Thursday, 24 September 2026

Adem SOMYUREK (Northern Metropolitan) incorporated the following:

Even though almost 24 years have gone by, it feels like yesterday that I stood where Mr Berger now sits and rose to give my first speech in this place.

I remember the excitement, the enthusiasm, the expectation and the commitment I felt to make some contribution towards a fairer society.

I did not intend to be here for a very long time.

Of course I wanted to become a minister. I have always believed that if you do not strive to reach the top of your chosen profession, you will not perform your job 100%.

But I certainly did not envisage spending two and a half decades in Parliament.

I was 35 when I was elected and always expected there would be another career after politics. My plan was to serve a term as a minister, make the contribution I came here to make, and then move on. I thought I would be out of this place by 45.

Yet here I am, about to turn 59 in a couple of weeks.

In politics, especially in major political parties, you generally do not speculate about retirement, even privately with trusted colleagues. The moment people think you may be leaving, attention starts shifting to the vacancy. Potential successors begin positioning themselves, alliances start forming and, before long, you can create a momentum towards your departure that you never intended.

In hindsight, perhaps I should have broken that rule and publicly announced my retirement plan from the beginning. As I accumulated more influence over the years, I also accumulated more political enemies. Had they known I intended to leave eventually, some of them might have been prepared to simply wait patiently for me to disappear, rather than getting their hands dirty with the various political assassination attempts I had to endure along the way.

Unfortunately, I kept the plan to myself.

Life rarely follows the script you write for it.

President, reading my inaugural speech again for this occasion took me straight back to that period. I could still feel the excitement and optimism in it, along with the confidence of a younger man who probably thought he understood more than he actually did.

My political philosophy has not changed fundamentally over the years, but experience has certainly tested it, refined it and, in many respects, reinforced it.

I have always seen myself as more of a social democrat than a democratic socialist. I believe that distinction goes to the heart of the difference between the Right and the Left in the ALP.

On the economy, I believe in capitalism and the market economy, but that does not mean government should stand back and do nothing. Protection of workers’ rights and a strong welfare system are imperative in any civilised society. Government also has a role where there is market failure and where strategic industries require support.

On equality, I have always been on the side of equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. But I have also acknowledged that the idea of a level playing field is more complicated than putting two people from very different socio-economic backgrounds on the same starting line and declaring the contest fair. That is why I believe in strong anti-discrimination laws, good public education, universal health care and investment in the things that allow people to improve their circumstances.

I have always been more cautious about affirmative action and quotas where they substitute equality of outcome for merit. Part of my reasoning is that I believe people should be encouraged to play to their strengths. Effort, education and ability should count for something, and organisations generally work best when people are selected for what they can actually contribute.

Politically, that is probably why I found my home in the Labor Right. I was never particularly interested in ideological purity. I believed the Labor Party had to win elections, and that meant occupying the centre and then using government to improve the lives of working people.

That philosophy also explains why serving in the Andrews government was, at times, a challenge for me. Andrews increasingly sought to make Victoria a laboratory for a post-materialist social agenda, driven heavily by the politics of the inner city and the Left.

President, over the course of my long parliamentary career I served on eight parliamentary committees, including as chair and deputy chair of the Electoral Matters Committee, and I held responsibility for nine different portfolio areas across the shadow ministry and government.

I am not going to go through all of them.

But there are a few that were particularly important to me and helped shape the sort of parliamentarian and, eventually, minister I became.

My early work on the Outer Suburban and Interface Services and Development Committee took me straight back to many of the issues I had spoken about in my inaugural speech: how we build new suburbs, whether infrastructure keeps pace with population growth and, more importantly, how we build communities rather than simply houses.

I was lucky enough to also serve on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee in my first term. On PAEC I came to fully appreciate just how large and complex modern government really is. Looking closely at expenditure, departments and the machinery of government made me realise how much there was to learn.

Motivated by my experience on PAEC and having always been eager to improve myself and become better at what I do, I went on to study and complete a Master of Public Policy and Governance. That study and qualification held me in good stead. It made me a better and more astute parliamentarian and, later, a better shadow minister and minister.

The Electoral Matters Committee became another major part of my parliamentary life. I had the privilege of being its inaugural chair and later its deputy chair. We dealt with the machinery of democracy itself: elections, political donations and disclosure, voter participation, informal voting and electoral administration.

The political donations inquiry in particular was important work. We were looking at money, influence and transparency in politics well before those issues became as prominent as they are today.

I enjoyed that work enormously, and I was proud when we eventually introduced legislation that brought an end to the donations arms race.

I never liked political fundraising. I hated being put in a room and expected to talk to donors. Most donors are business people, and business people generally think about return on investment. That always made me uncomfortable, and reinforced my belief that there should be as much distance as possible between money and political decision-making.

President, beyond the committee system, another important part of my parliamentary career was my time in the shadow ministry from 2010 to 2014.I was essentially the shadow minister for Industry, with my title being Shadow Minister for manufacturing, services, procurement and technology.

It was a tumultuous time to take on the manufacturing portfolio, but I learnt a great deal from it.

