Rudd guy tipped for key seat as Labor again looks to do a ‘Keneally’. No wonder the locals are unhappy

With an election looming, Labor are set to parachute Accenture managing director and former Rudd advisor Andrew Charlton into the marginal federal seat of Parramatta, in a move that has angered local branch members.

According to reports in The Daily Telegraph, Charlton, who recently purchased a $16 million property in exclusive Bellevue Hill, has emerged as a captain’s pick to run in the key Western Sydney electorate, where long-term local MP Julie Owens is retiring.

Labor sources told Crikey the party’s national executive is set to endorse Charlton this week, circumventing a preselection by local branches. Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s office declined to comment.

Factional background

Owens announced her retirement late last year. But the search for a new candidate has been stalled because of factional tensions, and the fallout from branch-stacking allegations. The outgoing MP is one of the last representatives of NSW Labor’s “soft-left” subfaction, linked to former powerbroker Laurie Ferguson.

The soft-left or “Fergs” control local branches, and would likely have secured their favoured candidate, but were originally divided between state Granville MP Julia Finn and Tamil-Australian lawyer Durga Owen. Albanese’s hard left faction wanted to use the federal executive to install a favourable candidate, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union legal director Abha Devasia.

Meanwhile, a 2019 probe highlighted allegations of systemic branch-stacking across the area, and recommended local preselections be suspended for two years, which have now expired. Most local members who spoke to Crikey said they hadn’t seen the report.

Branch members fire warning

Charlton looks like an excellent prospective candidate on paper — he was an economics advisor to Rudd, before founding his own consultancy company AlphaBeta, and remains an occasional media columnist — local Labor people worried he wouldn’t be relatable to voters in a diverse, working-class electorate.

Owen, once considered a front runner for the seat, told Crikey she wanted the party to apply the rules and run a local preselection.

“Western Sydney should be represented by people of Western Sydney. The people of Parramatta deserve someone who understands Parramatta,” she said.

She also warned that with the electorate on a 3.5% margin, voters would be more willing to support a Labor candidate who they could better relate to.

Parramatta Labor’s Federal Executive Council Secretary James Shaw said the decision about Labor’s candidate should be made by locals.

“I think that local members should be the people who decide who the Labor candidate is, and that’s the general principle under the rules,” he said.

He also warned local members wouldn’t be as persistent in campaigning for a candidate they viewed as a blow-in from Bellevue Hill.

Another ‘Fowler moment’

Critics of Labor’s decision warned it had parallels to the situation in Fowler, another highly multicultural Western Sydney electorate, where Labor installed Senator Kristina Keneally in order to move her to the lower house and solve an annoying factional headache.

The Fowler fall-out saw Tu Le, daughter of Vietnamese migrants, who had the backing of outgoing MP Chris Hayes, shafted. In Parramatta, two of the potential candidates in the mix, Owen and Devasia, both have South Asian heritage. Parramatta has a very high South Asian population and, like Fowler, includes some of the most diverse suburbs of the country.

To some within the party, Parramatta represents a major missed opportunity for Labor to improve cultural diversity within its ranks.

Vice-president of the Parramatta Labor branch Alan Mascarenhas, who has been approached by some branch members to run as a consensus candidate, said an open preselection would be the best way to ensure Labor picked a candidate that reflected the diversity of the area.

“Labor has a range of quality potential candidates who can speak to the future of our multicultural area,” he said.

Another Labor insider slammed the decision to install Charlton as a sign the party had learnt nothing from Fowler.

“What a fucking joke. Non-white candidates get a go when the odds are against them, but when it’s assured, they can’t find a single non-white person,” they said.