When will the Labor Party ever learn?

One of the plotters who called time on Mike Rann’s South Australian premiership last Friday — and delivered the message in person to the state’s elected leader — was right-wing factional boss and union leader Peter Malinauskas.

Surely, they could have made it look more democratic, even if it wasn’t.

Malinauskas is the 30-year-old former checkout operator who runs the all-powerful Shoppies Union (SDA) in South Australia. He also leads the dominant Right faction, and drives ‘The Machine’, which has run Labor politics in the state since the mid-1990s.

Young Pete inherited these positions from his former boss at the SDA, Don Farrell, who is widely known as “The Pope” because of his conservative, Catholic religious views and his absolute authority in state Labor circles over the last 20 years.

The softly-spoken Don no longer plays state politics full time, because he headed off to Canberra in 2007 to be one of the state’s senators. But he has already made his mark in the capital, first by playing a leading role in the June 2010 coup that brought down Kevin Rudd, and second by leaning on Julia Gillard to say no to gay marriage.

So Don and his mates have now played a major part in rolling two elected leaders in 14 months. Not bad.

The Shoppies Union, which Farrell ran for more than two decades, is the largest in South Australia, and easily the most conservative. It is adamantly opposed to gay marriage, stem cell research and the RU486 abortion pill.

Indeed, Farrell only got to Canberra by dumping Senator Linda Kirk from the Shoppies ticket in 2007, after she defied the union and voted in favour of stem cell research. Kirk had also pissed off her political masters in the SDA by voting for Kevin Rudd as leader in December 2006 even though Farrell told her not to.

“I have lived by the union and died by the union,” Kirk admitted at the time, conceding that Farrell had given her the senate seat in the first place: “He hand picks everybody and I was a beneficiary, there’s no doubt about that.”

Whether it was Farrell or Malinauskas calling the shots this time round is not entirely clear, but many say Farrell.

“Don has absolute power in the Right,” Ralph Clarke, the ALP’s former deputy leader in SA, told The Power Index. “He controls the pre-selection directly or indirectly of every MP in South Australia. If you want to get on, you get on with Don.

“Don also decides who is the state’s Labor leader and who gets into Cabinet. At the end of the day he has got the numbers.”

The SDA commands around 45% of the votes at state Labor conference. It can also count on support from branch level, where Farrell’s boys have been active for years. So it could probably run the party all by itself. But it does so with support from the Left.

Back in the mid-1990s, Farrell and the Left’s Mark Butler (now a minister in Canberra) formed “The Machine”, which has run Labor politics in the state since then. Butler, at 26, had just been installed as head of the state’s second-largest union, the LHMU or “Missos”.

As Butler told The Power Index last Friday: “The party was in an awful state. We had been defeated in the 1993 election and were down to 10 state MPs. So the two biggest unions felt it was up to us to fix it.”

Butler went on to be the youngest-ever state president of the ALP at 27, and is now co-leader of the national Left faction in Canberra. He no longer plays state politics full time either, but we believe he was in Adelaide last Friday.

Of course it can be argued that the factions have merely done what Labor MPs wanted, as they did when they knifed Rudd. As former SA state secretary Chris Schacht told Radio National Breakfast this morning: “When you’re sitting in a marginal seat and you look at the polls that show you’re an overwhelming lose, I think self interest comes to the fore overwhelmingly, no matter what the leader has done in the past.”

But they still could have handled the transfer better. “Having a non-MP being part of the message deliverers is probably unwise,” said Schacht.

“It’s just dumb isn’t it?” suggested presenter Fran Kelly.

“Yes,” Schacht agreed, adding it was also dumb that Rann might hang on.

“The opposition, the media the speculation will be, ‘who’s running the state?’” said Schact. “‘Who’s the boss, is it Mr Weatherill [the premier in waiting], is it Mr Rann, or is it the secretary of the SDA?'”

Year in, year out, we know where we’d be putting our money.