Daniel Andrews really does seem to be determined to supplant Tommy Bent as Victoria’s most corrupt premier. The Red Shirts, the firefighters’ union deal, signing up to China’s BRI, and now, yet another branch-stacking scandal.
Branch-stacking is, to be sure, an old political game. But for Labor it’s more-or-less normal politics. Sign up a few hundred fake members and use their phantom votes to make sure the candidate of your factional choice gets parachuted in. Particularly sordid, given the left’s witterings about immigration and multiculturalism, Labor faction hacks regard “ethnic votes” as pretty much their personal property. Much as the Democrats in the US regard the “black vote” as theirs.
The Democrats, much to their obvious chagrin, mightn’t be able to literally own black people any more but Labor in Australia seem pretty confident that they own the “ethnics”.
The Adem Somyurek scandal is Labor corruption on steroids. Like NSW Labor with their shopping bags of Chinese cash, Somyurek handed out wads of cash to buy “new members” to stack branches with at his whim. Even, he boasted, buy premiers.
Somyurek is Labor, through and through.
The Adem Somyurek we witnessed on secretly recorded tapes engaging in branch stacking, boasting about his ability to select the next Victorian premier and relishing the prospect of destroying a ministerial colleague was not a purely self-created being. He was a joint venture of colleagues and ALP members who either supported his operation or chose to turn a blind eye to what he was doing.
That’s the only way Somyurek could have amassed so much power. The Premier acted swiftly once the first story of Somyurek’s behaviour broke last week, sacking him from the ministry and casting him out of the Labor Party.
In other words, Andrews could have stopped it all along. He just chose not to.
The Premier’s adult life has been devoted to the Labor Party – he knows how it works[…]A member of the Socialist Left, he secured a ministry when his parliamentary colleague and factional sponsor Gavin Jennings told then premier Steve Bracks that Andrews would be one of two MPs from the left who would be elevated to the frontbench after the 2006 election.
That exchange was predicated in part on talent but mostly on factional numbers.
The Premier’s solid comprehension of Somyurek’s enhanced internal influence was demonstrated after the last election, when he welcomed Somyurek back to his cabinet.
Somyurek resigned as a minister in 2015 after bullying allegations. Far from being stripped of power, he amassed more. By 2018, he was back in Andrews’ public good books and back in the ministry.
Some will wonder how it could be that Somyurek, as a minister of the crown, could have established such an extensive and vigorous branch-stacking operation. It’s pretty simple.
The reason he was able to attain such influence was that many people in leadership positions, ministers, backbenchers, and office-bearers in the ALP did not want to see anything. And if they did notice something, they were incurious and hoped nothing would happen to them[..]left unchecked, he would have got himself to the point where he would be – as he put it on one of the tapes – “running the joint”.
Every senior Labor figure, state and federal, from Andrews to Anthony Albanese, is scrambling to distance themselves from Somyurek. It’s obvious bullshit, of course. Somyurek is a Labor creature, par excellence. His only sin was being caught.
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