National politics is again beset by a fraction too much faction.
On Thursday night, Victorian Labor’s public office selection committee confirmed that a long time ally of Bill Shorten, the lawyer Kimberley Kitching, would replace Stephen Conroy in the Senate.
People inside Labor who are not particularly enamoured of their leader were delighted by this turn of events, but closer to home, there was horror and consternation, and I don’t invoke those words lightly.
Kitching is a divisive figure in Labor circles. Her husband was a combative political blogger. The trade union royal commission made adverse findings about her in 2014 and referred her for possible prosecution.
One senior party figure outside Victoria, a person normally positive about Shorten, was brutal in assessment after the bitterly contested events of Thursday night. “If [Shorten] is this dumb, if he won’t recognise his own self-interest, then he’s not worth fighting for.”
Shorten’s move to back Kitching as Conroy’s replacement was partly about friendship – the two are close – and partly, colleagues insist, a brutal power play, a show of force for its own sake.
To be fair to the Labor leader, he had a big problem to fix. Conroy’s abrupt exit from politics after a 20-year career, particularly minus an agreed transition plan, was a significant blow. Without much warning, Shorten lost his main factional fixer. A hole had been blown in his internal defences, and these things matter in a tribal operation such as the ALP.
After Conroy’s departure, Shorten suddenly reappeared at right faction meetings, which he hadn’t been attending, given his higher responsibilities. Kitching can deliver him numbers from the Health Services Union, helping to consolidate his personal power within the Labor party – although party insiders warn that a big price has been paid for what will, in practice, be a tiny power bloc.
Shorten’s instinct post-election to buttress his own institutional architecture was also on show earlier this year when he moved to save the Victorian left-wing powerbroker Kim Carr from a friendly fire attack by his own faction, which wanted him off the front bench. Shorten intervened forcefully to shore up Carr, again ignoring internal disquiet, because Carr, working in cooperation with Conroy, was his praetorian guard.
It’s hard to predict right now whether the bruised feelings and the realignments of the week will escalate into persistent trouble for Shorten – predictions of that sort are a mug’s game – but we can put the sum of the parts this way: Kitching is a controversial figure, some new enemies have been acquired courtesy of events this week, the whole institutional architecture sitting around Shorten’s leadership has shifted, and this has happened at a time when alternative leadership contenders within the ALP are not inclined to waste opportunities.
But a grim factionalism fanfare certainly wasn’t the exclusive province of the Labor party this week.
On the government side, Tony Abbott rose to his feet in the Coalition party room as part of what’s become a mini crusade against factionalism in the New South Wales division of the Liberal party.
This fight has roiled internally for months, but the frame for Abbott’s intervention had been set last weekend, when the president of Abbott’s federal electoral conference in Warringah, Walter Villatora, emailed party members inviting them to a forum on Saturday to consider imposing plebiscites as the mechanism for deciding preselections across the state.
Abbott followed through by taking on Malcolm Turnbull in this week’s party room on the subject of democratisation, which then spilled over into a wider discussion, with several interventions. A verbal tussle ensued, with Abbott expressing impatience with an NSW colleague, Julian Leeser, which then triggered a rebuke to Abbott by the defence industry minister, Christopher Pyne.
The discussion quickly leaked, and Abbott rounded on colleagues in an interview with Guardian Australia, accusing them of acting dishonourably. He then declined for the remainder of the week to let others set the agenda, and popped up offensively on Sky News and the Alan Jones program, making the case for party reform, and making the case that Turnbull should lead the push.
Hint, hint, Malcolm. You know, leadership.
Of course, all this public hinting has the bonus of putting Turnbull in a position where if he ultimately takes up Abbott’s kind offer to lead the debate, in Canberra’s crudely applied scoring system, this will be seen to be a victory for the former prime minister.
Some in the party reform camp think Turnbull is already in the pro-democratisation column, so sense a certain amount of theatrics, proxy warring and stage management in the events of the week.
This might be right, but it is a tricky issue for Turnbull, because the moderates – his familial group in his home state – are the folks saying you need to tread carefully with democratisation to ensure you don’t trigger a branch stacking frenzy where the ultra right start determining all the preselections.
Whatever the intrinsic merits of bringing the members into the process, and locking out the factional warlords and their fellow travellers in the lobbying game (and the in-principle merits of those propositions are obvious to anyone thoroughly depressed by the state of contemporary politics), the spectre of Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican party fuelled by the fury and the alienation of the grass roots, and Jeremy Corbyn’s grim occupation of the Labour leadership in the United Kingdom, hang heavily over the Australian political scene.
The final burst of quasi factionalism for the week happened around the marriage equality plebiscite.
Nationals and government conservatives nearly tripped over themselves in the rush to declare that the imminent death of the plebiscite (finally confirmed by Labor this week) meant marriage equality was off the agenda for the next three years.
To make this case, they cited an agreement most of them would not have seen – given it’s a private agreement between two party leaders, which hasn’t gone to either party room or been made public. The unsighted agreement apparently prohibited a reopening of the issue.
Except, of course it doesn’t. The agreement was to have a plebiscite, and as far as anyone knows it doesn’t specify what happens in the event the plebiscite fails to clear the parliament.
Declaring marriage equality off the agenda is, actually, complete nonsense. The issue will come back, not immediately perhaps, but in time, because the campaigners for change will not give up, and supporters of change inside federal politics will want to see change happen.
A couple of tiny signals from the week that shouldn’t be ignored. Moderates, most pertinently, the prime minister, who was asked three times this week to rule out allowing a conscience vote in this parliament, (and could have easily ruled it out), did not.
This week, on the Australian Politics Live podcast, Gabrielle Chan and I spoke to the education minister, Simon Birmingham, a leading government moderate, who is in favour of marriage equality, whether he thought there could be a conscience vote in this term of parliament.
Unlikely, he thought, given, well ... everything. “Our policy emphatically is to have a plebiscite to resolve this issue and I see little likelihood of that changing,” he told us.
But not impossible, he believed. “I’ve learned to not really rule anything as being impossible. The Liberal/National and Coalition party rooms are the masters of their own destiny.”
Not impossible.
Like everything, it is a matter of watching this space.
