologies, inside the government and out. But all politics is local. And all local Labor politics is factional. And if you think that really even the Labor Party could not determine a decades-long, half-trillion-dollar or even trillion-dollar (it’ll blow out to that, at least, if any of this ever happens) commitment based on factional manoeuvres, hahaha I’d like to introduce you to the Labor Party.
Here’s roughly how it works (I do not want letters from insider rusteds, telling me I put the Frittlers in the wrong part of the Potrezebie Left; this is at the level of detail required).
The Albanese government was made possible by an alliance between his national left faction and the group that is still known as the Cons, or (Stephen) Conroy right, even though he has long departed Parliament. Their proximate leader is Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles.
There are other groups involved, but that’s the key axis. The alliance locks out several major players: the Victorian Socialist left, now fragmented, with the removal of Kim Carr; the SDA; and the AWU faction led by Shorten. The national left did not forgive Carr for backing Shorten instead of Albanese for the leadership post-Rudd.
Carr did so to create an alliance with Shorten, with a shared focus on reviving industrial development here in a planned and committed fashion. Green and all that, but big — and with a military component. The Victorian Socialist left was the one with the ideological commitment here; the AWU faction, from the right, can be neoliberal or neo-nationalist as need be. Carr’s preference for Shorten was because he reportedly believes the national left and its leader to be opportunists whose last faint leftish traits evaporated in the Sydney heat a long time ago.
Here comes the Mods squad
This was thrown into some disarray when Victorian state MLA Adem Somyurek started to turn his right-approved boutique factionette, the Mods, into a full national faction, by hooking up the AWU and various right fragments with the CFMEU and the trains-trammies, the RTBU, who had departed from the Victorian Socialist left and formed the “industrial left”. The plan of the Mods was to add the SDA to this comprehensive alliance and control about 60%+ of the party.
This galloping megalomania — a malaise of increasing frequency in Labor — was very much not approved. Somyurek was duly pinged, doing what looked very much like branch stacking, using as a base the office of his one-time mentor, Senator Anthony Byrne, a lifer on the parliamentary intelligence joint subcommittee, and within it, ASIO’s tireless advocate and defender.
Somyurek was caught doing this on concealed cameras, the video of “military grade”/Bridezilla-wedding quality — and certainly sharp enough to form the centrepiece of an episode of 60 Minutes, now coming out of the new TV-print integrated Nine. Bang! Somyurek was politically dead, and has now joined the party of such, the DLP. His broad centre-alliance industrial left plan — which involved taking over the Melbourne branches that had a very, very heavy preponderance of Conroy faction supporters — came apart.
The Feds go rabid hunting
As the national left/Conroy-Marles match-up proceeded, the Victorian branch was suspended, and put under the tightest and longest federal control possible, with preselections directed from the federal centre — and favouring the new alliance. By now Conroy had joined the advisory board of ASPI, the think tank that had started as a Defence Department mouthpiece, and is now funded by global defence industry major players.
The AWU/Shorten faction’s fightback against this marginalisation had had several fronts, but one was a series of official internal complaints by Shorten-aligned Senator Kimberley Kitching, an ultra-hawk. Kitching had been dropped into the No. 1 Senate slot by Shorten when he was opposition leader, to the rage of other factional leaders. To forestall a potential dumping down the Senate list after Shorten’s departure from the leadership, Kitching and co were doing internal party lawfare, throwing everything into a complaint against Wong and co.
Wong was responsible for bringing the South Australian non-right group into the national left-Marles/Conroy alliance. “Faction” applied to SA is really a stretch, it must be said. It’s more a cosplay tribute act of the Bloomsbury group, with long vowels, but it completes the set, and Wong is duly foreign affairs minister.
The people around Kitching had hoped to use one of these new-style kitchen sink lawfare assaults — “looked at me in a funny way”, “threw shade in the locker rooms” etc — against Wong and co. Then, tragically and strangely, Kitching died, and in their spontaneous grief those around her attached her death to the cause of bullying that was to have formed the substance of their complaint.
But when, months out from a make-or-break election, the Kitching loyalists escalated this into a heavy public attack on Labor’s bullying culture, they really, finally, went too far. Kitching had spent so much time cooperating with Coalition elements on national security that her nickname was Mata Hari. Diana Asmar, head of the Health Workers Union (HWU) — the skunkworks base of the group — was on the front page of the Herald Sun saying Labor senators had basically killed Kitching with their meanness.
Doubtless they were all their honest feelings. But it just might have been perceived as a spot of political suicide-bomber threat to retain the No. 1 Victorian Senate spot. That did not eventuate, because the campaign had to be wound down, and the slot was taken by someone associated with the Conroy/Marles group.
Now it’s hunting season on this beleaguered group. The Victorian IBAC report of Operation Daintree, released today, damns the Andrews government and especially the premier’s advisors for pushing public servants to award several million dollars to the HWU, to placate Asmar, for “training” for hospital workers to deal with aggression and violence from service users.
