[Theme Music Starts]

MICHAEL:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Michael Williams. Filling in for Daniel and Ruby. This is 7am.

When Anthony Albanese’s new ministry was sworn in this week, it was overshadowed by the axing of Ed Husic and Mark Dreyfus.

Husic in particular didn’t go quietly - calling the Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles a “factional assassin”.

After a landslide victory - with 93 seats and counting - the prime minister had significant talent to choose from as he assembled the ministry – but the process was limited by long standing factional rules.

Today, special correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Jason Koutsoukis – on whether factions help or hurt the Labor Party – and the warlords that won out.

It’s Wednesday, May 14.

[Theme Music Ends]

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“We have the largest ALP caucus in history since Federation, a caucus brimming with capacity, talent, and energy in both the House of Representatives, and the Senate.”

MICHAEL:

Jason, Anthony Albanese has unveiled his new ministry this week. What did you make of the picks?

JASON:

Well, in a sense, it's made easy for the prime minister because Labor's factional system serves up the 30 people who will occupy the 30 ministerial positions for him. That's predetermined. And of the 30 names that were elected to serve in the ministry by the Labor caucus, I think the prime minister has done a pretty good job of putting the best talent where it is needed.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“I've changed a range of portfolios around. I've got people who are, I think, in the best positions. And that's across the board. I think of the cabinet, there's been multiple changes made. That's what happens.”

JASON:

Moving Tanya Plibersek across to social services, I thought was a good move. He's given the National Disability Insurance Scheme to the Health Minister, Mark Butler. I think that signals that there's a lot of reform still to be done to the way the NDIS is funded and the way it operates and I think he's been given this extra portfolio for a reason to really try to put the NDIS on a long-term stable footing so I thought that was a good move. I thought keeping Chris Bowen in the climate change and energy portfolio was also very wise. I think Chris Bowan is an excellent minister and for such a complex portfolio there's been very little in the way of actual controversy. Chris Bowen has really kind of mastered the detail of this portfolio and I think it makes sense to leave him there. Michelle Rowland for attorney general is also probably quite a good move and then some other appointments in the outer ministry. He's made Peter Khalil the assistant minister for defence which I think was also a just reward for Peter Khalil who's got a long history in the national security space and he of course held on to state of Wills against a very determined challenge from the Greens there in Victoria and so I think that was a good move as well.

MICHAEL:

Jason, this is an overwhelmingly positive report card from you, but I want to know, you mentioned a couple of times the limitations on how much Albanese you can actually do, that you use the word predetermined by the factional plays behind the decisions. And I think we saw that in the axing of Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, we saw it in Science and Industry Minister Ed Husic also getting the chop. So take us back, take us a step to how that factional system works in the first place.

JASON:

I was reminded of what happened to another science minister in another Labor government, Barry Jones, after the 1990 election. His centre-left faction had lost numbers in the election. Labor lost a lot of seats in Victoria in 1990. And his faction decided that there wasn't enough space for all of their ministers to carry on in the new ministry. And Barry Jones was dumped from the Hawke ministry. And there was a big outcry at the time. And Barry Jones himself said that he had been dumped because of a combination of geography, simple arithmetic, and bastardry. And I think that's true today of the factional system as it was then. It's the same system. Geography, so which state do you come from? Simple arithmetic, as in how many members does each faction have in the caucus? So how do you then divide up the ministries according to that ratio? And then bastardry because it's always unpleasant to see talented people like Barry Jones or in this case this week Mark Dreyfus and Ed Husic dumped from the ministry for no other reason than just, you know, really simple arithmetic and the ambition of others who are in the queue behind them, in this case in the right faction in Victoria.

MICHAEL:

Absolutely, but when it comes to bastardry, Ed Husic had some particularly choice words for Richard Marles this week, the deputy PM; he called him a factional assassin...

Audio excerpt – Ed Husic:

“We've had a sort of bare faced ambition, and a deputy prime minister wield a factional club to reshape the Ministry.”

MICHAEL:

…What role did Marles play in the movements?

JASON:

Well, Richard Miles is the head of the Victorian Right. He's one of the most powerful right-wing factional bosses in the country. And I think Richard Marles decided that he needed to keep members of his faction coming up through the ranks. So in the case of Daniel Mulino, he's the new Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Financial Services. Daniel Mulino is recognised, I think, across the Labor Party as being one of their brightest economic minds. He's got a PhD in economics from Yale. And so I think that's definitely a promotion that has been made on merit grounds. But then Richard Miles also wanted to make a space in the ministry for Sam Rae.

Audio excerpt – Sam Rae:

“Stretching from Sunbury, Buller and Diggers Rest in the north-east, we clinch hillside on the outer edge of Melbourne's suburbia. Heading west, Melton is the geographical heart of Hawke, before the western freeway drops down into the evocative agrarian valley, where Bacchus Marsh lies at the convergence of the mighty Werribee and Lerderderg rivers.”

JASON:

Sam Rae has, I think, one job in federal politics, and that is, you know, when the time is right, he's got to make sure that the numbers are there for Richard Marles to succeed. Anthony Albanese as leader of the Australian Labor Party. So I think Richard Miles wanted to make sure that Sam Rae got a promotion into the ministry as the Minister for Ageing.

MICHAEL:

That's a, let's just say, a fairly underwhelming set of qualifications to be a minister. It's wild to me, Jason, that you can have an election outcome like this, you have a prime minister riding high in the polls, and yet that kind of authority, that mandate if you like, comes second to the factional system. So what happens if you don't join a faction and you're in the ALP? Do you have any future?

