CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Prime Minister Albanese was not given very long to celebrate his 90+ seat landslide election victory on May 3, as nameless Victorian powerbrokers are quick to remind Australians of the petty internal politics that the Labor Party does best.
The usually hidden cultural fault-lines that exist within the Labor Party don’t often come into public view when the party is fighting in opposition – but with an increased majority, there is now a battle between different factions and states over who gets what responsibilities in the government’s 2nd term.
Two senior cabinet ministers have been dumped from from the front bench as factional heavyweights begin fighting over 30 ministry positions.
Science and Industry Minister Ed Husic has been pushed out because of an over-representation of ‘The NSW Labor Right’ – while Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has been dumped by his own comrades in ‘The Victorian Labor Right’ to make way for the ambitious Melbourne darling, Sam Rae MP.
Aside from the poor optics that come with this very public disunity, it also appears lost on the Victorian Labor MPs at the centre of this chaotic reshuffle that the ambitions of these factional nobodies has also seen both Australia’s highest profile Jewish MP and highest profile Muslim MP booted from cabinet after white-knuckling perhaps the most difficult 18 months of their political careers.
Blacktown’s Ed Husic can at least take solace in the fact that he was relocated to the backbench on the grounds of having too many MPs to pick from – and the fact that no government would dare cut any female MPs from the cabinet after witnessing Australia’s female voters take cricket bats to the Coalition at the 2025 election.
Mark Dreyfus MP, however, finds himself on the back bench at 68 years of age, for no reason other than the fact that Deputy PM Richard Marles has a spritely young ally that he believes deserves a cabinet position after showing such loyalty to his irrelevant Labor faction.
Not since the Covid lockdowns has Victoria showcased such an over-inflated sense of self-importance, when their entire state got sick and went broke, while the rest of Australia just chugged along not thinking about them.
In true Victorian fashion, it appears that both Marles and his factional underlings believe they are owed something after a landslide victory that saw Labor carried to majority due to major swings in QLD, NSW and WA.
