ADAM SHAND: It was Simon Crean’s 57th birthday last Sunday, and the local supporters were out in force to thank him for his service to the Melbourne electorate of Hotham.

SIMON CREAN SPEECH: This has been my office for the last 14 years. I must say I intend it to be my office for many years to come.

ADAM SHAND: But Crean was wasting his breath. These people will not decide who contests Hotham for Labor at the next Federal poll.
This man, Hong Lim, is the local ALP warlord and he has decided that Simon Crean is for political execution.

SHAND TO HONG LIM: Can I ask you why you’re not supporting Simon Crean in the coming pre-selection?

HONG LIM: No comment.

SHAND: No Comment?

MARTIN FERGUSON (Labor Shadow Minister): I have never seen, and this is what people who know the history of the Labor party better than me (say), such a violent eruption of hatred and a lack of respect for one another.

DEAN MIGHELL (Secretary, Victorian Electrical Trades Union): There is no doubt that ALP politics is a bitter and twisted and violent game.

ADAM SHAND: Three years ago Bill Shorten was Victorian Secretary of the Australian Workers Union, now he is also the State ALP President. He‘s emerged as the most powerful player in Labor’s future, a potential leader of the party.

ADAM SHAND: This is a struggle between the left and the right of the Labor Party, but it’s not about philosophy or policy it’s simply about the politics of power and winning elections.

BILL SHORTEN (Secretary, Austrlian Workers Union): I think success has more to do with unity than particular personalities or particular points of view. I think the Party operates well when there’s a balance between all the points of view. Having said that, what is important is success, and success should come through the formula of new ideas, new people and strong leadership.

ADAM SHAND: Bill Shorten’s Victorian Right faction has the most to gain from Crean’s demise. They have been plotting for years to gain control of the state party and the Federal Caucus, the ultimate seat of power in the Labor Party.

Bob Sercombe, the sitting Federal member for Maribyrnong is an early victim of this power-play. After 17 years in the Parliament, mainly as a low-key machine man, Sercombe this week threw in the towel, leaving Shorten to be pre-selected unopposed.

BOB SERCOMBE (Labor Shadow Minister): The right have created a culture in the party over a number of years that is essentially corrupt. They have created a culture in the party where people are not dealt with in pre-selections on merit. They’re dealt with by the contribution they can make to the power of the factional master.

ADAM SHAND: The battle for Hotham is a measure of how vicious life can be in the Labor Party can be. Hong Lim, a state Labor MP, has for years, stacked the branch with Cambodian immigrants.

Lim has pledged his bloc of 100 votes, one third of the branch total , to Crean’s opponent, a union official Martin Pakula who is unknown in the electorate. There is also a smaller stack of Vietnamese and even a Latin stack. In just one week Crean must crack them all.

ADAM SHAND: So you did well cracking one of them but can you crack a stack of them?

SIMON CREAN: I have another strategy for cracking the stack. It is called door knocking.

ADAM SHAND: It would be a sad end to Crean’s political career, the former Labor leader pleading for the support of people only dimly aware they are members of the Party.

When we investigated branch stacking in Hotham eight years ago Hong Lim was busy rolling the state Labor member for Springvale Eddie Micalleff.

EDDIE MICALLEF (Former state ALP MP): And when I tried to door knock some of them with some Cambodian people, they said they had been visited by a member of the Cambodian Association and given their orders on how to vote.

ADAM SHAND: The taxpayer funded Cambodian Association had acted as a local recruiting arm of the Party, allegedly forcing those seeking welfare to join the ALP.

VOICE OVER FROM ’98 STORY: It’s unfair to identify these people most of whom don’t speak English, let alone understand the implications of their membership in the Labor Party. This woman voted at the pre-selection. When we first asked her if she was a member of the Labor Party she said she didn’t know. She said she never attended meetings, didn’t pay her own membership and that other people told her who to vote for. This woman’s severely intellectually disabled son is also a member of the ALP.

ADAM SHAND: The Crean forces say Hong Lim was given an ultimatum by the Right. Either the stack backed Martin Pakula or Lim would lose his coveted parliamentary secretary’s post in Victoria and risk never becoming a state minister.

