What is going on inside the Victorian ALP? Monday’s Administrative Committee meeting called to oust State Secretary Stephen Newnham has been cancelled but the crack-up still threatens to cast a pall over John Brumby’s Christmas. It’s now almost certain Newnham will be boned by other means and replaced with Rob Hulls’ chief of staff Mark Madden. Crikey understands Newnham will now be offered a package to go quietly after Victorian ALP Branch President and NUW National Secretary Charlie Donnelly bowed to pressure from the Premier and backed away from his previous demands for a showdown.

Donnelly sent the following email early this afternoon to Admin Committee members after crisis talks with the Premier’s inner sanctum this morning:

From: Rachel Baker
Sent: Friday, 19 December 2008 1:17 PM
To:
Subject: Special Meeting of Administrative Council

Dear Administrative Committee Member,

I write to inform you that the special meeting of the Administrative Committee to be held at 6:00pm on Monday the 22nd December 2008 has been cancelled.

I wish all Administrative Committee members well over the festive period and look forward to a productive New Year.

Yours faithfully,

Charles Donnelly
President
Victorian Branch
Australian Labor Party

Newnham, an ex-Brumby staffer, is effectively being held hostage by a breakaway group of National Union of Workers rebels struggling for control of the Right faction against the ‘old-right’ controlled by Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy. They are the same ‘young Turks’ that sided with the Left in 2002 to garrote ex-State Secretary and now Senator for Victoria David Feeney. Feeney ‘stood down’, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family, and an eerily similar sequence of events is expected to play out with Newnham. Members of the Left are also said to be celebrating his imminent downfall, telling Crikey this morning that they were now in a “good space”.

Newnham has been credited with two election victories, a spate of by-election wins, and a tranche of impressive poll results but is now in the invidious position where 80% of his party openly lacks confidence in his abilities.

Despite his superficial successes, the problems with Newnham run deep. He was criticised by members of the rank-and-file after installing his own candidate to run in June’s Gippsland by-election and his reputation as a political svengali in the model of Karl Rove is now being ridiculed. Dissidents tell of Newnham re-hashing the same presentation to ALP-apparatchiks detailing his dated take on modern politics. Newnham basically filters all ALP policy proposals through the prism of ‘middle Australia’, which he takes to mean Herald Sun readers — a copy of which is usually displayed prominently on his desk.

Newnham’s downfall doesn’t entirely mirror Feeney’s, however. No-one in the state ALP questioned Feeney’s ability — it was entirely a question of how he was conducting himself factionally. The whole NUW execution was basically a ‘thrill kill’ designed to annoy Shorten and Conroy that resulted in his executioners gloating via a fake death notice published in The Age.

Newnham’s reign at head office was also controversial on a range of operational levels. After his ascension to State Secretary in 2005, Michels’ Iron Law of Oligarchy became the dominant narrative inside the state branch’s King Street HQ with lofty officials feathering their beds at the expense of input from a non-existent membership.

Crikey understands state office budget blowouts were used to mask payments to various Unity accomplices for a range of questionable purposes. Like the Kevin07 t-shirt rort revealed in January, Newnham appeared to be operating parts of the notionally-democratic state branch as his own personal fiefdom.

The thinking is that phantom ‘wages’ were funnelled to a suite of recruiters who controlled votes in Unity’s September 2007 elections. All State Conference delegates who are members of the Right got a vote — spots on the staff payroll at King Street may have been traded for influence in that election.

One questionable King Street appointment was that of Mehmet Tillem, ex-Brumby staffer and Sang Nguyen electorate officer, a duo not known for their reticence when it comes to factional squabbling.

Despite the ructions, the average ALP voter continues to forgive Brumby, and seems to be warming to his self-styled ‘action man’ persona. But the party powerful have resumed the mudslinging like it’s the dark days of 1997. In rosier eras it would only a matter of time before the membership rebelled — nowadays it’s difficult to raise even a whimper.