Nick Butterly: WA Labor fight a Chinese puzzle

In the Coen brothers flick Hail, Caesar!, Hollywood star and sleeper agent Burt Gurney rows a boat out to meet a Russian submarine off a beach in Malibu to defect to his Soviet handlers.

Reading a few gusty headlines last week, it would have been little stretch to picture the Harbin-born WA Labor MLC Pierre Yang making his own rendezvous with a Chinese sub in the dead of night off Cottesloe, slipping away with a satchel of state secrets for Beijing.

One newspaper reported how Yang, who is a member of the Army Reserve, was posted aboard a claimed “Chinese spy ship” off the WA coast as a liaison officer during the hunt for missing Malaysian airliner MH370, leaving open the question of exactly what his true mission may have been.

Yang was already in a pickle for his failure to declare to Parliament his membership of two Perth-based Chinese associations with strident views on issues such as Beijing’s claims over the South China Sea — views diametrically at odds with longstanding Australian foreign policy.

Could it be that WA had its very own Chinese sleeper agent hiding in plain sight in the Legislative Council?

Reds under the bed?

Not likely.

In reality, Yang had become a victim of his own success. The Chinese Australian, who came to Perth at age 15, has worked hard to establish himself in WA Labor, but has put some powerful noses out of joint along the way.

Yang appears to have quickly grasped former prime minister John Howard’s dictum — that politics is governed by the iron laws of arithmetic — and set about an energetic recruiting drive in Perth’s Chinese community to provide a bedrock for his rise inside WA Labor.

Yang joined WA Labor in 2001, three years after arriving in WA. By one report he has now recruited a record 500 party members to WA Labor since being elected to Parliament 18 months ago — meaning he has enlisted about one in 14 members of the party in this State.

Angst over Yang’s branch-stacking boiled over at a WA Labor administrative council meeting last Friday as the powerful body — which is headed by top MPs and union officials — debated the MLC’s push to create a new branch inside the party’s Curtin electoral council.

The new branch was to be called Churchlands, and the members Yang had put forward were drawn almost entirely from Perth’s Chinese community. With a stronger hand in the electoral council, Yang would bring numbers to Labor’s State executive and get a bigger say in preselections for State and Federal seats.

To be clear, there is nothing technically wrong with branch stacking. Any politician worth their salt does it. The trick is to hit upon a cohort of people and rally them to your side.

In the WA Liberal Party there has been much hand-wringing in recent years about the use by some senior figures of evangelical church groups to stack branches.

But Yang’s sin in the eyes of some was the source of his numbers.

As one WA Labor figure told The West Australian, navigating the politics of Perth’s Chinese community can be a tricky business and often more trouble than it is worth. China’s rapid rise and aggressive territorial claims have encouraged a frothy nationalism among young Chinese expatriates.

Efforts to mine the local Chinese community for numbers and cash could capture a few colourful characters along the way.

The Yang story also served to highlight again the subterranean tensions between the Left and Right of the party’s union base.

Yang is a member of the Left’s United Voice, which has traditionally dominated WA Labor. In recent months, a new alliance of Left and Right factions calling itself Progressive Labor has claimed to hold numbers — but only just.

Yang’s numbers might swing the pendulum back in favour of the Left. Labor State president Carolyn Smith — who also comes from the Left — gave a strong defence of Yang, blasting “senior members” of the party for leaking confidential membership information and complaining that attacks on the MLC had a sniff of xenophobia.

Australian politics faces a real threat in the form of Chinese interference in our political system. Look at the recent cases of dumped Labor MP Sam Dastyari, or ASIO’s repeated warnings to political parties about foreign donations.

And Yang’s case again highlights the embarrassing state of WA’s political disclosure laws. Stone age rules mean the public won’t get to see what Chinese organisations Yang has joined or quit for another year.

But we should be careful about seeing the hand of Beijing where it does not exist.