SIMON CREAN: People should never respond in cowardice to threats. The only way to deal with it is to stand up to it and expose it. If the Labor Party has its people and its representatives responding to threats and not to beliefs we are finished as a party.

ADAM SHAND: But whether Labor will tear itself apart over these Victorian pre-selections is another matter. Monash University’s Nick Economou says this internal struggle will have no bearing on the real election next year.

NICK ECONOMOU (Political Science, Monash University): The electors not really interested in this stuff. It’s a form of politics that’s of great interest to, what’s sometimes derisively called the Commentariat, but for the average voter it’s not that important mainly because we know in Australian electoral behaviour, party identity is crucial.

ADAM SHAND: But the struggle in Hotham may still hurt Labor Leader Kim Beazley. Throughout the pre-selections, Beazley has refused to publicly back Crean, his frontbench colleague and long time leadership rival.

LAURIE OAKES: I don't want to get bogged down on this though.

KIM BEAZLEY: But you are getting bogged down on it, Laurie.

LAURIE OAKES: Are you prepared to say a year ago Simon Crean should not be nudged out. Now you won’t say, don’t you think it makes you look either silly or shifty?

KIM BEAZLEY: No. I am prepared to say that, and I know, I don’t have to say it, I know it — that the preselectors in his constituency will take his service into account.

SIMON CREAN: Well I just want to know why Kim changed his mind last year he was the firmly prepared to back me. I want to know what has changed. He hasn’t given me any explanations of that but that is up to Kim.

MARTIN FERGUSON: It is more than a question of loyalty, it’s a question of what’s right. Right in the mind of the party, its tradition, its respect to one another but it’s also electorally smart. We need people with experience.

NICK ECONOMOU: The problem for Mr. Beazley, he knows that he has very little influence over what goes on, especially in Victoria, so he’s in a no win situation if he gets involved and takes sides in a pre-selection battle so he has tried to keep away from it. So there is a sense that you’re right, Mr. Beazley looks like a bystander.

ADAM SHAND: Two years ago Dean Mighell, the Victorian Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union, quit the Labor Party in disgust at factional politics.

DEAN MIGHELL (Sunday, 2003): I’m a Labor boy. I’m a Footscray boy. I’m a unionist. All the things that I ought to be believing in Labor, but they lost me, they lost thousands of people and continue to do so. The Labor Party as we’ve known it, as unions have known it, is dead. I think we better wake up to that.

ADAM SHAND: Now back in the fold, he is a key player in the ascension of the Right under Bill Shorten. It’s a strange alliance for a dyed in wool leftie like Mighell.

DEAN MIGHELL: I first met Bill Shorten at a young Labor conference and Senator Stephen Conroy and they were fresh out of Uni and I was fresh from a factory floor and I think I wanted to punch them both out for articulating employees share schemes.

ADAM SHAND: Mighell helped to broker a deal that delivered the support of six key left wing unions for the Shorten campaign in Maribyrnong. Shorten may be a conservative but at least he looks a like a future winner.

DEAN MIGHELL: I think that’s where Unions like the electricians the plumbers and firefighters and others are saying 'sticking with the old so-called left, are we going to increase the chances of winning Labor with more just tribalism, what is the net gain for the workers that we represent we want Labor to win government not just win government but to articulate policies?'

ADAM SHAND: But support in factional politics is never free. In return for supporting for Shorten, the Right must throw its weight behind left wing candidates like Nathan Murphy in the seat of Scullin where he is tipped to oust sitting Labor member Harry Jenkins.
At just 28, Murphy has no track record to speak of and his political arsenal is modest.

NATHAN MURPHY: I plan to bring enthusiasm activism and ahhh, pride into what Labor can deliver for the people of Scullin. I intend to bring the people of Scullin with me, both the membership and the broader community with me in formulating policy that we can push throughout the party.

ADAM SHAND: Murphy may be green but he brings a serious bargaining chip to the table. His father Tony is a senior official in the Plumbers Union, which controls ten pre-selection votes on the central panel, which can be used to secure seats for right wing candidates, much to the disgust of the left wingers like Martin Ferguson

MARTIN FERGUSON: A person like Bill Shorten is a person of national significance and I support his preselection because he’s actually proven that he’s got the capacity and he will make a major contribution in Canberra. But then they go to a young bloke who is 28 years of age, basically a fulltime factional party hack, serving in the Victorian branch office of the Labor party. His father sits down and says I had got ten central votes for pre-selections, where is the seat for my son? That just tells me that this party has a very dim future.

