Well, well, well. It looks like Daintree is coming to Dunsinane. Yesterday’s story in The Age, as to investigations into the Health Workers Union (HWU, actually the Health Services Union, Victoria No.1) and its hugely, ludicrously inflated printing bill — $2,800,000, multiples of tens of times the amount of comparable unions — and into the personal spending of HWU head Diana Asmar, have turned the fire on a union that really does deserve attention.
But, ah, they can’t do it without a detour drive-by on the CFMEU. HWU leadership is facing scrutiny that they may have put $2.8 million in print costs through a possibly shonky printing fund, through which the vastly larger CFMEU may have put… $180,000. Well, it’s a hook, I guess. The story alleges the CFMEU was doing that to support Asmar’s reelection as head of the HWU. Not good if true, but small potatoes compared to the allegations against the HWU.
Let’s roll the backstory, as briefly as possible. The HWU is really a state branch of the larger Health Services Union, and it represents people like hospital porters and others; low-skilled workers who ensure hospitals actually work. They are most in need of a fighting union. Instead, in the 2000s, the HSU was taken over by a group on the right whose inspiration for union work was less The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and more Werner Herzog’s bad-guy turn in the Jack Reacher movies (“ve take everything ve can carry and zen ve move on”).
HSU head Kathy Jackson so abused that privilege that her fellow colleagues set out to oust her, at which point she posed as a corruption-buster — gaining the endorsement of Christopher Pyne and Tony Abbott — until she was reverse-pinged for corrupt misuse of union funds for personal use, carefully hidden by, er, her giving her holiday videos to Four Corners.
The HSU crisis allowed for Asmar, then closely associated with Bill Shorten, to take over the union and present herself as a pair of clean hands. She brought in factional pal Kimberley Kitching, wife of colourful identity Andrew Landeryou, as general manager. Kitching was pinged with the allegation of criminality — taking worksite organiser accreditation tests for other people — but her career sailed on regardless.
Then, in the mid-2010s, the stable faction system broke up in Victoria. Stephen Conroy and Bill Shorten broke up the unified “Short-Cons”, and Shorten allied with Adem Somyurek, a former SDA, disgruntled with the union’s leadership by Irish-Dutch religious nutters. They established the Mods (i.e. Moderates faction) largely out of non-Anglo Labor groups who had attached to the SDA and weren’t getting much from them.
This new “Centre Alliance” on the right was matched by uproar on the left as the CFMEU exited the Socialist Left and created an “Industrial Left” faction with the rail and tram RTBU, headed by the Venus of Hobson’s Bay, Luba Grigorovitch, now member for Kororoit, currently holidaying on a superyacht she rented — $250k for a week, according to The Australian’s Margin Call — with new husband, venture capitalist Ben Gray.
The push by the Centre Alliance and Industrial Left — which were marching on to take over the party before the 2019 loss, and after that to regain the leadership — came apart in 2020 when Somyurek was caught on very high-quality, espionage-level video organising branch-stacking from the office of his one-time mentor Anthony Byrne, the former member for Holt and ASIO’s most enduring champion in the House.
This pirate ship of desperadoes — faction is really too flattering — was increasingly seen by the other factions as a nuisance and distraction. In 2018, Asmar, in meetings with Dan Andrews, had gained the HWU a $1.2 million contract to conduct training sessions for hospital staff.
These sessions, those actually done, were farcical, as the “Operation Daintree” investigation into them demonstrated. The question is whether anyone in the party actually believed for a second the money would be spent on actual competent training, for actual members. Doubtless Victorian Labor’s intentions were pure. It just looks like a pay-off for political peace ahead of an election, done with official funds.
The final act of this very mid Macbeth? The tragic death of Kimberley Kitching from a heart attack was followed, in the days after, by radio interviews where Shorten suggested that the stress of internal party politics had contributed to Kitching’s death, and Asmar writing an op-ed for the Herald Sun in March 2022 — two months out from the election — asserting that Labor Party bullying had killed Kitching. The election seemed on a knife edge; a loss would have cost Labor the era. It seems reasonable to believe that within Labor, such behaviour, whatever its motives, was the last straw.
The reasons for Kitching’s dumping are currently being aired in the Linda Reynolds-Brittany Higgins defamation trial. Kitching, nicknamed “Mata Hari” by other Labor members, had leaked to Reynolds that the Albanese team would be using Higgins’ accusation of rape and cover-up as a political weapon. It seems reasonable to assume here that Kitching was acting less out of a noble disdain for politics than a desire to damage the Albanese leadership, with a view to being enough of a threat to get her Senate seat back — or to see Labor lose the election.
Look, it’s all more complicated than that, and I’ve left out a whole internal loop for clarity. (This will get me yelled at by Labor tragics “Hey you put the United Frittlers in the Potrzebie Left! Hah not since the amalgamation with the Eschatologists, they’re not!’) But it looks like the HSU/HWU branch might finally be held to account. Asmar gets praise from some for cleaning up the very worst excesses of the previous regime. But you never know whether things like that are true, or just a factional line.
The difference between the accusations levelled at the CFMEU and the HWU is that the CFMEU fights for its members, and thus thousands of building workers have got houses, investment flats, super and university funds for their kids from getting a share of the Melbourne building boom. If the right had run the whole sector, they would have got bupkis. It would remain a financially precarious occupation, and it would be accepted that was “natural”, as it is for the shelf-stackers and 7-Eleven workers “represented” by the SDA.
The HWU has taken its low-paid, low-power, often non-English-speaking members for a ride for decades. And the ACTU has let them. We will watch with interest as the Asmar accusations play out. As we did while the member for Kororoit sailed the ocean waves, sending out Instagrams of herself which suggested she was in Kororoit in Melbourne’s West when she was on her rented yacht called — what else? — Silver Dream.
And as the former MC of it all, Dan Andrews goes on to his next thrilling adventure. Where will the newly enthusiastic Zionist go? My guess is that Dan, this square peg, will find a well-remunerated slot somewhere in the start-up sector.
Daintree has come to Maribyrnong? Is all to play for?
