BY SUE BOLAND
The number of senior ALP figures implicated in vote rorting and other shady internal party practices is increasing as middle and lower level ALP figures spill their guts to the Queensland Criminal Justice Commission inquiry headed by Tom Shephardson.
The inquiry has already named two federal Labor MPs, the shadow minister and former Queensland ALP state secretary Wayne Swan and a federal MP whose name has been suppressed. Four state Labor MPs have also been named: deputy premier Jim Elder (who has now resigned), Gary Musgrove, former state secretary Mike Kaiser and Gary Fenlon.
Allegations by current and former ALP members have revealed an internal party regime of standover tactics, branch stacking, theft of ballot papers for candidate preselections, joining people to the ALP without their knowledge, forging electoral enrolments, impersonating voters who had moved out of an electorate in order to vote in an election, a donation of approximately $1400 to the Democrats following a national deal to swap preferences, and, falsification of a membership survey on affirmative action.
While the allegations mostly involve the ALP, glimpses of equally grubby practices in the Liberal Party have been revealed, with a Liberal Party member admitting to falsely enrolling in the Townsville electorate of Mundingburra in order to vote for the Liberal candidate Frank Tanti in a tight by-election.
The rorts only came to light because of an internal factional dispute. Karen Ehrmann, a key figure in the ALP's AWU (Australian Workers Union) faction in Townsville, withdrew support from the AWU faction's candidate, Tony Mooney, and supported the left faction's Mike Reynolds in the preselection battle for the safe Labor state seat of Townsville in 1996.
As a pay-back, an AWU faction member gave evidence of Ehrmann's involvement in forging electoral enrolment forms to the local branch of the Liberal Party. Ehrmann was subsequently jailed for three years for the offences.
Unwilling to be the scapegoat, Ehrmann began naming names and revealed that false electoral enrolments were widely used by ALP factions in Queensland.
Ironically, when the federal ALP intervened in the Queensland branch in 1980, a rule was introduced which states that branch members, in order to vote in a preselection, have to be registered on the electoral roll for the relevant electorate. The rule was supposed to curb branch stacking but was unsuccessful. Instead, successful branch stacks became more complicated because false electoral enrolments had to be organised.
In contrast, Liberal Party branches can be stacked with members who live far away from the electorate in question, even from overseas and interstate.
The Queensland ALP has two right-wing factions, the AWU (based around AWU state secretary Bill Ludwig) and Labor Unity (also known as the "Old Guard") and two "left-wing" factions, Socialist Left and Labor Left.
The AWU faction is most associated with electoral rorts because it controls the state ALP branch and many state and federal MPs owe their jobs to the faction. The AWU controls around 41% of votes at ALP state conferences. Ehrmann described to the inquiry how the faction controls voting at these conferences: "They have runners to collect the [blank] ballot papers of the people they consider aligned with the AWU faction. They take them into another room where they fill them out."
The electoral rorting scandal has highlighted the extent to which ALP careerists are motivated by self-interest. Rivalry between ALP factions is based on competition for parliamentary seats and not ideological differences. Aspiring ALP careerists choose a faction to join on the basis of which one will give them the best chance of securing a parliamentary seat.
Roy Mudford, who was the National Union of Students state president in 1996, explained to the inquiry that he enrolled in an electorate in which he did not live because "It was a regular thing for there to be promises that you would be looked after in relation to jobs if you did what you were told". Jamie Lonsdale, a former student politician from the Queensland University of Technology, told the inquiry that the implied promise of "jobs" included jobs with the state Labor government such as ministerial advisers.
According to Warwick Powell, one of the two main organisers of the false electoral enrolment scam for the AWU faction, the student Labor members "were ambitious, they were keen, they were jumping out of their skins to render assistance".
Labor students practice their dirty tricks and intimidatory tactics in university student elections each year in order to ensure victory. Student elections at Newcastle and Macquarie universities this year are the latest of a long list of examples.
Branch stacking and rorting are part and parcel of the bourgeois (big business) political system where professional and unaccountable politicians get to make important decisions which have a major impact on the lives and well-being of large numbers of people. Politicians avoid being accountable to their electors because electorates are too big for voters to be able to recall them.
Nor are they accountable to their own party's members, because party rules ensure that the parliamentary caucus has total freedom to make decisions, even when those decisions contravene official party policy or election campaign promises. Party members don't have the right to recall politicians who flout party policy.
With no-one to make them accountable, parliamentarians are guided purely by self-interest. This motivation is enhanced by the handsome incomes and extensive perks and allowances which parliamentarians are entitled to. These are designed to ensure that politicians identify their interests with those of the corporate rich rather than the working majority.