Angry, frustrated, insulted – these are some of the expressions Barton locals have used to describe this sham National Executive ‘preselection’ process, imposing the Prime Minister’s pick.
After months and months of indecision by the NSW Labor branch and much rank-and-file frustration, a bogus preselection process was staged for public consumption.
A process that ignored over one thousand members in the federal electorate of Barton and trashed the ALP’s ‘mighty’ NSW Sussex Street Branch.
As the president of Barton federal electorate council and as a candidate for Barton, I write for the record and for Labor and union members to understand the travesty that they called the National Executive preselection.
As the president of Barton FEC, representing more than 25 branches in the federal electorate, I was kept in the dark as to what was happening with the preselection for Barton.
Neither I nor the FEC secretary were consulted or told what was happening following Linda Burney’s announced retirement. Like the rest of the party members in Barton, we felt irrelevant, mere election campaign fodder.
Labor members need to understand the skullduggery our party and union “elites” play in such a phony preselection process. A process that lacks legitimacy and transparency.
I therefore write with the hope that fee-paying, card-carrying union and party true believers can understand where power lies, and the shenanigans union and party elites get up to at the expense of the party membership.
At its final meeting for the year, the NSW branch reported that the prime minister was about to make a captain’s pick. A pretend or make-believe ‘preselection’ process was then chosen by the prime minister for the benefit of the prime minister and the left of the party.
Following the prime minister’s letter of 3 December to his left-wing national secretary Paul Erickson, copied to the general secretary of the NSW Branch, the prime minister requested that “the matter of the preselection of a candidate for Barton be determined by the ALP National Executive”. A process through which the prime minister called the shots.
This infuriated certain right-wing union leaders, firstly because they neither controlled the process nor the outcome, and secondly because this time, the prime minister and his Left faction pulled the strings.
Thirdly, they wanted to appear to be on the side of party members by seeking to give members a free rank-and-file preselection vote. In reality, though, the Right faction union leaders wanted to use their power to influence local branch members.
I know, as a matter of fact, that the leadership of the AWU, for instance, had a paid former state MP lobbying key branch executives to sway local preselectors away from me and onto their candidate, flown in around the time Linda Burney announced her retirement.
A petition was even created calling for a rank-and-file vote. At first, it appeared to be a genuine petition organised by a concerned member, but the sudden rush of energy behind the petition raised eyebrows, revealing the ulterior motives behind the petition and so members refused to sign.
I personally wanted a rank-and-file process because it gave our members the right to have a say in who would represent them in Barton. For years now, members have become sick and tired of being ignored and having candidates imposed on them.
On a personal level, I had support of my Labor locals, with whom I worked for decades, and so I was confident of a chance of winning a free and transparent rank-and-file vote.
Unfortunately, the prime minister wanted intervention for his own reasons, perhaps because he controlled the National Executive and thereby the outcome or perhaps he feared the potential impact of losing one Left caucus vote in the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party.
So not only were the rights of the local rank-and-file hijacked, but this National Executive “preselection” was at best a pretend process, at worst an utter sham. So much so that, as a candidate, I faced difficulties in being provided with information about the preselection and the preselectors, facing hurdles at every turn.
Trying to obtain the contact details of the voting members of the National Executive is one example of such hurdles. In the end, Erickson, replied to my email but only to provide me with a link to the ALP’s National Executive that I already had. A website link that did not provide me with the contact details needed to communicate with them as voters.
In that email, Erickson wrote that “the Secretariat does not make contact details for executive members available”. So, how was I supposed to talk to or at a minimum email the preselectors about who I am and what I stand for?
The denial of access to information was an obvious and fundamental breach of the right of access to the preselectors. In any event, I later learnt that most National Executive preselectors on the list are usually proxied.
To add insult to injury, the NSW Left Assistant Secretary, the man behind organising the prime minister’s pick and vote proxies, called me ostensibly to make a “welfare check”. This very act was consistent with the Labor strategy of shoot first, ask questions later.
Twenty-one members of the National Executive were entitled to a vote – 10 from the Right faction and 10 from the Left faction, with the prime minister making the 21st, giving him the casting vote or the tie-breaking vote to install his left-wing pick.
After all the hype and the media marketing of many Left and Right candidates, with many claiming rank-and-file support, they simply failed to nominate. At the close of nominations, only two candidates were in the race: one was the prime minister’s pick, a “cracker of a candidate,” and myself.
Neither Left faction nor Right faction leaders wanted to support me, even though “many considered former NSW MLC Shaoquett Moselmane had the branch numbers”.
Why was I not supported by my own right-wing faction? As a vocal politician, I was subjected to many attacks and even an AFP raid in which I was declared not a person of interest, leaving no blemish on my name.
So, what led to their decision not to support me? The answer lies in the fact that I stood for justice for the Palestinian people, and that irked the lobby. Both Left and Right didn’t want to face the wrath of the Lobby by preselecting me to a federal platform.
According to The Australian, Alexi Demetriadi’s 9 December 2024 article stated: “Mr Moselmane would have caused headaches for federal Labor – particularly given his vocal support for Palestine.” There you have it in a nutshell. Nothing else.
