Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten
Anthony Albanese and Bill Shorten (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

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.