Some time in the early 2000s an odd parcel arrived in the post at my electoral office.The accompanying letter alleged that the contents of the envelope included some Labor branch lists that highlighted ethnic branch stacking in Victoria. It went on to get stuck into a Victorian female Labor member with the unattractive assertion that she had “got there on her back”.
Apparently this was a gift for which I should have been grateful. I didn’t see it that way. It seemed to be some disgruntled Labor sleaze who couldn’t handle losing to a woman just trying to get me to do their dirty work. The parcel just went on the shelf in case one day we had the time to make ethnic branch stacking an issue. In a later office move it went to the dump. Every now and then I reflect on whether I was an idiot and passed up a golden opportunity. I’ll never really know.
Ethnic branch stacking is an old Labor game. It’s very unattractive. Under the guise of actually caring about newcomers you get an organiser to sign a whole bunch of people up to a branch. The new members may not realise they’ve been signed up, someone else pays the membership. Or they may well come from a country where keeping sweet with the authorities is a lifeline so they assume the same system operates here.
Some clearly are given the idea that being in the branch will make the local member work harder to get a family reunion visa through. That’s cheap, nasty politics at its ugliest.
Without great English (not a requirement under humanitarian visas nor for secondary applicants) these people are unlikely to head along to branch meetings and cause any bother by actually demanding a say. They get nothing, but the branch stacker gets bigger numbers to in turn increase their power and control.
It’s not limited to Victoria by any means. NSW Labor has made an art form out of it. It’s worth highlighting for two reasons. First, there’s something worse than moral bankruptcy in signing up swaths of new migrants who either don’t know they’re being used in this way or worse are misled into thinking that it gives them a better chance of bringing the rest of their family here.
Read the full article by Amanda Vanstone at The Age.