Late last week, Shoppies union boy wonder and SA Police Minister Peter Malinauskas was preselected unopposed to move from the upper house to the lower house safe Labor seat of Croydon.

The Shoppies (or Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association) control the SA Right’s 45% share of state conference floor delegates, by virtue of their almost 30,000-strong membership, which dwarfs all other affiliated union memberships in the state. South Australia is the last bastion of Shoppies domination.

The Shoppies in New South Wales have almost twice as many members than the South Australian branch, but they are nowhere near as powerful or dominant in the New South Wales Right.

The difference in South Australia is it’s a state with comparatively high unemployment — 6.4% versus the 5.7% national average — that has been de-industrialised over recent decades, hollowing out their workforce. Think Ford, Holden, Mitsubishi and all the tens of thousands of jobs that go with them. It’s a less diversified, dynamic economy than the big east coast states. This decline has coincided with a weakening of the normally dominant Left union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union (AMWU).

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In Labor politics, rank-and-file union membership numbers convert to raw power on the conference floor. On the Left, United Voice and AMWU traditionally come together to dominant or nearly dominant state or territory branches. The dominant union of the SA Left, United Voice, is missing its powerful Left ally in South Australia.

While manufacturing struggles in South Australia, low-paying minimum wage retail work is everywhere. In fact, Australia’s three largest employers are Woolworths, Coles and McDonald’s. These employers have been in the news in recent years for unusually cosy relations with the Shoppies. The Shoppies give them sweetheart deals that short-change employees and boost profitability and these employers join their workforce up with the union and deduct union fees from their wages.

It’s in this environment that the protege of Shoppies “Godfather” Senator Don Farrell, Peter Malinauskas, has risen through the ranks.

The 36-year-old Malinauskas, who Farrell has been grooming meticulously for power for over 20 years, became the secretary of the South Australian Shoppies from 2008 to 2015 on the back of this relationship. In 2015, Malinauskas was elected by national conference to Labor’s national executive.

According to electoral returns, the SA Shoppies secured almost $2 million by way of affiliation fees or donations under his leadership. Upon entering state Parliament he was immediately elevated into cabinet.

Going into the March 2018 state election, the Left-aligned Premier Jay Weatherill’s job depends on maintaining a good working relationship with Malinauskas. The Shoppies are the ones that “brung” Premier Weatherill, so to speak. In fact, it is Peter Malinauskas who tapped former Labor premier Mike Rann, told him he had to go and appointed Weatherill in 2011.

The cult-like Shoppies practise the most brutal politics within the Labor Party. Farrell played a central role in removing Kevin Rudd as prime minister, as he controlled the largest bloc of Right votes within the party room. They can be outplayed, however.

His fellow Shoppies-aligned colleague Michael O’Brien “volunteered” to step down as the state MP for Napier, in favour of his much more powerful friend. The nation was stunned in 2014 when Weatherill said in an ABC radio interview — with Don Farrell also on the line — he would resign if the then-soon-to-be-former Senator Don Farrell tried to shoehorn himself back into politics by way of the safe state Labor seat of Napier. With an election only months away, bewildered and outgunned, Don Farrell reluctantly withdrew his candidacy. Poor Michael O’Brien was stranded and without a job, for no good reason.

Weatherill barely clung onto power that election.

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Despite their support keeping him in his position, Weatherill has appeared very keen to keep the most powerful of the Shoppies’ forces out of the lower house where they can mount a challenge on his leadership. Weatherill is popular and it’s this popularity that keeps the SA Right at bay.

There is a theory that says Weatherill was keen for the casual vacancy in the upper house to go to Malinauskas to stop him as a potential threat to his leadership. With his move into the lower house, that plan appears to have failed.

Another Shoppies-aligned “volunteer”, current House Speaker Michael Atkinson, representative for Croydon, stood aside for this to occur.

Malinauskas’ move into Croydon for 2018 has been long speculated.

Secretary Josh Cullinan of the newly formed rival retail union, the Retail and Fast Food Worker’s Union (RAFFWU) says Malinauskas was “just another apparatchik” until the battle began over Coles’ infamous 2015 Enterprise Bargaining Agreement. According to Cullinan, the Shoppies practice a rare form of unionism: “yellow unionism” or unionism that sells out their members for their own ends.

On Malinauskas’ role in multiple deals with employers that have been found to have disadvantaged over 250,000 employees: “These kind of characters have no role. The bargaining was occurring at the national level. His job was to turn employees out in droves, who never had the deals properly explained to them, to vote for them.”

“Our understanding is Joe de Bruyn still runs the show,” he said.

He acknowledges there are major loopholes in the Fair Work Act that need to be addressed and says “there needs to be major intervention in all these national deals”. His sense is as there is increasing awareness of the dodgy deals that have been struck, the Shoppies will lose members and clout. The Shoppies say they are currently looking over 200 deals to make sure they are all compliant with federal law.

Back in the South Australian Labor government caucus there’s plenty of built-up tension between the Left forces of Weatherill and the Right forces of Malinauskas that have been kept in check for the good of stable united government.

The recent dramas about South Australia’s electricity supply, blackouts and “load shedding” are causing some major headaches for Weatherill.

This move by the Shoppies will be seen as pre-positioning for any poll slump or misstep leading up to the next election, upon which they can pounce and install Malinauskas as premier. Weatherill will be on high alert.

When asked if he would be concerned if this occurred, Cullinan said, “The SDA has been responsible for the grossest wage theft of low-paid workers in Australia’s history, complicit with management.”

“None of them should ever be the head of any government.”

Things are holding together at the moment but, as we saw with Kevin Rudd’s removal, when polls go south, things can escalate quite quickly and the internal damage from these episodes can be lasting.

Nobody understands that more than the current Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Don Farrell.