Already and this is the Daily This is the Daily OS. Oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Tuesday, the thirteenth of May. I'm Zara Seidler.
I'm Billy fitz Simon's.
Yesterday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi announced his cabinet for the next term of parliament. It followed a week of very public infighting in the Labor Party about who should be elevated to the cabinet. In today's podcast, we're going to explain the concept of factions and the role that factions have played in discussions about who should be promoted in the Labor Party.
So, Sara, yesterday Prime Minister Anthony Albanesi unveiled his cabinet. But that came after a week of headlines about infighting in Labor, which I think that many people would have been surprised by, you know, because they had such a signialificant when you would have thought that there would be a lot of unity amongst the party, but that is not what we saw. No, So this all surrounds the cabinet. I think we should maybe just first explain what actually is the cabinet.
Good starting point, So the cabinet is basically just the main decision making body of the government. That's just a good way to think about it. If you're thinking about a business, it's like the c suite, the upper executive, and so it's made up of ministers who have responsibility for areas of government policy. So think things like health
or defense or education. Ministers work with relevant government departments to oversee the government's work in that area, and they basically just design new policies, the policies that we talk about and the policies that the government then chooses to implement. One thing that I think you were the person that became very passionate in the office about this to remember is that for someone to become a minister, you don't actually have to have worked in the field at all.
So I think made a video about this, But basically to become a minister and to serve in cabinet, say as the Health minister, you don't have to have worked as a doctor, don't have to have a medical degree, same as truth for education, don't need to be a teacher.
Thought that was a little fun factor.
That interesting something I think about once a week. The fact that you're yes to be the Treasurer. You don't need to have an economics degree.
No, though he does, our treasurer does.
It is a bonus and I think important to note here the reason why that is the case is that often these ministers are supported by a full department that's made up of experts, of public servant experts who are working on.
These policies day in, day out.
But basically what we're talking about today is that cabinet and the ministers make up the cabinet.
Okay.
And so since Labor won the election, Prime Minister Anthony Alberizi has been deciding who will be in his cabinet. Now, my understanding is that it is pretty much the Prime Minister's decision alone. So why has it become so contentious?
I mean, it is in some parts his decision. But I think to understand the Labor Party, especially, but mostly political parties here in Australia, you need to understand factions because factions are arguably the most powerful thing that exists, especially in the Labor Party.
Okay, so what is a faction?
Yeah, I'm going to be really annoying and answer that with an analogy.
Because I think love an analogy. It's the best way for me to think about it. So, Billy, you like to party or go to party a partygoer. When you go to a party, do you ever notice that there are like lots of small groups of people having separate discussions.
Yes, particularly at extended family gatherings, Like I'm just with my cousins.
And the cousins you really really like the cousins that stand over.
The second cousins wants are removed, like I'm not really talking to them exactly, no offense.
I'm sure they're lovely, and.
I'm sure they're listening to shout out to Billy's cousins. But that's basically what a faction is. So politics, when we talk about factions, we're just talking about a party within a party. So they're these kind of small, ideologically aligned groups who share close ties. Now important to recognize that they exist at both state and federal level, and they exist in both the liberal and the labor parties.
They tend to be really really important when a party is choosing a new leader, as the factions will create deals with each other. So one faction might say to another faction, if you let one of us become leader, we'll let you become deputy leader. But it's not just at that point that they're important. Factional deals also happen in the course of parliamentary business too, So one faction might offer to compromise on legislation to keep the other
faction happy. I've said the word faction so many times it's losing its meaning if they need something else down the road. Basically, it's just agreeing to disagree so that there is a deal in place. Factions are basically formed around political interests, and that's a good way to think about them.
Okay, so both the Liberal Party and the Labor Party you have factions. Yeah, but today we're talking about the Labor factions because those other factions that have been at the center of all of these headlines over the past week.
Yeah, and the Labor Party's factions are much more clear and i'd say hold a lot more weight than the Liberal parties do. So in the Labor Party there are two main factions. There's the left and the right.
And we have.
Dedicated a whole podcast to explaining the left and the right, and the same is true when we talk about these factions. So the left is like a progressive faction, the right is a more conservative faction. Anthony Albanzi is a member of the Labor Left, and Richard Miles, who's the deputy
Prime Minister, he is part of Labor Right. And so the reason that we have seen so many headlines about factions lately is because after Anthony Alberzi became or was re elected as Prime minister, he was tasked with building his new cabinet and he had to fill some roles that have been made vacant because Bill Shorten, who was the ndis minister, he was from Labor Right, he resigned and stepped back from politics. And Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones,
who was from Labor Left, he also retired. So basically there were these two roles that were open for competition, and the factions were fighting about who those replacements should be.
Can I just ask one question. Those roles are vacant and so they have to fill them. But the whole conversation has been actually about an entire reshuffle, So it's not just about making sure that those two roles are filled, but it's kind of triggered an entire reshuffle, so kind of every position is up for grabs.
Almost yeah, because it's about numbers. It's about how many people do Labor Left have in the cabinet and how many people do Labor Right have and is that basically proportional representation of who should be there. And So what was reported last week and this kind of kicked off the string of in fighting and headlines, is that two cabinet ministers from the right, Attorney General Mark Dreyfus and Science Minister Ed Husick, they'd been removed from the cabinet for factional reasons, Zara.
Before we go on, let's just hear a quick word from the sponsor. Okay, So we've got two people, Ed Husick and Mark Dreyfus. They were in the cabinet in the last term. They have now been dumped from the cabinet. How have they responded to that?