JASON:

Well, I think you end up like Andrew Lee. Andrew Lee is the Assistant Minister for Productivity, Competition, Charities and Treasury. So he's what used to be called a Parliamentary Secretary. Andrew Lee's from one of the three seats in the ACT. Thoughtful politician. He's someone who's written many books. He's a deep policy thinker, eminently qualified to serve in the actual ministry. But because Andrew is not a member of a faction, he has reached the upper limit of where he can go. I guess the other side of that, Michael, is that people who argue in favour of the factional system, they argue that it does provide stability and it does provide a clear and kind of certain mechanism for promotion to the ministry, that everybody knows where they stand in the queue.

And I think Sam Rae is someone who could bring a similar level of kind of political pragmatism to the Albanese ministry. Just because he's a factional warlord doesn't mean he can't be a good politician, or he can't contribute meaningfully to the government in a policy sense.

MICHAEL:

After the break - should Albanese have overruled the factions?

[Advertisement]

MICHAEL:

Jason, what does this mean for figures like Husic and Dreyfus? They've arguably reached the pinnacle of their parliamentary careers. Can you see them sitting on the backbench happily and quietly?

Audio excerpt – Journalist:

“Did you fight for either Mark Dreyfus or Ed Hudic to stay in the ministry, and if not why not?”

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Look, we have a process in the Labor Party caucus, you've been watching it for some time.”

JASON:

Well, I think Mark Dreyfus; he is 68, he served as attorney general in two different governments and I think he's had a very long and distinguished career and I think he's also someone that is probably going to accept what's happened to him and he still has, I think, a role to play as a party elder. He is someone who is an enormous repository of political and legal knowledge. So I see Mark Dreyfus is still playing a very constructive role within the Labor caucus.

Ed Husic on the other hand, I think he's someone who's still relatively young. He sees that he's got a lot of runway left in terms of his political career and he is going to really be feeling hard done by and I think he is going to be a problem in the future for not just the prime minister but especially for Richard Marles.

Ed Husic is famous for being a very determined enemy because he holds his grudges. So I think Ed Husic will go to that back bench. He's not going to leave the Labor Party. He's going to quit parliament or anything. I think he's got one ambition now and that is to, when he gets a chance, pay back Richard Marles for what happened to him this week.

MICHAEL:

The other move that's attracted a lot of commentary is the move of Tanya Plibersek from the environment portfolio and into social services. Some media outlets are calling it a snub, even a demotion. So given we know this tension between Pliibersek and Albanese, what do you make of that to move her from one portfolio to the other.

JASON:

Well, I think the relationship between Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek is obviously very complicated. They go back a very long way to when they were both, I think, just first joined the Labor Party all those decades ago. The fact that Tanya Plibersek was moved from education to environment at the start of the last term became very much a focus of media attention, but I don't see being moved from environment to social services. As a demotion at all.

And I think social services is a kind of iconic portfolio for Labor ministers. The biggest spending portfolio. It's a portfolio where she can really demonstrate the Labor values that she is probably more closely identified with than she was as Minister for the Environment.

AND
It clearly had become untenable, I think, for Plibersek to remain in an environment she'd been seen to lose too many battles there. And I don't think she would be the right person to then pick up and start negotiating again on the nature positive legislation that the government very much wants to get through the Senate in this term.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“Murray Watt, Minister for Environment and Water.”

The Greens have already signalled that they're going to try to focus more on the environment as an issue in the next term. So they're going to be up against the Greens who are again on that issue and I think Labor has to demonstrate that it takes the environment seriously. So I think Murray Watt can really turn this into a winner for this second term Albanese government.

MICHAEL:

From the outside, the fight for positions in the new ministry looked pretty ugly. You know, any time you hear the factions mentioned in the news, it feels like it's an example of people looking after their own interests rather than the good of the country. So given Albanese had such a win, like such a mandate, why do you think he didn't make the call to go against the factional system? Why didn't he assert his own authority?

JASON:

Well, I think several things here, Michael. Firstly, despite the massive majority that Anthony Albanese has won, he still has a limited amount of political capital to spend in this term. And I just think he didn't want to waste any of that capital trying to break down a system that is really entrenched in the Australian Labor Party now. The other part of it is that Anthony Albanese is very much of the factions. He's been a factional warrior his whole political career. And I think he really believes in this system. He didn't see any need to try to challenge it or to break it down. And the other thing is that Anthony Albanesi has come out of this unscathed. He can point to Richard Marles as the person that is primarily responsible for cutting down Ed Husic and Mark Dreyfus. So it hasn't cost him anything and he hasn't spent any of that very precious political capital that he's got up his sleeve.

MICHAEL:

Never hurts to have an assassin nearby when you need one. Jason, thank you so much for your time.

JASON:

Michael, a pleasure speaking with you.

[Advertisement]

[Theme Music Starts]

MICHAEL:

Also in the news…

Sussan Ley has been named as the new leader of the Liberal Party, with Ted O’Brien as her deputy. Ley is the first woman to hold the position.

Immediately after she became leader, Ley’s staff kicked Peter Dutton’s staff out of the Liberal campaign’s whatsapp group.

We will have a full report of what Sussan Ley’s leadership will mean for the future of the Liberal Party tomorrow.

AND

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says the outcome of yesterday’s Liberal leadership contest is not one she wanted – but that she is still committed to the Liberal Party.

Price defected from the Nationals to stand as Angus Taylor’s deputy.

After Taylor was unsuccessful securing the leadership, Price withdrew from the contest.

In a statement following the result, Senator Price said “unity now must prevail”.

I’m Michael Williams. This is 7am. Thanks for listening.

[Theme Music Ends]