Minns earns ire from Labor branches over candidate ‘captain’s calls’

The Minns government is facing an angry backlash from senior branch members in western Sydney after the premier personally announced a string of candidates in winnable or Labor-held seats without preselection or sign-off by the party’s national executive.

In the past week, Premier Chris Minns and Deputy Premier Prue Car have announced Labor candidates for the target seats of Holsworthy and Winston Hills, and the must-hold electorates of Prospect, Wallsend and Wyong.

The selections have angered some local branch members, after Minns announced the candidates without a rank-and-file vote and, in at least one case, before nominations had opened.

In the north-west Sydney seat of Winston Hills, where Minns unveiled former police union official Pat Gooley as the party’s candidate last week, branch members only knew about the announcement the night before, when some were asked to attend a press conference.

Multiple senior branch members from Winston Hills, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters, said the decision to install a candidate over the top of the local rank-and-file was particularly galling because of the high proportion of South Asian members in the branches.

The government has used careful wording in announcing candidates. When upper house MP Emily Suvaal was unveiled on Tuesday as Labor’s candidate in the crucial seat of Wallsend, a statement from the government said Minns was “proud to announce that he has asked” her to nominate.

The government used the same wording to announce Liverpool councillor Zeli Munjiza for the marginal Liberal-held seat of Holsworthy, local school principal Tracey Ellen in Wyong and Gooley in Winston Hills.

Those candidates have not been endorsed. As well as bypassing a local preselection, Minns made the announcements before the national executive signed off. In Winston Hills, the notice for nominations only appeared in members’ inboxes after Gooley had been announced by Minns.

The process has outraged local members who had hoped to run for the seat. The preselection was expected to be strongly contested with Hills Shire councillor Immanuel Selvaraj, former candidate and Parramatta councillor Sameer Pandey, and a senior member of Minns’ own staff, Sachin Saxena, all considering nominating.

Selvaraj, the secretary of the Hills branch, still plans to nominate, despite Gooley’s selection being a fait accompli. He declined to comment. However, in a post on social media he said he was “surprised to see a candidate for Winston Hills confirmed online on 5 November, a day before the call for nominations reached members on 6 November”.

“So I ask, respectfully: is this preselection genuinely open? And will members with real credentials, who have contested elections for our party, get a fair go to become the candidate?”

Pandey, a Parramatta councillor and the city’s first lord mayor of Indian descent, who made the seat by a marginal 1.8 per cent in 2023, expressed frustration with the way Gooley’s nomination was handled.

“I understand the announcement preceded the opening of the formal nomination process,” he said in a statement. “I believe preselection processes are strongest when they are open, transparent and allow eligible candidates to be fairly considered before an announcement is made.”

The anger in Winston Hills is acute because of the decision to bypass a South Asian candidate in an electorate where Labor membership is dominated by the subcontinental diaspora.

Six of the seven largest Labor branches in the electorate are led by a South Asian secretary, and in the past two elections the party has run South Asian candidates – Durga Owen in the then-seat of Seven Hills in 2019, and Pandey in 2023 – who have won swings against the Liberal incumbent.

“To put it bluntly, the ALP is criticising One Nation for talking about a monoculture, but it’s just for outside presentation because internally, they’re doing the same thing,” said one senior branch member, speaking on the condition of anonymity to protect their position.

Senior government and Sussex Street sources speaking on condition of anonymity defended the decision to bypass preselections in some seats, pointing, for example, to Gooley’s credentials as a senior police officer and secretary of the NSW Police Association. In Winston Hills, where the right, hard and soft-left factions would all have contested a rank-and-file ballot, the party wanted to avoid a messy preselection.

Those same sources defended the government’s record on the diversity of its candidates, and pushed back on claims the South Asian candidates had been overlooked. They pointed to Treasurer Daniel Mookhey, newly elected upper house MP Bernard Govind and Liverpool MP Charishma Kaliyanda as MPs with South Asian heritage.

The decision to bypass preselections in a clutch of seats has left some Labor MPs confused about the government’s motives. In Holsworthy, for example, Munjiza would easily have won a rank-and-file member vote. “We seem to be getting these captain’s calls for no reason other than just the brute force of the premier,” one MP said.

The cross-factional deal to install Suvaal, a Cessnock-based upper house MP, into the ultra-safe Hunter seat of Wallsend also has the potential to cause internal disquiet.

Suvaal was tapped to move into Wallsend after veteran MP Sonia Hornery announced her retirement last week. While it is now Labor’s safest seat, on a 31.8 per cent margin, the rise of One Nation and the outside possibility of a run by Newcastle Lord Mayor Gavin Morris has put the party on shakier ground.

Suvaal is well liked and has impressed senior figures in the caucus during her first term in parliament. But she is based in neighbouring Cessnock and, as a member of Labor’s right faction, would have struggled to win a rank-and-file vote in left-dominated Wallsend.

If she holds the seat, it would be likely to pave the way for NSW Labor assistant general secretary George Simon to fill her upper house spot. Simon declined to comment. That could cause disquiet among some MPs because Hornery is aligned to the soft, or “Ferguson”, left and Simon is a member of the hard left.

It means the soft left – which has been marginalised during the Minns government – would lose a seat in parliament.

At a press conference announcing her candidacy on Tuesday, Suvaal was surrounded by all of Labor’s Hunter MPs except Hornery.

The popular outgoing Wallsend MP’s endorsement is seen as critical for Labor to hold the seat. Suvaal said she had spoken to Hornery “a number of times over the last week, and I feel very fortunate to have her endorsement as a Labor candidate”.

Asked on Tuesday whether she was endorsing Suvaal, Hornery said: “I’ll certainly be working with her to help her get elected. I’ll be giving her opportunities. When I attend functions, I’ll invite her along [and] when I host street stalls as I normally do, Emily will be there as well.”

Asked again whether she was endorsing Suvaal, Hornery said: “I will be supporting and helping Emily to make sure she and Labor is elected.”

Declining to agree that she was endorsing her was “a difference of terminology”, she said. “There is no distinction.”

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