There’s nothing strange about branch stacking, but what was unusual in rise and fall of Adem Somyurek was the amassing of enormous power by one man, a junior minister and member of Victoria’s upper house. How could this occur?
Somyurek and his officers were caught on video forging signatures and paying for others’ memberships. He was removed from office and the ALP. The resultant 2020 Federal Executive Intervention into Victorian ALP remains ongoing. The following material is edited from Guy Rundle’s full articles cited below.:
Somyurek was a leader of the “Moderates”. Over a few years, the “Mods” took over suburban Melbourne ALP branches, using Turkish-Australian, Lebanese-Australian, and Indian-Australian community networks. Without the surveillance it is likely the Mods’ branches takeover would have continued, giving them power to appoint the state executive.
The mystery is not that a group was trying to take over the ALP, but they did so with no substantial political or industrial base to speak of.
By the 1910s, the ALP had two main “factions” – the unionized workers, largely Protestant Anglo-Saxons, and an Irish-Catholic community of workers and small business people, both groups committed to “white Australia.”
These groups developed into a union-based Industrial group committed to socialism, and a Catholic right governed by Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, endorsing private property, the master-servant relationship, a living wage and reasonable work conditions. By the 1930s large sections of the Catholic and socially conservative groupings split to form a National government.
The ALP revived during and after World War II. But in 1954 the bulk of the Catholic right in most states split off to form the anti-communist Democratic Labour Party (DLP). In NSW the Catholic right stayed in the party, forming the NSW Right. They dominated the party and had extensive corporate, criminal, and US state connections.
ALP factions were formalized around 1970. After the 1975 sacking of the Whitlam government, a left-right battle broke out over the US alliance vs. nonaligned neutrality, and state ownership vs. private development. The Left lost. Eventually the Right dominated Hawke-Keating governments took power 1983–96.
Most of the next 25 years were in opposition. The Left adopted a left-neoliberalism; anti-communism no longer fueled the right; and division widened between the ALP Catholic right and a pragmatic right pro-market politics group.
Union membership fell to under 25% in 2001, and unions increasingly recruited faction-aligned student politicians. Connections weakened between union members and officials.
By the 2000s, the right factions collapsed into smaller warlord groups who formed short-term alliances. In 2010 they removed Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. One of these faction leaders, Bill Shorten, eventually became the Opposition Leader. Shorten’s base was the center-right Australian Workers’ Union. He was threatened from the hard right Catholic conservative controlled Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association (SDA) and from the left by the more united Victorian Socialist Left faction and the “National Left” in NSW, whose leader, Anthony Albanese, was an alternative leader.
Shorten needed a partner, and Adem Somyurek was the one. First elected to Victorian upper house in 2002, Somyurek is a Turkish Australian who had risen in branches in southeast Melbourne, based on ethnic community support. The socially conservative Muslim and Lebanese Maronite-Christian had allied with the SDA, but given the conservative and bigoted SDA Ieadership, Somyurek and others formed an internal “moderate” group, staged a policy showdown and left to form their own group.
Adem Somyurek is a trained sociologist and a graduate of the Monash University Labor subculture. He built the core of a new Labor faction on non-Anglo networks knowing there was no countervailing forces that could oppose him. The media report portrayed him as a taxi driver who put himself through uni. In fact, he understood power bases were shifting and class composition had altered.
The major Australian political parties are committed to multiculturalism, though elements of the Right would later publicly denounce it. Organized politics could rely on the solidarity of ethnic groups in a new world. These groups created voting blocs in Labor for decades. By drawing on the promise of greater access to power and political advancement, Somyurek and his core group could have dozens of new members turn up to branch meetings, pay, join, and vote.
In 2017 Somyurek’s Mods made a a “Centre Alliance” with Bill Shorten’s AWU and other groups. In 2018, this in turn allied with a new faction, the Industrial Left, focused on the militant Construction Union (CFMEU) which had left the Socialist Left over their lack of advancement in the faction, and lack of pushback against the neoliberal policies of the Labor right.
This Centre Unity-Industrial Left alliance was not principle based, since it was the right parties that were most sought to detach Labor from union influence. This alliance was even sought to include the SDA, who were embroiled in scandal after deals with major supermarket and convenience store chains.
Somyurek’s plan to control large sections of the Labor Party was exposed because his former allies become so alarmed they undertook a surveillance operation and drew in the media, prompting calls for party reform. But these calls have been echoing for two decades. Labor’s only success came when Kevin Rudd, an outsider and a former diplomat supplied a left-populist campaign against the old establishment.
The Left has always seen Labor as managing workers’ expectations within capitalism, with the 1907 High Court’s “Harvester” judgement which made an centralized wage-fixing system a matter of lawyers, courtrooms, and state-implemented wages and conditions, turning the labour movement into a complex machine, integrated into the state.
With the mass politics falling out of the middle of it, the Labor machine remains. Has Labor now become a machine for denying itself success, at the federal level? Labor’s reliance on student politics to supply leaders has marginalized non-Anglo-Celtic Australians, as has the remnant power of decades-old formations, handing down union leadership within dynastic networks.
Can the party reform? Can it be replaced with something better given our preferential electoral system? The rise and rise and fall of Adem Somyurek is a measure of Labor’s stuckness and incapacity to reproduce itself, in the absence of actual political movements within.
Meanwhile the mirror to this has been the transformation of the Liberal Party and its think tanks from parties and organisations anchored in branches and civic life, into client organisations of conglomerations of capital and rich individuals, supported by large bequests has allowed the party to operate without mid-level fundraising and branch participation.
Postscript
In the subsequent October 2020 Ibac Watts enquiry into corruption related to branch stacking, witness Adam Sullivan (a former Somyurek electorate officer) said ultimately the choice was that we put our own interests, and our own loyalty to a factional machine and a system of patronage above the interests of the public.
Related readings
Operation Watts IBAC enquiry into branch stacking practices – by Open Labor, 19 Oct 2021
The Rise and Rise and Fall of Adem Somyurek – by Guy Rundle, Jacobin Magazine, 20 Jun 2020
Aide tells of Somyurek ‘megalomania’, office ‘dysfunction’ – by Sumeyya Ilanbey, The Age, 19 Oct 2021
War Without, Rot Within: The Collapse of Australian Party Politics – Guy Rundle, Arena Quarterly no. 3, Sep 2020
ALP power vacuum – can the Labor Party really clean up its factional mess? by Sumeyya Ilanbey, The Age, 19 June 2020
F**k the Premiers: Labor’s secret tapes reveal industrial scale stackathon – by Nick McKenizie, Sumeyya Ilanbey, Joel Tozer, The Age, 15 June 2020
War Without, Rot Within: The Collapse of Australian Party Politics – Guy Rundle, Arena Quarterly no. 3, Sep 2020
Labor has a significant problem, Premier Daniel Andrews says following branch-stacking scandal – ABC News 17 Jun 2020
How did Somyurek get so much power? Because the ALP let him – by Sean Carney, The Age, 21 June 2020
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