A very Labor Christmas: the alleged headbutt, the plumber, and the tip-truck union

To quote Australian Crawl, things-uh just-uh ain’t going right for the gang that can’t shoot straight, i.e. the Bill Shorten crowd, aka the Shorts, now on their way to becoming the positively Miniscules.

Faction members are defecting, the Health Workers Union led by Shorten ally Diana Asmar is being probed by IBAC over the fate of $3.4 million in grants, and the Victorian Socialist Left and SDA Right have stitched up a new stability deal. How could things get any worse for them?

Well, your last loyal lieutenant could headbutt someone at the primo union lawyers’ Christmas do in Melbourne. 

Yes, Thursday before last, Earl Setches, head of the Plumbers’ Union, allegedly put his head down and his butt up and charged at Mem Suleyman, assistant state secretary of the Transport Workers Union, at the Maurice Blackburn Christmas party held at Trades Hall. Maurice Blackburn, the top union law firm and legal home to lefty HRT heartthrob Josh Bornstein among others, holds this every year, with the bruvvers, sistas, silks and MPs converging for free drinks and ’80s singalongs.

Several sources have been willing to confirm that Setches allegedly charged at Suleyman, unprovoked, and was then escorted from the party. None of the witnesses will go on the record. They may have to though if Suleyman makes a complaint.

What would have cranked the heat up to turn plumber into cooker? Well, Suleyman and the TWU are members of the “Cons”, the Labor faction run by former senator Stephen Conroy from his ASPI-funded floating space casino, and deputised to Richard Marles MP, who runs our national defence in his spare time. 

Suleyman and team have been facing elections in the past few weeks and, unusually, there was a challenger. Candidate Luke McCrone was running what he claimed was a grassroots campaign to reform the TWU. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. 

McCrone has run a barnstorming campaign, accusing TWU leaders of poor representation, excessive pay and mismanaging TWUSuper, the union’s $6 billion fund, with poor returns and high costs. 

In November, McCrone’s team succeeded in getting numerous “non-connected” non-members thrown off the TWU voter roll, including Marles, federal MP Sam Rae, failed speaker candidate Rob Mitchell, and half a dozen Victorian state MPs and candidates. 

The Con leadership retaliated with a letter to members defending its record, which Senator Andrew Bragg has now referred to APRA for investigation regarding the use of funds in an election campaign.

So who is McCrone? He’s a tip-truck driver who went owner-driver a few years ago. For the past two years, he’s popped up as spokesperson for the Victorian Tippers Union (VTU), which, in the reports, claims to be a 300-strong organisation, which News Corp was happy to feature as a real player. Further information is scarce, because two years later the group’s website remains under construction (though its Facebook page claims 4200 members). 

Doubtless, McCrone is a rank-and-file people’s champion. But it can’t be denied that his campaign and the sudden appearance of the VTU created a beachhead against the TWU leadership. More Bay of Pigs, as it turned out. On December 13, a week after the alleged headbutt, Suleyman declared victory on Facebook:

Two lost elections? The enemy within? That’s a mean thing to say about James Scullin. Or does Suleyman have a more recent Labor leader in mind? Looks like we’re going to hear a lot more about it.

It’s not the first time there have been accusations of argy-bargy over right-wing factional arrangements, with accusations four years ago that Adem Somyurek had threatened with a butter knife Con faction stalwart Johnny “Butterdish” Eren (Somyurek denies this happened). 

So you can see why the Plumbers’ supremo was busting a gasket. Earl Setches — Cain/Kirner minister Kay Setches’ little boy — was pretty much there when the whole landscape started to shift in 2013-14 to make the bizarre Somyurek push possible. 

Setches was a prime mover in the most ambitious move of this period yet, the 2017 meeting, when the Somyurek-Shorten “Centre Alliance” made its grand deal with the Industrial Left, comprised of the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), the Rail, Tram and Buses Union (RTBU), and other unions, which had escaped the clutches of Socialist Left dear panda father Kim Carr and pursued the world-historical task of getting the late Jane Garrett elected to the Legislative Council. 

The meeting for that was said to have included Shorten, Adem Somyurek, accomplished failure Andrew Landeryou and Setches. Count your kidneys when you leave that room. 

This meeting occurred just before the 2017 Bennelong byelection, a middle-class Liberal seat that Labor was hoping to surge forward in, at a time when the CFMEU was still a leeeetle on the nose (i.e. about half as loathed as Scott Morrison is now). People were a little cross at Bill and Setches for that. 

Little did they know. When senator Kimberley Kitching died of a sudden heart attack, Setches was straight out of the box to throw accusations at Labor. Setches told Samantha Maiden (who ran uncritically with the “Labor killed Kitching” angle for days):

Union boss Earl Setches, who attended the Wednesday morning Zoom meeting of the Victorian Right which declined to endorse [Kitching’s] preselection said that he believed the Labor Party’s brutal preselection process had ‘killed her’.

…

‘I think it did kill her,’ Mr Setches told news.com.au.

That was in March, eight weeks before Labor’s make-or-break election. No one thought Setches or the Shorten crew could do anything more counter-productive. But, oh, is it possible that at the moment he decided to go the full head-tonk, Setches handed his tinny to someone and said, “Hold my beer”?

What’s next? The HWU is in IBAC’s sights. The TWU is being scrutinised. John Setka still buys his shirts in wallpaper stores. Former RTBU head Luba Grigorovitch, the Venus of Hobson’s Bay, now gazes over the Altona Riviera, as member for Kororoit, and wife of Ben Gray, son of former Liberal Tasmanian premier Robin Gray and private equity company asset str… investor, a marriage that has seen half the labour movement shun her.

They met on an Australian American Leadership Dialogue junket (clearly, instant affection!). New Democratic Labor Party MLC Adem Somyurek is running an Officeworks bug detector over the walls of his tiny office, before looking for someone to have lunch with.

And above all, while you sleep, work, love, nurture and watch Netflix, a gang of termites are working 24/7 to grab whatever they can from a movement funded by workers’ dues, to further by ten minutes their exhaustingly futile political careers, and carve off slices for themselves. 

Things-uh don’t seem to-uh be going riyight…