That money never got spent for training — COVID was the excuse — so where did it go? We may never find out, as no charges have been recommended against anyone. (We’d find out more if the Victorian Greens had not done a deal with Labor, defeating an opposition proposal to give IBAC more independent powers and procedures.)
The strong feeling is that anything and everything is being done to neutralise Shorten, his associates and his wider faction. This is essentially taking apart the successor to the Storeman and Packers faction created by state MLC Bill Landeryou in the 1980s, which long had a reputation as the most thuggish and corrupt grouping in the whole party.
On the left side, the coming apart of the industrial left is being reported in the courts pages, with the charging of CFMMEU head John Setka’s wife Emma Walters on various allegations concerned with procuring weapons. Since returning from South Australia where she had departed with the couple’s children, Walters is said to be living in a recently completed house the couple jointly own, and which is, well, not unbuggable.
The dispute is a personal one. But it’s also a factional one, around whether the CFMMEU should stay tightly within the Labor order, or stake out its independence, as the United Firefighters Union and others do. With former RTBU leader Luba Grigorovitch, the Venus of Hobsons Bay, now the MLC for Kororoit (previously held by a Somyurek associate), and married to a mega-rich Liberal establishment scion, the grouping has entirely come apart, leaving even less opposition to the national Llft-Conroy/Marles alliance.
Power projection
The full commitment to AUKUS? In factional terms, the Conroy/Marles right is doing this because, as a faction, it believes in the US alliance, as much as it believes in the labour movement itself, and regards the Labor left as a greater threat to the nation than the Coalition. Its motives are clear.
The national left? It is doing whatever is required to keep the factional alliance together, squeeze Shorten out, and give no one — neither the Shorten group nor some SDA-aligned grouping — the opportunity to attack Albanese from the right as soft on national security, the traditional charge against the left.
This is all coming into play now, because finally the Victorian branch is coming out of federal control, and will have the opportunity to control its own preselections, and it is going to be on on on. The federal party centre would have liked to leave the Victorian branch in permanent suspension and direct control. But open revolt on that was brewing, and so reluctantly, it has returned it to self-control, not a word that really applies to the Victorian branch.
For the ruling alliance, everything needs to be nailed down twice, and the final act in this decades-long struggle begun. Expect to see a few well-placed articles starting a series of internal Labor attacks popping up over the next weeks and months.
Left out: a progressive defence policy
Yes, there are external factors, and nat sec intel that we mortals don’t know about. But if you want to know why the national left has committed to a process of total integration with the US — a first-world power defending a vastly over-extended power projection into the Asian century — and proposes to spend $300 billion on death weapons that won’t go to schools, hospitals, affordable housing and much more, it’s all that.
Ultimately it’s willing to see a social democratic party turned into a national corporatist one on its watch, to reject any notion of a public debate about how this country should defend itself and make its alliances, in order to guard the flank of a flank within the party.
Believe it or don’t believe it as you wish. If you find this account too breathtakingly cynical, well, this is the sanitised version. Advance Australia Fair, and God bless the right of the Australian Labor Party and all who slip beneath the waves in her.
I try so hard to be interested in articles about party factions, and I start out really concentrating – then my eyes glaze over and drift to the final paragraphs. I know it’s probably important, but oh god it’s a dull topic (not Guy’s fault, I add).
My eyes glaze over but my blood boils
I waded (sorry Guy) through this but I’m glad I did (hurrah Guy), because it has done my head in trying to work out why the hell Labor would put a trillion dollar icing on Morrison’s yellow cake. If factional power machinations have in any way fed into this appalling, in my view, decision to hand our defence sovereignty to the intellectual and moral basket case that is the US, then, well, that is so sickening I can barely keep my lunch down. And don’t get me started on the Labor-lition stage three tax cuts, while the dole and other welfare payments wither on the neoliberal vine, along with their recipients, and while people with jobs are living in their bloody cars and so on, because that’ll be the end of my excellent smoked trout, cream cheese and lettuce wrap. Labor may well be able to get away with two terms but it won’t be because the social democrats among us approve of these policies/shenanigans or believe they are in Australians’ interest … on the contrary, we’re talking whopping betrayal.
Applying the short term blowtorch and scrutiny of Labor, who can still wriggle out of AUKUS etc., but ignores the past decade of LNP government?
Running deflection on previous cabinets, defence, security & supply policies (often implicitly bipartisan), making life easy for other malignant stakeholders and influencers who set the trap in the first place in LNP, think tanks and DofD?
Albanese came to power claiming there is no need for a transformation of either the public service or the MSM.
This class traitor is content with the status quo. While in opposition he was adept at shouting at the conservatives, when in government he was quick to make a deal with Dutton to ensure that the promised National Integrity Commission is a defanged institution, without any of the embarrassment of public hearings for those unfortunate politicians and public servants who forget that they are paid to SERVE, rather than line their pockets, or those of their cronies.
