Something rotten is happening to the ALP in the Apple Isle. Infighting among the Tasmanian branch threatens to spill into the federal election campaign.
A bitter Labor split in Tasmania could cost three federal seats at the forthcoming election — and deny Anthony Albanese the prime ministership.
Throughout its history, the Australian Labor Party (ALP) has displayed two defining aptitudes. The first is for losing elections. The second is for splitting.
In Tasmania right now, both are on glaring view. The past two state elections have been resoundingly lost, and a successful takeover bid by the Right faction has effectively sidelined the formerly dominant Left. The state’s largest union and biggest party donor has disaffiliated from the ALP. Another union is considering it.
Labor’s most popular MP has resigned from politics, citing a toxic culture, secret media briefings, backstabbing and undermining. Two further state MPs are said to be considering resignation. The party president and the parliamentary leader have been driven out.
All this has rendered the Tasmanian ALP almost incapable of funding or organising an effective election campaign or of competing with a cashed-up, well-organised and locally popular Liberal Party. But three of the state’s five House of Representatives seats are marginal. Before the 2019 election, Labor held all three. It now has one, and only luck allowed it to keep that one.
Bass, centred on Launceston, went to the Liberals with a margin of only 538 votes after preferences. It is the most marginal of all Coalition seats in the country.
Braddon, covering the north-west and west coast, went to the Liberals with a 4.8 per cent swing against Labor. It is the Coalition’s fourth-most marginal seat.
In Lyons, a scandal during the 2019 campaign forced the Liberals to disendorse a candidate, resulting in a slight swing to Labor. Even so, the ALP holds the seat by only 5.2 per cent — and their luck of three years ago is unlikely to be repeated.
Tasmania is poorly polled, but Roy Morgan’s September survey shows federal Labor narrowly ahead in Tasmania, a swing to the Liberals of 4 per cent since the last election. Most — and probably all — of that narrow advantage is in the progressive southern electorates rather than in the more conservative north.
If it is to govern in its own right, Labor needs six seats more than it now holds. Failing to regain the three Tasmanian marginals would make that task much harder and perhaps keep Scott Morrison in the Lodge.
The current saga began when power within the Right moved from Helen Polley, a long-time socially conservative senator, to a young union official, Kevin Midson. He has the backing of senior Right figures, including former premiers Paul Lennon and David Bartlett.
The then-dominant Left faction denied preselection for Franklin to a Right candidate, high-profile local mayor Dean Winter. There was savage, public pushback from the Right and Winter was preselected.
That was just the start. As soon as the election was called, an anonymous female complainant, claimed to be associated with the Right, accused Ben McGregor, the state party president and preselected candidate for Clark, of having sent her an inappropriate message seven years earlier. McGregor soon lost preselection, despite angry protests from left-wing unions. McGregor has threatened to sue the leader, Rebecca White, for defamation.
Labor dominated the campaign in the final three weeks with a policy to reform the state’s ailing health system. The policy was developed by Dr Bastian Seidel, the former federal president of the Royal Australian College of GPs who had won a former Liberal upper house seat for Labor. It was not enough to negate the factional fallout, but it prevented the electoral defeat being even more devastating than it was.
White, having led the ALP to two election losses, was replaced by a long-time rival, the Left’s David O’Byrne. A fortnight after he took the leadership, a public complaint of sexual misconduct was made by Rachel Midson, the wife of the Right’s new convenor. She alleged that a decade earlier, O’Byrne had sent her unwelcome text messages and had kissed her while she was an employee at the Liquor, Hospitality and Miscellaneous Union and he was her boss.
He said he had thought his conduct was reciprocated but has since apologised. White, now back in the top job, called publicly on him to resign from Parliament. Two other high-profile rivals of O’Byrne’s, former premiers Paul Lennon and Lara Giddings, went on radio together to urge the same.
Lennon is a key figure in the Right’s takeover. As premier, he gave the Federal Group, owned by the Sydney-based Farrell family, a 20-year monopoly on poker machines in Tasmania. After leaving politics, Lennon was employed as a political lobbyist by Federal and was a member of the campaign committee for this year’s May state election.
Labor went to the 2018 Tasmanian election with a policy of removing poker machines from pubs and clubs. It spurred a million-dollar-plus campaign in favour of the Liberals, backed by Federal boss Greg Farrell and the Australian Hotels Association.
But the party’s stance has changed diametrically. They are now even stronger backers than the government of the gaming industry and supported a new 20-year agreement that, while watering down Federal’s monopoly, also halved their tax rate.
Meanwhile Seidel, the party’s star recruit, will leave politics at the end of the parliamentary year. “I have tried to work constructively to solve some of our issues in our party, but have come to the realisation that I have failed,” he said. “I can’t work in a toxic environment and I can’t work with people who constantly leak information to the media out of pure selfishness.
“I don’t enjoy political infighting. Compared to others — I actually don’t get a kick out of it. It is sad and depressing and too often I felt like I was a dispensable pawn in somebody else’s stupid game. I did not sign up for that. My community and my electorate of Huon did not sign up for that either.”
The only federal intervention has been to formally sack McGregor as state president and to postpone the imminent state conference until at least after the federal election.
Martyn Goddard is a public policy analyst specialising in health and state government funding. He was a member of the Australian Council on AIDS and Related Diseases and its clinical subcommittee; as well as the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee. He also served as a health policy officer at the Australian Consumers' Association (Choice).
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