NATHAN MURPHY: The Labor party is a broad church and everyone is welcome to their opinions. I intend to prove the knockers wrong and my backers right.

ADAM SHAND: Sercombe’s decision to withdraw from the Maribyrnong contest raised questions about the deals that had secured safe seats for Nathan Murphy and others. Would the Right honour its back room deals if it didn’t have to? Mighell certainly hopes so having staked the left’s long term future on the champion of the Right

DEAN MIGHELL: If I thought that Bill Shorten was going in, just a be a part of the old right and to see what the polls say before he goes out and has a crack it will all be for nothing.

ADAM SHAND: So the jury is still out you may yet still punch him out?

DEAN MIGHELL: He might hit me back. No I think he’ll be all right, you got to back people.

BILL SHORTEN: It’s not a case of Left or Right in the Labor party. It is a case of two groups in the Labor party one that is prepared to make the hard decisions in order to win elections and those that are perhaps satisfied with opposition.

ADAM SHAND: In all this political intrigue, there’s seems to be more than a whiff of corruption, but it’s just the way that Labor has always managed the family. It’s unruly and ugly but eventually a form of harmony returns.

DEAN MIGHELL: I don’t know what the Labor party would do with itself if you got rid of all that. You would like to think there is a better way for the party to operate with a bit more integrity, tackle Branch stacking probably, how I don’t know.

NICK ECONOMOU: Factional politics is inevitable in broad based political parties, factional politics is actually a form of internal power sharing. It’s normally cast in the press as a form of instability, financially has a fairly stabilizing effect as long as everyone except the procedures and settles down once the decision has been made, and so far that’s been the pattern. Once the decisions are made, the preselections have been made, that’s it.

ADAM SHAND: Yet there are historic moves afoot here. Victoria, once the stronghold of the Left is now firmly under the control of conservative right faction. Domination of the Federal caucus is the next objective.

BILL SHORTEN: I would encourage the Left of the party to find some new candidates, encourage a bit of debate, bring forward some new people. We have lost four elections. At some point leadership of the party must put its hand up and say 'we’re not convincing the electorate,' We can’t always blame everyone else for what goes wrong and I do think it’s important to have a debate about regeneration and renewal.

ADAM SHAND: But the problem with Shorten’s renewal process is the new look candidates look much like the old. Just more union officials and party hacks. Labor elders like Rod Cavalier have long warned Labor must find a different class of candidate.

RODNEY CAVALIER (former NSW ALP Minister): There's a serious problem in our parliaments now, which is only going to get worse as the catchment, the gene pool becomes narrower and narrower. People going into school, into university, where they get cased by a faction and they go into a trade union office, into the party office, the Member of Parliament's office — that is their sum experience of life.

MARTIN FERGUSON: You play the game and you will be given a safe seat in parliament. You don’t have to make any contribution to the community at all. The problem now is that a lot of these preselections are not what is good for the party but what is good for particular individuals and that’s why we are in such a mess, and somehow in a fortnight we have to work out who is left standing and pull together but on the way through there are a lot of people who are never gonna forget.

ADAM SHAND: Simon Crean claims he is being punished for acts of treachery. His attempts to reform the party to reduce union influence and to rein in branch stacking. And never forgotten, his support for Mark Latham in 2003 leadership battle with Kim Beazley.

SIMON CREAN: There are six people being targeted, every one of them wasn’t prepared to suppory Kim Beasley last time. Let’s get serious, let’s call it what it is.

ADAM SHAND: But just hours before the ballot began, Crean was still confident of victory. He claimed he had successfully cracked Hong Lim’s Cambodian stack.

SIMON CREAN: I think he is deluding himself. He’s been able to turn them out in on past occasions but this is different. Hong Lim has misread this badly. If he is directing or seeking to direct votes against genuine community concern about what the backroom dealers, the factional apparatchiks are trying to do to put me out of office, if he’s misreading that he will pay the price.

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