Labor review into branch stacking in Victoria set to recommend mass expulsions
Labor’s national executive will on Friday mull the findings of a review into branch stacking in Victoria by party elders Steve Bracks and Jenny Macklin that is expected to recommend mass membership cancellations, expulsions and an overhaul of recruitment procedures.
The party’s executive in June appointed Bracks and Macklin as administrators of the Victorian branch, and suspended all state committees, as the party grappled with the damaging fallout of the Adem Somyurek branch-stacking scandal.
Friday’s national executive meeting will consider their recommendations, which are expected to include culling members recruited through industrial-scale stacks, and requiring that new members be signed up centrally rather than at the branch level, with the necessary authentication and integrity processes performed centrally.
But while the headline number of membership cancellations is expected to be north of 1,000, there are concerns within the state branch that Bracks and Macklin have not gone hard enough in driving out the Somyurek forces during the period of administration.
Deloitte was appointed during the intervention to undertake an audit of branch members. The firm’s brief involved identifying non-bona fide members and patterns of stacking.
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The clean out in Victoria will be contested and contentious, because it will alter the backroom power balances in the state, and the realignments between power blocs and powerbrokers will flow through to caucus politics in Canberra.
The central facility for signing up party members will also face objections.
As well as the membership clean out, the review is expected to recommend that party branches be configured around state seats, which shifts the state organising model. Sources say that change is likely to lead to the amalgamation of existing branches which are currently configured along factional lines.
Bracks and Macklin have already recommended the Victorian branch ban cash payments for memberships and renewals as part of their initial intervention, and stopped non-traceable payments being made for membership applications.
The extraordinary federal intervention in the state branch was triggered by a Nine Network report that Somyurek, a rightwing powerbroker, orchestrated the payment of party memberships, an allegation he contested.
Somyurek later resigned his membership of the Victorian ALP. The disgraced powerbroker resigned before he could be expelled by the party’s national executive, and he was sacked from the state ministry by the premier, Daniel Andrews.
As well as Friday’s assessment of the Victorian review, Labor’s national executive is expected to sign off on a virtual national conference. Labor’s national conference was originally scheduled for this year, but the online event is expected to happen next March.
The online party conference will have 400 delegates – the same contingent that attended Labor’s last national conference in Adelaide.
The national executive has the power to convene national conferences for specified purposes. In this case, it will be a conference for the purpose of amending the party platform.
The Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, said on Tuesday it would be a two-day conference, convened before Easter. “It will be a special national conference to consider the platform,” he said.
Albanese said Labor had been able to produce a working draft of the party’s platform through policy deliberations conducted on Zoom, so a virtual online conference was the next logical step.
