https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2026/09/26/inside-albaneses-factional-dominance-theyve-all-been-executed-except-one
"
When Anthony Albanese lost his first run for the Labor leadership in 2013, he blamed nine defectors from his own Left faction who had voted for the Right’s candidate, Bill Shorten.
“They’ve all been executed, except one,” a Labor source close to Albanese tells The Saturday Paper, referring to Lisa Chesters, who holds the regional Victorian seat of Bendigo on a margin of 2.8 per cent.
“And she’s being kept there as a warning to others, like a head on a spike.”
Some of the so-called group of eight left parliament on their own terms, but the fact the Albanese camp sees their departures in such stark terms says a good deal about how the prime minister views the factional tribes he now rules uncontested.
His dominance – unmatched in the history of the Labor Party – also accounts for much of the apparent timidity of his government’s policy agenda. Without pushing from the factions, everything is done at the leader’s pace.
“I think he sees the world very much in personal terms,” says one long-time observer of Albanese’s career in politics. “Cross him and he can be quite vindictive, and frankly, what he’s very, very good at is this internecine warfare.”
Doug Cameron, a former national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, who served as a New South Wales Labor senator from 2008 to 2019 and has worked alongside Albanese as a member of his hard left sub-faction, is scathing of what he sees as Albanese’s shift to the right since winning the 2022 election.
“I can see the Left having the numerical numbers but not implementing Left policy vision or ideas,” Cameron tells The Saturday Paper this week.
“I said 12 months ago the Left have been defanged, and I’ve now come to the conclusion that I wasn’t strong enough, because the Left have not only been defanged but lobotomised. They’re not making any difference to the lives of grassroots Labor supporters, they’re not making a huge difference to the travails of ordinary Australians, and they need to deal with that because, if they don’t, there’ll be a lot of Labor members who are in parliament now who won’t be there after the next election.”
Cameron points to falling poll numbers and other signs that traditional Labor voters are drifting away, disappointed that the Albanese government hasn’t delivered what they expected. He struggles to explain why Albanese has abandoned so many of the progressive policy positions he has championed since the early 1980s.
“I am absolutely bewildered by this and I don’t have an answer,” says Cameron. “I did not expect Albo to veer to the right as he has. It’s a shock and an absolute bewilderment for many people who have supported Albo, as I have, over the years.”
Albanese is a lifelong member of the NSW Left, who rose to the top as leader of its hard left sub-faction. In this parliament, he has delivered something no Labor leader has managed since the war: control by the Left of both the federal parliamentary caucus and the party’s organisational wing.
In a federal caucus comprising 124 members and senators, 63 are with the Left, 59 are with the Right, and two are unaligned.
Of the 397 delegates to the ALP’s national conference in July, the party’s supreme rule and policymaking body, 202 sat with the national Left, 191 with the national Right, and four were unaligned. That was little changed from the 2023 conference, where the 399 delegates split 201 Left, 192 Right, and six unaligned.
The NSW Right still controls Albanese’s state branch, holding 60 per cent of the delegates to the party’s most recent state conference. Yet the Right’s grip is weaker than its numbers suggest, eroded by a decade of corruption scandals. Albanese’s knack for building key alliances across factional lines, honed in the early 1990s when he worked as an assistant general secretary inside the party’s Sussex Street headquarters, has led some Labor insiders to now jokingly refer to the once-feared faction as the “Albanese right”.
As for policy development, while Albanese’s NSW Left faction still sees itself as the party’s engine room of ideas compared with the Right, that’s not a position shared widely outside NSW, even among Left faction leaders from other states, who mostly consider Labor’s current factions as serving as little more than management tools.
With this collapse in the faction system and homogenisation of once-strident ideological differences, Cameron sees the future for the party as more neoliberalism and more ceding of Australian sovereignty to the United States.
“It’s maybe entering into a war with our largest and most important trading partner, China. It’s about battling Australians never having the chance to get a roof over their head, or having adequate social security payments, of not being able to maintain a decent life for Australians that are disadvantaged,” Cameron says. “The basics are not being delivered, but instead we get this jargon about patriotism and rules-based orders, while ordinary workers are battling to put food on the table, or pay the rent or the mortgage.”
