24 January 2024

Labor pains continue over preselection intervention 'so a white man can be returned to the ticket'

| Ian Bushnell
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man in park wearing a white polo shirt

Taimus Werner-Gibbings will again contest the ACT election in Brindabella, but the fallout in ACT Labor goes on. Photo: Region.

Rumblings over the Labor preselection row in the Brindabella electorate are continuing, with a party member saying the cause of diversity had been damaged and the authority of the ACT Branch Council undermined.

In an email to Region, the party member from Wanniassa attacked the role played by federal MPs David Smith, Andrew Leigh and Alicia Payne, and Chief Minister Andrew Barr in the restoration of Taimus Werner-Gibbings to the Labor ticket for October’s election.

Non-aligned Mr Werner-Gibbings, a 2020 Labor candidate pipped by the Greens’ Johnathan Davis, topped last November’s preselection vote, outpolling sitting MLA and Minister Mick Gentleman 44 to 32.

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But the Branch Council pushed him off the ticket under affirmative action rules in favour of left-aligned former ACT party president and ministerial staffer Louise Crossman, who came last in the ballot.

This alarmed party members who believed the decision was unfair to Mr Werner-Gibbings.

It is not known if Mr Werner-Gibbings appealed or lobbied party figures. Still, the federal MPs wrote to the national executive expressing their concern and urging it to overrule the branch council decision.

Mr Werner-Gibbings was a staffer for Dr Leigh from 2016 to 2017.

Under a deal brokered by Mr Barr, preselected Noor El-Asadi moved from Brindabella to the neighbouring Murrumbidgee electorate to make way for Mr Werner-Gibbings’ return. It is believed Kamaljeet Singh dropped off the Murrumbidgee ticket to allow Ms Al-Asadi to take a spot.

woman holding placard

Labor candidate Louise Crossman will also run in October. Photo: Twitter.

The party member said the outcome was a blow to grassroots democracy.

“I am a proud member of the ACT Labor Party. Democracy and democratic principles underpin our society and our party. Democracy at both our grassroots level and in our elected bodies have been absolutely devastated by this decision by the National Executive, reportedly at the urging of the Chief Minister and our Federal Representatives,” the party member said.

The party member said the intervention had tarnished Labor, leaving it in a worse state to approach the election.

“If this has truly come from the Chief Minister, and David Smith, Andrew Leigh and Alicia Payne, each one of them should be ashamed of this outcome and their role in it,” they said.

“I know I would be. And I know others share similar thoughts to me.”

The party member supported affirmative action rules and principles and understood why Ms Crossman was preferred.

“I had thought the matter was settled then, even with there being those who were left disgruntled by it,” the party member said.

“It was a decision made by our Branch Council, who are elected representatives of our unions and our grassroots … Everyone should have gotten on to what was important, which is the actual election.”

The party member said not only had Brindabella suffered interference but Murrumbidgee as well, “seemingly at the expense of two diverse candidates”.

“Noor El-Assadi (sic) is made to campaign in an electorate that she had not originally sought preselection in, and Kammy Singh has of no fault of his own been entirely removed from the preselected ticket, after having been under the impression for months he would be a candidate and preparing to sacrifice most of this year to that campaign.

“And all so a white man can be returned to the ticket.”

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Under Labor’s affirmative action rules, the party must run at least two female candidates in each of the five-member ACT electorates and 13 female candidates out of the total 25-member candidate list.

When quotas are not reached, the branch council can reopen nominations, move candidates between electorates, or “take any other action to ensure that Affirmative Action is met, and ensure the overall diversity of the ticket”.

ACT Labor has now finalised its preselections across the five electorates and will announce their October election candidates in the coming weeks.

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HiddenDragon7:55 pm 24 Jan 24

A quota for non-apparatchiks (of all genders, orientations, ethnicities etc.) and people who haven’t spent their post-education lives on or close to the public payroll might do more good for a tired, group-thinking government which obviously has trouble conceiving of Canberra as anything more than a taxpayer-funded theme park.

Branch Council made the right decision.

And now an unnamed “disgruntled Labor member” has contacted the media and wants to bring race into it!

GrumpyGrandpa4:00 pm 24 Jan 24

Quotas, affirmative action, diversity…tell me how all these things ensure that taxpayers, get the best person for the job?

And then to sum it up, we have a party member complaining that Taimus’ reinstatement to is “……so a white man can be returned to the ticket.”

How sickening all of this is.

So Labor isn’t sure its own members aren’t misogynists and still needs affirmative action rules to make sure women get a go. They throw barbs at the Libs for their lack of women but without these rules they would be the same. Seems both sides think the same.

Given the initial vote strongly in favour of TWG, the obvious answer is to drop Mick Gentleman entirely. Then nothing else is perturbed, including the Canberra populace.

That would seemingly have been a far more sensible option, although it’s probably hard to boot Mr Gentleman when he did receive the 2nd highest personal vote in Brindabella in 2020.

Name recognition from devout believers. Left and right both have them.

I can’t believe that at a time when attracting Party Members is getting harder and harder that Head Office would meddle with current members’ votes all in the name of social engineering. The electorate is then presented with a candidate that even the Party themselves considered relatively inadequate. Why would you go to Party meetings thinking you were making a grassroots contribution and then cop a smack in the face when your vote is thrown in the bin. Having diversity quotas patronises the diverse.

@waggamick
“Having diversity quotas patronises the diverse.”
Agreed. And its just a bad, when someone who falls under one of these diversity categories achieves success on their own merit, critics will attribute it to the fact that they are a … {insert diversity category}.

Oh, what a tangled web of ambition, deceipt and nastiness is Labor branch council factional politics. Machiavellianism wrapped in vitriol, inside a nest of vipers.
Forgotton and ignored are principles of equal opportunity and putting the best candidate forward based on merit to best represent us, the electorate.
All indications are that Mr Taimus Werner-Gibbings would be an articulate, qualified and effective local member – although undermined by backstabbing, party nonentities who rely on quotas to disguise their own ineptitude and lack of merit.

Nothing new about lots of backroom deals and back stabbing in the ALP. What’s new is that now it’s all attributed to race apparently: no more contest of ideas between Labor right v left. Now it’s just racialised attacks based on skin colour. And these people run the country.

The ideology and inner workings of the party are broken and disfunctional. Lets not apply them to the community and vote this party out.

We should at least have a law in Canberra that you have to live in the electorate you are in.
How can you represent people if you aren’t one of them.

For all this talk about diversity, the only beneficiaries are left wing white women.
If labour has to do diversity, shouldn’t it reflect Australia’s population?
Structure the party and pre-selections to reflect exactly that.

What a perfect example of the ridiculousness of quotas, well done to the ALP.

You do also have to laugh at the claims that it’s somehow a blow to “democratic principles” that the person who received the most amount of votes wasn’t relegated to meet an artificial diversity target.

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