Election Wrap - 15 September

Whistle,
I am not a party official, so I cannot be certain the rules have not changed recently. But in the time I’ve been involved in such processes, that’s how they’ve worked. Factions do exist within the Territory’s ALP, and they lobby for their preferred candidates.
From what I have seen though, to call the groupings ‘factions’ in the ACT is a bit misleading, since they’re nowhere near as strongly divided as factions in NSW or Qld, where it’s hard to imagine they’re in the same party the way they carry on.

whistle said :

Don’t tell me the factions have been abolished in the ACT? How about the union delegates?

…I’m guessing your boss doesn’t have many representations if you have spare time to be on riotACT?

Aurelius said :

Whistle, within the ACT ALP, to get preselection, you nominate, and then there’s an election of grass roots party members.

HAHA yeah after they’ve been to their factional meetings (although I do understand the ACT has a nice chunk of independent people).

I had an ALP mate tell me about the factions. She said she just turned up and did whatever her faction told her to do.

I nearly plotzed.

That’s not meant to be an indictment of the ALP though, more about how uninterested she was at the time. The same thing happens in the Libs, just on an informal level.

Don’t tell me the factions have been abolished in the ACT? How about the union delegates?

Whistle, within the ACT ALP, to get preselection, you nominate, and then there’s an election of grass roots party members.

How do these people get preselected? Is the attendance at factional meetings the real qualifier?

Whilst I can’t comment on all 1655 of Mary Porter’s ‘representations’, I can say that in my 13 years attending Labor party meetings, I haven’t seen any MLA attend as frequently as Mary Porter (and she’s not even in my sub-branch, she belongs to one of the Belconnen ones). She’s at more than half the monthly meetings I’ve been to since she was elected, whereas the one MLA who *is* a member of our sub-branch has not been seen there for at least a year.

Sorry…Mary Porter, no idea what you do. Obviously you like to complain though. And boast about how many “representations” you make…to what? But I can assure you you don’t have my vote.

I would be more concerned about whether the representations led to any delivered outcomes and improvments to service delivery. Any idiot can run about slapping the top of their head ‘representing’, but listening to the constituency and then acting is a completely different thing.

Until they give more detail, they’ll continue claiming they’re the the most efficient party based on representations per capita (or per hilowatt hour in the last finanical year, however they want to use this useless metric)…

So its unlikely to happen.