By Chip Le Grand

The testimony of former Labor staffer Adam Sullivan (centre) helped reveal the conduct of MPs Marlene Kairouz and Adem Somyurek.Credit:Richard Giliberto

Adam Sullivan can’t nominate the moment he went from being a young political idealist to a cog in a soulless party machine. It doesn’t happen like that. First you see things you never knew went on inside a political office. Then you find yourself doing them. You know it is wrong – everyone knows – but no one tells you to stop.

Sullivan was smart and ambitious, fresh-faced and articulate. He joined the ALP when he was still at university and Kevin Rudd’s government was shuffling like a condemned man towards the 2013 federal election. Like so many people who enter politics, he wanted to change things for the better.

He signed up at his local branch. He volunteered for his local MP. On election day, he stood outside a polling place in Fountain Gate and handed out how-to-vote cards. Then he started working for the machine.

At the start, he did the sort of work he received a taxpayer-funded salary to do; answering phone calls from constituents, helping MPs with correspondence. By the time he was invited by Adem Somyurek to join his personal staff, he was a fully-fledged factional operative. He knew how things really worked and the sort of people he had thrown his lot in with.

Adem Somyurek remains unrepentant for a “catalogue of unethical and inappropriate behaviour”.Credit:Paul Jeffers

The day he appeared before Victoria’s Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission to give evidence about his seven years as an electorate officer and ministerial adviser, he could still have passed for a schoolboy, with his neatly parted hair and knotted tie. But through his matter-of-fact, insightful testimony, he showed us the underbelly of Victorian Labor.

Anyone who reads or heard his testimony knows it will take more than the proposed integrity reforms announced this week by Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews to stop the rot.

As Sullivan explained to IBAC Commissioner Robert Redlich, doing the dull, dirty work of Somyurek and his factional cronies required a “series of cascading rationalisations”. His motives were not pure – in helping to collect money for branch stacking and harvesting ballots from phony party members, he was greasing the path of his own advancement. Only a “morally and ethically bankrupt calculation” could account for his actions.

“At a certain point, I suppose you start to see it as there is no difference between what is right and what is necessary,” he said. “If everything is necessary in this situation, it’s therefore right. It’s a quick exercise in mental gymnastics that I suppose can get you around some of these difficult issues.”

He knew he shouldn’t have spent up to $14,000 of public money on stamps so that a state MP could use them for his re-election campaign, and you don’t need party rules to spell out that, after a branch member dies, you don’t count a ballot paper filled out in his name, signed from beyond the grave.

“You can draft the best constitution the world has ever seen, you can tinker with all the mechanisms you like,” Sullivan told Redlich. “At the end of the day, somewhere along the line, someone has to make a decision to either do the right thing or the wrong thing.

“We chose to do the wrong thing again and again and again and again. And ultimately the choice was that we put our own interest and our own loyalty to a factional machine and a system of patronage above the interests of the public.”

Rationalisations, like the dark art of branch stacking, are entrenched in Victorian Labor. In the days following the tabling of the damning final report of a combined IBAC and Victorian Ombudsman’s investigation into allegations of corrupt conduct by Victorian MPs, one former minister who engaged in branch stacking admitted that, if he had his time in parliament over, he would do it again.

The former minister is proud of what he achieved in his policy area and reasons that, had he not fed the factional beast, he wouldn’t have been preselected for a winnable seat in parliament, much less promoted to the front bench. He welcomes the changes to party rules introduced after this newspaper exposed Somyurek’s conduct two years ago and the proposed reforms to strengthen integrity across the parliament. He also questions whether these things will stop “stackers and packers” who have operated for longer than any current MP has served.

“I’m not saying people shouldn’t try to stop it, but it will be bloody difficult to make it work,” he says.

Another former minister predicts that branch stacking will largely stop, but says this, in itself, will not fix the deeper cultural problem within Labor. As he describes it, the disease, as distinct from the symptoms of branch stacking, ballot-harvesting and shoehorning friends and family into taxpayer-funded jobs, is the belief that decisions are best made when power is concentrated in the hands of a small number of people.

Where Somyurek has sought to portray his branch activities as a means of democratising the party by including more people from diverse communities as members, staff and MPs, the ultimate aim of branch stacking is to increase the power of the stacker.

At the peak of Somyurek’s rise, he and the rival factional chiefs who struck a power-sharing bargain with him wielded enormous influence over the administrative affairs of the Victorian ALP. The former minister points out that the party’s response to the Somyurek scandal – the suspension of member voting rights, national administration of the Victorian branch and the formation of a new, cross-factional pact by Somyurek’s enemies – has merely concentrated power in different sets of hands, without any need for branch stacking or manipulating ballots.

“This is democratic if you believe a tiny group of people sitting on top of a charade is democratic,” he says. “You can return the vote to members, but if you have these arrangements in place between these leaders who determine who gets to sit in parliament and, indirectly, who gets to be ministers and premiers, there is no change to the underlying culture.”

Steve Bracks and Jenny Macklin, the administrators appointed by the ALP national executive to take control of the Victorian branch, describe this culture as a “winner-takes-all mentality”. A long-serving Labor MP says that, where factional groups used to be organised according to ideology or policy differences, they are now entirely dedicated to one thing; power. Bracks and Macklin, in their submission to the IBAC and Ombudsman’s investigation, note that it was common knowledge that Somyurek was amassing extraordinary power, in part, through branch stacking operations.

