Labor rightwingers determined to execute a power realignment on Bill Shorten’s home turf are pushing ahead with a pact which has infuriated key leftwingers and elements of the right faction.
Party sources have told Guardian Australia that breakaway elements of the Victorian right are planning to have a new factional power-sharing deal signed on Friday, despite stiff resistance from opponents of the pact, including members of Labor’s federal frontbench.
Sources from the right and left Labor factions say the groups on board with the new deal being spearheaded by Adem Somyurek, a former minister in the Andrews government, are said to include Shorten’s union, the Australian Workers’ Union, the plumbing union, the Transport Workers Union, and numbers aligned with the federal Labor senator and longtime Shorten ally Kimberley Kitching and her husband, Andrew Landeryou.
The new arrangement, which aims to overturn a stability pact brokered by the former Labor right faction powerbroker Stephen Conroy and the party veteran Kim Carr’s socialist left faction – which mapped out a plan for state and federal preselections up to 2022 – is backed by the industrial left, which includes the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union construction division; the Finance Sector Union; and the Rail, Tram and Bus Union.
But key elements of the right and the socialist left faction continue to oppose the rebellion, which blew up spectacularly just before Christmas, viewing it as destabilising and provocative, particularly ahead of a state election due later this year. “This could well be catastrophic,” one senior player declared on Wednesday night.
Representatives from the Victorian right faction met on Wednesday and Thursday, and failed to reach consensus, with the influential shop assistants union and the National Union of Workers said to be unwilling to sign up, and rightwing forces aligned with Conroy and the current frontbencher Richard Marles are also unsupportive.
In a swingeing speech delivered last month about problems with Labor’s internal power plays and party culture, the South Australian Labor frontbencher Mark Butler referenced the boilover in Victoria as a case study of backroom “buffoonery”.
“The designers of this new pact have already decided who the party’s candidate will be for a seat that hasn’t even yet been created; the new federal seat in Victoria,” Butler said.
“We don’t know where in Victoria it will be, what community will be represented, the views of local party members and supporters, or whether this person has any connection whatsoever with the area ultimately chosen,” he said. “That sort of backroom buffoonery does not reflect a healthy party organisation.”
The reference was to a newly created federal seat in the north-west of Melbourne, which proponents of the power-sharing deal want to go to Jane Garrett, a former minister in the Andrews government aligned with the CFMEU.
But some Labor sources query whether any cross-factional agreements reached under the Somyurek-driven pact can be delivered even if the deal gets signed by supporters on Friday, because of the splits the push has triggered on both the right and the left.