Cameron dismisses incremental policymaking of the sort that has characterised Albanese’s first four years in office as an excuse to do as little as possible. The same goes for the argument that Labor can govern only by holding together a coalition of working-class and middle-class voters wary of radical change.
“I take the view that if you deliver for your base, you deliver for Australian people,” says Cameron. “You’ll get elected, and re-elected, and you don’t have to veer to the right. You don’t have to take selfies with Donald Trump. You don’t have to abandon Australia’s sovereignty to the United States. You don’t have to do any of these things. You can defend Australia without becoming the deputy sheriff for Trump and his minions.”
If Labor’s factions are to a large extent something of a black box, with faction leaders often reluctant to talk openly about what happens behind closed doors, some still see Labor’s factional system as influencing policy development.
First, says Flinders University associate professor Rob Manwaring, there is an overlap between union power and factional power. The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, Australia’s largest private sector trade union, is traditionally part of the Right, for example, and the United Workers Union is the backbone of the Left.
“What that means is that certain factions and/or unions have what’s described in political science as ‘issue ownership’, so they tend to be seen as custodians within the party of that issue,” Manwaring tells The Saturday Paper. “For example, when you take issues around pay rates for certain key workers in key industries, then the unions and the associated faction become gatekeepers around that issue.”
Second, when it comes to formalised structures and policy development forums such as the Australian Labor Party national conference, Manwaring sees the party’s factions as still being the key driver of deals and agreements around policy positions.
“That’s where there’s a lot of kind of behind-doors negotiations between factional and union leaders about what they’re prepared to sign off on, even if they know that a formal policy adopted at national conference might not necessarily then translate into an election commitment, something we saw 10 years ago with the jostling around same-sex marriage.
“There’s this growing view that the factions are not ideological, or that ideology is less important, and I tend to disagree slightly with that, because you can still see evident traditions within the party, from social liberals to labourists, to social conservatives, too. There is still a broad sort of division where progressives tend to be either unaligned or they go towards the more progressive faction, and that’s where you might see some of those real pushes for tax reform and those sorts of things.”
Manwaring concedes that compared with the 1980s, when Labor’s factions guided policy positions as well as managing issues of potential conflict and deciding who gets every job or trip overseas, there has been an atrophying of ideas.
“There are just far less publicly vocal debates, and nor do I see a huge amount of internal advocacy. Once in a while, you see things like Labor for Refugees pop up as an activist sort of group within the party, but then their influence tends to wax and wane, and I just don’t see the Left faction advocating the same way.”
Manwaring adds: “I think the reason for that is twofold. One, there’s still a lot of people burnt by the Rudd–Gillard years and the 2019 election defeat, that you can’t be too noisy within the party, because it becomes problematic. There definitely does seems to be kind of less idealism, almost less intellectual vigour, than you might have seen in the 1980s within the party.”
With so many inside the Labor caucus today believing they owe their seat in parliament to Albanese’s political astuteness, much like when John Howard was at the peak of his powers during the early 2000s, there is little appetite for a radical change of direction.
Most Labor MPs in the federal caucus, it would seem, overwhelmingly trust Albanese to lead the government to the next election and beyond.
“I keep running into people, inside and outside the party, who still manage, despite everything, to underestimate Anthony. Not just his ability to deliver policy wins but electoral wins too,” says one Albanese confidant.
“And no place is that more evident than in Macquarie Street,” the confidant adds, referring to the NSW parliament, where the Labor Right’s Chris Minns is premier.
“This is where the NSW Right, the faction that prides itself on having a reputation for ruthlessness about the decisions that need to be made to win elections, still runs the show. And some of these guys still think that Anthony has just lucked his way to it all, because they actually have to hold on to this idea that no one else can possibly know how to win.”
There will always be a price to pay for anyone who crosses Albanese, says the confidant, reiterating the view that no one knows better than him how to square the ledger.
“Why is Chris Minns such a thorn in Anthony’s side? Because he [Minns] is a prick,” a NSW Left faction powerbroker says. “But don’t worry, we’re watching and we’re waiting, and when the right time comes, we’re going to give him a whack.”
Factional dominance of the sort that Albanese enjoys not only gives him enormous influence over policy but also in terms of succession planning.
1/2
"
#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead 
