Labor in damage control as Kaiser quits

Issue 

BY JIM McILROY

BRISBANE — The Queensland Labor government is in deep trouble after one of its leading lights, MP for Woodridge and former state secretary Mike Kaiser, quit the ALP and announced he would not stand in the upcoming state election.

Premier Peter Beattie immediately announced on January 11 that he would conduct a three-week snap tour of the state to "consult" the community about whether he should call an early election.

Beattie said he had promised independent MP Peter Wellington in 1998 that an election would not be called before May 2001, in return for Wellington's support for a minority ALP government. Beattie said conditions had changed, but that he was still reluctant to go back on a promise without widespread consultation.

Kaiser is the third Labor MP forced to resign as a result of the Shepherdson inquiry, conducted by the Criminal Justice Commission, into allegations of electoral rorting and branch stacking in the preselection of ALP candidates.

Kaiser was forced to resign after recognising his signature on a falsified electoral enrolment form, relating to an operation carried out by the Australian Workers Union faction in an unsuccessful attempt to defeat a Socialist Left candidate in the state seat of South Brisbane in 1986.

"I accept the consequences of what I did 15 years ago and as a 22-year-old student", Kaiser said. "I feel stupid."

"He's not just stupid", commented the Democratic Socialists' Coral Wynter, who ran for the South Brisbane seat in the last state election. "Mike Kaiser's 'youthful indiscretion' as a student was part of his apprenticeship as a Labor Party hack."

Wynter said the Shephardson inquiry's glimpse into the ALP's internal operations proved that the party was an "organisational dictatorship" run by ruthless right-wingers like Kaiser, "in which the rights and views of the Labor rank and file and the working people are pushed aside".

She called it proof of "the fundamentally anti-working class character of the so-called Labor Party."

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