All public spending is a POLITICAL choice of government, NEVER an economic choice. The government has recently guaranteed that there will be no rescuing of those in receipt of unemployment benefits nor a genuine effort to fund public housing in the nation, because the economy can’t afford it, while signing Australia up to a $368 billion bill, to procure American Submarines for a possible future war with the nations most important trading partner.
We live in a society, NOT an economy. The nation’s economy is a thing built by society, to serve us, rather than this neocon invention that we all currently serve.
Since gaining power, on EVERY occasion the government has had the opportunity to serve either the people or Capital, Albanese and Co, have chosen Capital. The failure to tax the current super profits of fossil fuel corporations profiteering off the war in Ukraine, by selling OUR LNG to us, at international prices, is a case in point, as is the failure to rein in the behaviour of the RBA with its use of interest rate rises to combat inflation that is the result of either supply chain shocks imported from elsewhere, or corporate profit taking.
Albanese came to power with around 30% of the national vote and a very thin majority claiming a mandate to rule, and what we’ve got is a continuation of Morrison’s form of non-consultative government, without the sleaze.
You’d reckon a practiced politician, one with Albanese’s supposed political acumen, would be able to take a lesson from Blair’s New Labour, and take a different course. Apparently not.
It’s sad really. Opportunity for the nation wasted, by this “progressive” government, in its service of capital.
I dont give a flying f… about factions in the Labor Party. As a long time ALP member, maybe I should but I prefer P Keatings analysis that this AUKUS debacle goes way beyond party politics. I don’t see any current members of the ALP bold enough to question our vassal State approach to the US.
The point made is that factional politics drives positions of consequent foreign policy, which is why you should care about them – and fight for change in the party. Which faction is yr branch counted for? Who are you helping by not giving a damn?
Or fight for some party that cares more about the country than the faction, if that’s possible.
Caring includes being outraged – “not giving a flying f…” is outrage not indifference
Well, I come from the ‘Bloomsbury’ Set State so miss some of the minutae of Vic/ NSW factional battles. If there was some inference that Shorten was some bulwark against hawkish foreign policy, then he had some strange bedfellow, incl. Kitching who was DLP incarnate. The person I am most disappointed in is Wong, whose finally crafted ‘platitudes’ do little to challenge the AUKUS alliance.
You’ve had your say, and paid for it, now it’s our turn and ypu just have to suck it up, sunshine, and stop with the defensiveness- is that because you’re not so sure about what you’ve written or because so many of us don’t find your writting as entertaini g or informative as you think we should?
What Guy has written about factional politics driving foreign policy is exactly correct. This AUKUS debacle is completely bonkus and certainly doesn’t emanate from a party of Keating. Labor, like the LNP has been hijacked by right leaning imbeciles. No money for the homeless, but plenty of loot to upgrade defence, using US manufactured highly expensive toys, courtesy Christopher Pyne’s lobbying for the US MIC. We’re doomed to follow the US model of societial disintegration while the MIC prospers.
Albo’s BIGGESt mistake. Aided and abetted by war-monger Marles, who’s obviously manoeuvring for a post politics job….anti traditional Labor values. Oh for a Simon Crean…..
Nah, ABC.
Thanks for this article, Guy.
I experienced a number of different emotions while reading it.
First and foremost, I felt a degree of shame and embarrassment that I spent 16 or so years of my life as a card-carrying member of this party. But I was also able to remind and console myself that I joined it circa 1966 when it had the guts to stand up to the U.S. imperialist war machine that was on the rampage in Vietnam. (Where are the Dr Jim Cairns’s of the ALP today?) At least I had the good sense to leave this outfit in about 1983 when I could no longer stand its dissembling and deception.
Secondly, I had a couple of good laughs (with you Guy, not at you). I loved reading about Kimberley Kitching’s nickname, “Mata Hari”. I was not previously aware of this.
A third emotion was anger at reading your description of the shenanigans that the Victorian Labor Government has been getting up to under the leadership of “Dubious Dan” Andrews.
Finally, Guy, just on the AUKUS issue that you raise, this article from this morning’s edition of John Menadue’s Pearls and Irritations might interest you. It really is a reminder of just how the political ground here in Australia has shifted over the last 5 or 6 decades and it is also a reminder of how blurred the distinction between the Liberal and Labor parties has become:
https://johnmenadue.com/aukus-the-possible-consequences-of-our-alliance-with-the-united-states-of-america/
They joined The Greens.
I am not totally convinced that Jim Cairns (or his successors) would have done that, but Bolivar let’s just assume for the sake of argument that what you suggest is true. That would still be a very sad reflection on what the (so-called) ‘Labor’ Party has become.
I would say too Bolivar, (in defense of your comment), that one former comrade from my old local ALP branch (which no longer exists) did exactly that. He is a PhD. who was a very senior public servant at both the state and federal levels. He was an incredibly interesting and knowledgeable interlocutor; however, we ‘fell out’ in recent years over our respective views on Islam. He canceled me (as you might expect from a Green), not the other way around.