The factional bosses who now control the administrative affairs of the party are a product of this culture. If Labor MP Robin Scott was right when he testified that branch stacking has been endemic in the Victorian ALP for 50 years, these same factional bosses have benefited, to some degree, from the practices Daniel Andrews is now vowing to stamp out.

The difficulty of this task, assuming Victorian Labor is genuinely committed to it, can’t be overstated. Although everyone in Labor knew Somyurek was manipulating party processes, it took the combined effort of dedicated investigative journalism, the full coercive powers of IBAC and an unprecedented collaboration between the state’s two most powerful integrity bodies to expose and forensically examine his activities.

Andrews’ conversion to integrity reformer, in the final months of his second term of government, invites cynicism. Through his actions and inaction he appeased Somyurek, most notably by welcoming him back to the cabinet table after the 2018 election. This gave the Labor Party’s dominant factional figure greater access to public resources to fund his activities.

IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich and Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass detail the findings of their agencies. Credit:Paul Jeffers

When questioned about this on the day the IBAC and Ombudsman report was tabled, Andrews replied that Somyurek’s cabinet appointment was a decision of caucus. While this is true, Andrews did not exercise his authority as premier to block Somyurek’s return. Instead, in a choice of words he now regrets, he publicly welcomed back his “good friend”.

Andrews’ time as premier has been marked by his government’s protracted legal challenge to and lack of co-operation with an ombudsman investigation into the “red shirts affair” – an earlier scandal which centred on the ALP’s misuse of taxpayer-funded staffers for party political purposes – and what this week’s report described as its “tepid” response to Ombudsman Deborah Glass’ findings.

Those findings, handed down in 2018, made clear the need for reform. At the time, Andrews did not support a proposal by one of his most senior cabinet colleagues, Gavin Jennings, to introduce a parliamentary integrity commissioner.

More broadly, Andrews’ approach to politics, as described privately by his own MPs, reflects the ruthless culture that Redlich, Glass, Bracks and Macklin identify as being the root cause of the Somyurek scandal.

Andrews served his political apprenticeship on the staff of former federal MP Alan Griffin, an active player in the party’s factional disputes of the 1990s, though no hard evidence has been produced of Andrews doing what Somyurek did. Shortly after 60 Minutes and The Age revealed some of what Somyurek was up to in the latest round of factional hostilities, a Labor MP expressed dismay at what the parliamentary party, under Andrews’ leadership, had become.

“Because Daniel came out of that world, that is the way he knows how to do business,” the MP said. “In here, it has been like running a horrendous sub-factional meeting. There are winners, there are losers, people are humiliated, decisions are made on factional shoring-up of power.”

So where does this leave Victorian Labor? Somyurek, through the “catalogue of unethical and inappropriate behaviour” detailed by the IBAC and Ombudsman’s report, and his own bizarre claim to have been exonerated by its findings, is without credibility and seemingly at the end of his political road. Meanwhile, surviving factional operatives who, like Somyurek, spent decades manipulating party branches are already planning their next move.

While Victoria’s Attorney-General Jaclyn Symes drafts the legislation to establish a parliamentary ethics committee to promote better standards, a parliamentary integrity commissioner to investigate complaints and a law prohibiting MPs from directing staff to engage in party-specific activities, stackers and packers will be looking for new ways to game the system.

As for Adam Sullivan, he has already been dealt with in typical Labor fashion.

At the start of 2020, Sullivan was so disillusioned with the work he was doing at Somyurek’s behest that he quit his job. Since then, his party membership has been revoked.

“The Labor Party loves whistleblowers until the whistle gets blown on them,” a veteran Labor figure with knowledge of the episode says. “For being honest and trying to do the right thing with the corruption agency, he was expelled. He was a really great kid, and he has been broken by the Labor Party into a thousand bits.”

The small role Sullivan played in helping Somyurek guard his sordid political kingdom is perhaps reason enough to tear up his ALP ticket. Yet the party has so far taken no such action against MP Marlene Kairouz, the only person other than Somyurek subject to an adverse finding in the IBAC and Ombudsman’s report.

Former ministers Marlene Kairouz and Robin Scott. Credit:The Age

One of the episodes Sullivan recounted to the investigation was filling out stacks of blank ballot papers for the 2018 national conference in Kairouz’s office, while she sat at her desk. “If that isn’t a direction of doing party-political work, I don’t know what is,” he said.

Redlich said the saddest feature of the investigation was listening to the stories of young political aspirants who saw unethical, factional behaviour as the only pathway into parliament. “The processes that have been so embedded for so long mean that these people start their careers with a distorted moral compass,” he said. “That’s the thing that has got to be addressed.”

In one of his more prescient comments to Redlich, Sullivan reflected that, when you work for an organisation like the Victorian Labor Party, you quickly learn that your value depends on your utility and preparedness to be used. “Useless things have a way of disappearing,” he said.

Sullivan has now disappeared. He has changed his phone number, is no longer in contact with his old Labor colleagues and couldn’t be reached for comment on this story. As the veteran Labor figure remarks: “He is the perfect example of someone who wandered into a swamp and drowned in it.”

The Morning Edition newsletter is our guide to the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up here.

Most Viewed in National

Source: Read Full Article