Well, we've heard quite a lot from Ed Husick.
He was on ABC's Insiders, and I think it's fair to say that he didn't really hold back. He called Richard Miles, the Deputy Prime Minister, a quote factional assassin.
Wait, can I just stop you because they are from the same faction, right, they are from the right side of the factions.
Well, I mean, I don't want to complicate this even further. But there are like state factions as well. So Richard Miles is from the Victorian Right and Ed Husick is from the New South Wales Right, not actually from the same faction. They're kind of ideologically aligned, but different groupings of the faction.
Is that a bit confusing?
No?
No, that makes sense. Okay. So Richard Miles has been called a factional assassin by Ed Husick, who lost his position in the cabinet.
Correct, he said to the ABC. I'll just quote directly here.
He said.
The difficult issue here is that we've had bare faced ambition and a deputy prime minister he's talking about Richard Miles there wield a factional club to reshape the ministry. He went on to say, I think people when they look at a deputy prime minister, they expect to see a statesman, not a factional assassin. He also claims that Anthony Albanesi, who like you said, can get involved and make the final call about who should make up the
front bench, who should make up the cabinet. He said that Anthony Alberanzi was asked to intervene in this factional battle, but that he stayed out of it, and ed Husick said that if Albanizi had exercised his authority, he would have been able to create stability and a strong team. And he said, no one would have quibbled about that. But according to ed Husick, Anthony Albanize stepped back and allowed that factional battle to kind of go ahead.
And I remember also reading some very strong words from former Prime Minister Paul keating what.
Does he say?
Yes, he's a man that often has strong words to say, and again he also didn't hold back. He was criticizing the fact that factional warfare was becoming more important than whoever.
Being the right person for the job was.
He said that the demotion, and especially the demotion of ed Husick, he said, only serves to keep up some notional proportional.
Count between factions.
In his letter, he also said that Husick is currently the only Muslim MP in the inner cabinet because ann Ali is in the outer cabinet and they're two different things, and that Mark Dreyfuss is the most senior Jewish MP in Parliament, and so reflecting on those two things, he said that factional moves display poor judgment, unfairness and diminished respect for the contributions of others.
Wow, so many groups within groups, even explaining that inner cabinet, that out of cabinet, so many different things to understand. Do you want to just take us through what were the movements in the cabinet that Prime Mister Anthony Albanezi announced yesterday.
Yeah, so there were a bunch that stayed the same. So people like Richard Miles so we've just spoken about, will remain as Deputy Prime Minister, Jim Chalmers will remain as Treasurer, Penny Wong as Foreign Affairs Minister, Katie Gallaher as Minister for Finance and Women. But then if we're to shift to people and roles that are changing. Tanya Plibisek will become the Minister for Social Services, so she's moving on from the Environment portfolio that she held in
that last term of parliament. Mark Butler will add the NDIS, Aging and Disability portfolios to his existing health portfolio, so he's now going to be covering a whole range of kind of healthcare system there elsewhere. Anika Wells will become the Minister for Communications, so she's now Sport and Communications. Michelle Rowland will become Australia's next Attorney General, replacing as we mentioned, Mark Dreyfus. Now I could go on and on and read out a bunch of names, but I
fear that would probably be boring for our listeners. So absolutely go to our Instagram and you can flick through and see all of those changes. One role, though, that I did think was just I don't know, interesting to mention was that Anthony Albanezi announced a range of new special envoys and one of them caught my ear. He said that he was making Dan Repercoli the new Special
Envoy for men's health. That's never existed before, and I thought that was an interesting one to just pick out of the lot.
Yeah, that is interesting. Now before we go, today is a big day for the Liberal Party. They are electing a new leader after Peter Duttan lost his seat. What do we need to know about factions within the Liberal Party.
Yeah, so, like I said, the Liberal Party is less structured in the way that they run factions. It's more just like general groupings around that ideological scale. So there are the moderates, there are the centrists, and there are the conservatives. To give you an example, Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor is part of the Conservatives, so he's part of
the Conservative faction. Deputy leader Susan Lee, who's also contesting leadership today, she is considered more of a moderate and so there's not necessarily these strict numbers that a number of moderates or a number of Conservatives need to make up the shadow cabinet, but it's certainly something when it comes to who's backing who to keep in minds, like why are certain MPs backing Susan Lee over Angus Taylor, for example. That'll probably because they're part of the moderate faction,
whereas the others are part of the conservative faction. But I do think it's worth noting that a lot of the moderate faction from the Liberal Party has basically been wiped out, have lost over two elections. They've lost so many of their moderates, especially to the Teals, that there aren't many of them left in the Parliament, or at least in the current parliament. So the Liberal Party of today looks quite different from previous generations of what it did.
Look like, as in its more conservative right.
Now there are not as many moderates, so yes, there are more conservatives, but yesterday a moderate was successful in the seat of Bradfield that was called for the Liberal Party. So there are some Tim Wilson is another, but there aren't as many as there used to be, that's for sure.
Well, it sounds like if there's one thing that we can count on, it's politicians arguing with each other.
Politics be politics.
And this certainly seems like a week where that is more true than ever.
Absolutely, Zara, thank you so much for taking us through that.
Thank you, and thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Daily os. If you're wanting to support us, if you could hit follow on Spotify or Apple, it really helps us climb up those charts and ends a signal that people are listening and liking us. We'll be back again this afternoon with your evening headlines, but until then, have a great day. My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bunjelung Kalkutin woman from
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