Inside the south-west Sydney Labor branch threatening to topple a sitting MP

Resumen detallado

With one MP facing the end of his political life, Campbelltown’s deputy mayor has led a surge in party enrolments over the past two years.

NSW Labor is considering rolling a sitting minister while also blocking the ascension of his main local rival, part of an increasingly messy preselection poisoned by months of bitter infighting and accusations of branch stacking in their south-west Sydney seat.

This masthead revealed on Thursday that NSW Fair Trade Minister Anoulack Chanthivong is facing a revolt from local branches in his electorate of Macquarie Fields. Despite it being widely known that he would lose a rank-and-file ballot, neither Premier Chris Minns nor party head office have intervened.

His main rival is Masood Chowdhury, the deputy mayor of Campbelltown Council and the president of the largest branch in the electorate.

There is a growing unwillingness to save Chanthivong via a referral to the party’s national executive. The MP has endured a torrid term as a minister and has alienated key stakeholders, including the union movement, as both fair trading and corrections minister. Even if he survives preselection, Chanthivong will not be a minister if the Minns government is re-elected in March.

The reluctance to save Chanthivong stands in sharp contrast to a series of “captain’s calls” made by Minns to install candidates in seats such as Winston Hills, Wallsend and Wyong.

However, there is also no appetite to open the door for Chowdhury to enter parliament. The party finds itself in a difficult position in the seat. Installing a third candidate via national executive referral would be a break with the convention of not rolling sitting ministers, and risk angering locals keen to back Chowdhury.

His branch — Ingleburn-Macquarie Fields — has faced multiple complaints of stacking from Chanthivong and branch members amid a surge in discounted membership numbers, a senior party source said. But, the same source said, the minister had failed to provide the party with sufficient evidence to warrant the same kind of intervention head office has made in other areas recently.

A membership list for Chowdhury’s…

The…

Inicio del artículo, extracto de The Age. Para leer el resto, abra el artículo en el sitio del medio.