I am honoured to have stood for and continue to stand for justice for all people dispossessed, whether the Aboriginal people of Australia, the Rohingya, the Kashmiri people, the Palestinian people, and many others oppressed around the world.
I know I continue to pay the price for my position. I see it as a matter of principle and so I have never, nor will I ever, wavered from this position.
I see no other reason why I would not be supported for Barton. In my 42 years of involvement in the Labor Party, I had never broken caucus ranks. I have always followed faction and party decisions. Always a team player.
So much so that in 2015 I was appointed as Opposition Whip and served for four and a half years, enforcing caucus rules and decisions in the State Parliamentary Labor Party and votes in the Legislative Council until 2019 when I was elected Assistant President of the Legislative Council of NSW.
As a youngster in the party, I never thought of unions as right-wing. I believed all unions represented justice for their workers. I never believed unions could be against matters of justice, especially justice for people oppressed or dispossessed.
I was right. Union and Party members support justice and a fair go for all. But what I didn’t know was that there is a real disconnect between union membership and union leadership.
Union members wanted their rights protected, while certain union leadership had other agendas. In any event, that will be a discussion for another day.
I am, to say the least, disappointed with the Right-wing, my Centre Unity faction, spitting the dummy and boycotting the National Executive vote and then going on a media rampage, attacking the prime minister for “meddling” and “disrespecting” the rank-and-file to install his preferred Left-faction candidate. (See The Australian, Alexi Demetriadi’s 9 December 2024 article.)
Any member of the Labor Party behaving in such a manner would have been expelled for bringing the party into disrepute. But of course, who dares, and secondly, such rules don’t seem to apply to powerful Right faction union leaders or, for that matter, to elites in the ALP who regularly leak and openly speak to the media with a deep sense of impunity.
They went so far as to even threaten the prime minister, according to James Massola, in the SMH, on 23 December, that there was talk in the right-aligned unions such as the powerful Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association to potentially “withhold election donations from the party’s national office” and redirect funds to state divisions ahead of the federal election.
Furthermore, it was reported that the Right abstained from voting, a silent protest to Albo to say “f— you for interfering in preselection”, one MP, who asked not to be named, said.
While the heavyweights bickered, nominating for me was a matter of principle to stand for the rank-and-file and to expose the “preselection” sham. Of course, the outcome was a fait accompli. I knew I would receive zero from the 21 National Executive votes.
My nomination further exposed the divisions within the National Executive, with the entire Right-wing union representation on the National Executive boycotting the vote they knew they couldn’t win. Anthony Albanese and his Left defeated the lot of them, leaving them howling with their tails between their legs.
Powerful Right-wing union leaders, who usually dictate policy and politics at the NSW Branch and across State branches throughout the country, were not used to being defeated.
The NSW general secretary, on behalf of the Right-controlled administrative committee, which includes Right factional elites, wrote to the national secretary protesting the Prime Minister’s intervention, noting that “the administrative committee places on record its concern about the foreshadowed use of the National Executive to preselect a candidate”.
It concluded by announcing that “the administrative aommittee calls for a thorough review to take place after the federal election into how the plenary power has been used in recent times and the role of the National Executive in state branch preselections”.
I support the administrative committee’s call for a thorough review of the role of the National Executive in the preselection process, with the view that the body with the right to preselect federal members in both houses should only be the party’s rank-and-file.
Through branch motions, I will campaign to encourage branches and members to call for the immediate removal of all powers of intervention in preselections by the State Administrative Committee, the National Executive, and union leadership.
A good starting point for this review is for Labor to remove from the National Constitution the extraordinary interventionist plenary powers given to the National Executive.
The other aspect the Party must curb is the interventionist powers of the industrial wing of the party in the preselection of members of local government as well as state and federal parliaments.
Currently, union leaders determine the outcomes of so-called “preselections” of state and federal candidates in both houses of Parliament, and they also control the election of party executives who naturally become subservient to the beck and call of union elites.
Unions have a significant role to play in the ALP, and they do a great job in fighting for the rights of workers – absolutely. I pay a fee to support them in this mission.
However, the elites in the unions must be prevented from being involved in the preselection processes or have the power to impose their union hack mates in parliamentary staffing and parliamentary representative positions. Their excessive power holds the party captive to their dictates and that must stop.
Similarly, the power of party executives to determine appointments must also cease. The state rules giving them such powers must be removed if the rank-and-file want the party to stop appointing party hacks into state and federal positions. The entire system is skewed to the powerful.
The party’s administrative role should only be to protect the rights of party members and to put in place a free and transparent rank-and-file process to select local, state, and federal members from its membership, including its multicultural membership.
Given my experience, I now agree with Premier Chris Minns when, in his inaugural speech, he called on the party to curb union power. Where he stated: “That will mean taking steps to reduce union control on the floor of our conference and increasing the representation of ordinary members of our Party to have more diverse voices echoing through the halls of this 124-year-old institution.”
It is time for the party membership to take back control of their Labor Party.
Republished from Australasian Muslim Times
Shaoquett Chaher Moselmane is an Australian politician who has been a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council since 2009 and is a member of the parliamentary Australian Labor Party until suspended in June 2020. He was assistant president of the Legislative Council from May 2019 to April 2020.