I think there’s something you’re not telling us, Mr. Iemma
Mar 3rd, 2008 by Rebecca
Over the last couple of weeks, there’s been a pretty messy corruption scandal developing in New South Wales surrounding the activities of a couple of corrupt local bureaucrats, a few developers, and about half the Wollongong council - all of whom have serious political connections within the Labor Party. There’s an important angle on this that’s been missed entirely by the mainstream press, though - were it not for an accident of fate, Joe Scimone, the man most implicated in this whole mess - would currently be a Labor member of the House of Representatives, and Kevin Rudd’s nascent government would be reeling under the strain of this scandal.
Let me take you back to 2002, and the by-election for the federal seat of Cunningham, based on Wollongong. To cut a long story short, the local branches were so badly stacked out by all sides that the right faction-dominated Labor state executive decided to impose their own candidate in the traditionally left-dominated electorate. The man the state executive were so keen to get into parliament was one Joe Scimone, then an obscure bureaucrat working for the Wollongong council. The whole preselection mess was in the national papers for weeks, and then federal Labor leader Simon Crean took a serious hit in the polls as Labor ate itself.
It sparked a massive local backlash, as the local branches of the union movement decided to support the Greens in the by-election, with the president of the local Trades Hall running as an independent and endorsing the Greens. In a decision for which I’m sure Kevin Rudd is thanking his lucky stars, the state executive got scared at the eleventh hour and dropped Scimone, installing instead Sharon Bird as the candidate - apparently figuring that a woman and a recent defector from the left would be easier to sell than a walking archetype of a Labor “mate”. Bird went on to lose the by-election to the Greens, before winning it in 2004, and she’s still in parliament today.
Every Labor MP in New South Wales has been trying to put great distance between them and Scimone over the last few weeks. It seems as if, so far, they’ve succeeded - the Independent Commission Against Corruption has decided not to pursue state Ports Minister and Labor powerbroker Joe Tripodi (who appointed the thoroughly unqualified Scimone to a $200,000 to a prominent government job) and Wollongong state MP Noreen Hay (who had her campaign office at the last election paid for by one of the developers who is up to his neck in this, and had repeatedly lobbied on his behalf). It’s quite possible that, as now seems likely, the state government will sack the Wollongong council tomorrow and try and declare that it ends there.
It shouldn’t. Tripodi and the rest of the right faction mates who control the New South Wales Labor executive should be explaining exactly why they went out on such a limb four and a half years ago, and nearly put a thoroughly corrupt hack into the House of Representatives. More than that, it raises serious questions about exactly how far the influence of Scimone and his mates down in Wollongong extends, both in state and federal parliament. I think there’s a lot more to this than Iemma, Tripodi, Hay, and more than a few powerbrokers in the New South Wales Right are letting on. This has the potential to well and truly trump the Metherell affair (which brought down the Greiner government in the early 90s) if actually investigated. ICAC was responsible for forcing Nick Greiner’s resignation; there is no excuse for pulling their punches this time. Too many people have too many questions still to answer to let this drop.