Branch stacking is the practice of recruiting or enrolling people into a political party branch to manipulate internal party decisions, particularly candidate preselection.
When Democracy Is Manipulated From Within.
Political parties are supposed to be democratic organisations. Members join, attend meetings, debate policies and vote for candidates. But what happens when people join a party not because they believe in its policies, but because their numbers can be used to control who gets preselected, who holds internal positions and, ultimately, who gets elected to Parliament?
This is the world of branch stacking.
Branch stacking is the organised recruitment of people into a political party to influence internal votes. In its most extreme form, people may be recruited in large numbers, membership fees may be paid on their behalf, and members may be directed or encouraged to vote as a bloc. The objective is not necessarily to win an election against another party. It is to win the internal contest before the public gets to vote.
In other words, the battle for political power can sometimes begin long before election day.
Australia has experienced branch-stacking controversies across the major political parties. The most prominent recent example was the 2020 scandal surrounding the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party and then minister Adem Somyurek. The allegations led to Somyurek’s resignation from cabinet and expulsion from the Labor Party. The Victorian branch was placed under administration, and former premier Steve Bracks and former federal minister Jenny Macklin were brought in to oversee reforms. Their review described branch stacking as a long-running problem that had repeatedly undermined the integrity and public standing of the party. Among the proposed reforms were measures to ensure that members genuinely consented to joining and paid their own membership fees.
The controversy did not stop with Labor. In the same year, allegations emerged concerning branch-stacking activities within the Victorian Liberal Party, involving conservative powerbroker Marcus Bastiaan and links to the offices of federal Liberal MPs. The allegations included claims about recruiting members to influence internal party power struggles. The individuals named disputed wrongdoing, and subsequent reporting noted that some allegations and reporting were later retracted or clarified. Nevertheless, the controversy demonstrated that the temptation to manipulate internal party democracy is not confined to one side of politics.
A further controversy emerged in New South Wales in 2022, when reports alleged that more than 100 people had been signed up as Liberal Party members using fake email addresses and other contact details. The allegations raised questions about whether party membership systems could be manipulated to influence internal votes, including preselection contests. The reports also highlighted a fundamental weakness in party democracy: when membership numbers determine political power, controlling the membership can become almost as important as winning an election.
Branch stacking is more than an internal party dispute. It raises a profound democratic question.
If a political party chooses the candidates who will appear on the ballot paper, and a small faction can manipulate the process by controlling party membership, then the public may ultimately be choosing between candidates whose selection was decided by a relatively small group of people.
The voters still get to vote.
But they may be voting on a menu they did not choose.
That is why branch stacking deserves a place in a Museum of Political Scandals. It is a reminder that democracy is not only about what happens on election day. Democracy also depends on what happens inside political parties, behind closed doors, in factional meetings and in the seemingly ordinary process of selecting candidates.
The scandal is not simply that people may have joined a political party dishonestly.
The deeper scandal is the possibility that the machinery of democracy can be captured by people who understand the rules well enough to manipulate them.
And perhaps the most important question for visitors to the Museum is this:
If you discovered that your political party could be controlled by recruiting enough people to vote as a bloc, would you try to change the rules or would you play the game?
Because political scandals are rarely about uniquely bad people.
Often, they are about ordinary people discovering that the system rewards behaviour that everyone privately knows is wrong.
All individuals named have denied wrongdoing, and no court has found them to have acted unlawfully.
Note: During one of the Australian Guardian’s very worthy annual competition to name Australia’s most favourite bird – the Cockatoos were accused of branch stacking.