Victoria was being hit hard by the two-speed economy created by the resources boom. The Australian dollar went as high as $1.11 against the US dollar in 2011, which was devastating for a manufacturing state like Victoria. Exporters were becoming less competitive and there were manufacturing job losses almost every day.

The prevailing economic orthodoxy of the Coalition at the time was that the market should simply be allowed to adjust and that industries which could not compete should disappear. I never accepted that in such a simplistic form. I agreed that economies have to play to their strengths and that Australian manufacturing could not compete indefinitely on price against low-cost countries. We had to compete on value, innovation, technology and higher-end manufacturing. But that did not mean standing back and watching strategically important industries disappear while we waited for the exchange rate.

The Victorian Coalition government was too driven by neo liberal ideological dogma to take action; they sat back and watched as very important industries disappeared.

The auto industry became the clearest example for me. Holden was telling me that even a public commitment such as a payroll-tax holiday would help them demonstrate to their head office that Australia and Victoria actually wanted them here. These companies were being courted by governments all over the world. Instead, at the federal level, Joe Hockey effectively dared the industry to leave. Eventually it did.

I thought that was a major policy mistake. When our objective should have been to move Victorian manufacturing further up the value chain, allowing one of our major high-technology manufacturing industries to disappear made very little sense to me.

That experience reinforced my view that the answer was not to retreat from manufacturing, but to become more strategic about the kind of manufacturing Victoria could sustain and grow.

Victoria already had some real strengths. We had strong universities, good research and innovation infrastructure and a skilled workforce. The Bracks and Brumby governments had invested heavily in building that capability. My view was that we had to keep building on those strengths and move Victorian industry further up the value chain rather than trying to compete on labour costs.

Years later, when we were in government, I was very critical of Andrews internally about what I saw as his lopsided approach to economic and jobs strategy. He was singularly focused on infrastructure and construction as the engine of jobs and investment. In that sense he became something of a one-trick pony: build more infrastructure, create more construction jobs.

My concern was that not enough attention was being paid to some of the less visible fundamentals that determine whether a high-cost economy like Victoria remains competitive over the long term: innovation, research, commercialization, skills and maintaining strategic industry capability. You cannot build a competitive economy on construction activity alone.

Being a shadow minister was also a very different job from being a minister. There was virtually no support. Apart from your electorate office, you were largely on your own. I spent most days on the road meeting manufacturers, unions, industry groups and other stakeholders, trying to understand what was happening on the ground and what government could realistically do about it.

Looking back, that period probably did more than any other to shape the way I thought about the role of government in the economy. It also left me with a strong view that the resources available to shadow ministers need to be bolstered. In a modern government, proper policy development and effective scrutiny of the executive are too important to leave to shadow ministers operating as one-person bands, running from meeting to meeting and trying to do everything themselves.

That experience proved invaluable when, eventually, I had the opportunity to put some of those ideas into practice in government. I held responsibility for Small Business, Innovation and Trade, and later Local Government and Small Business.

I did not come into the Local Government portfolio with the background that some MPs had from years in councils, but I took a real liking to it. My study in governance held me in good stead, as did my work on the Electoral Matters Committee, particularly our work on reforming voting systems for council elections. My experience in the shadow ministry had also taught me that some of the most valuable knowledge is gathered out in the field rather than from briefing papers.

In Local Government, I had the privilege of taking through Parliament the biggest overhaul of Victoria’s local government laws in more than 30 years, strengthening democratic accountability and service delivery across all 79 councils. I became very absorbed in the portfolio and made a point of visiting all 17 of the small rural councils facing sustainability problems. I wanted to hear directly from the people dealing with those pressures on the ground, because that was where the real understanding came from.

It also reminded me that some of the most important work in government is not particularly glamorous; it is simply making institutions work better for the communities they serve.

That belief in the importance of functioning institutions and strong communities was tested almost immediately. During the Black Summer bushfires, as Local Government and Small Business Minister, I saw at close range how badly whole communities had been hit. People’s homes, businesses and livelihoods had been destroyed.

There were moments during the bushfires when I felt the limits of government very acutely. We could provide assistance, coordinate services and support recovery, but when people had lost their homes, their businesses and, in some cases, almost everything they had built, there were limits to what government could actually put right.

Within weeks, however, COVID confronted us with the opposite reality: not the limits of government power, but its extraordinary reach. We were about to witness, first-hand, just how much control a democratic government could exercise over people’s daily lives in the name of protecting public health.

My concern, particularly as the crisis wore on, was how concentrated decision-making became.

The fact that Andrews remains such a polarising figure years later does not particularly surprise me. It shows that Victorians did not regard having their liberties withdrawn as a trivial matter.

For me, the lasting lesson was that extraordinary circumstances should never become an excuse for weakening the institutions that restrain executive power. If anything, Cabinet government, parliamentary scrutiny, proper debate and accountability become more important when government is exercising powers that reach so deeply into people’s lives. Once those safeguards are diminished, public trust is very difficult to restore.

President, by then, I was already thinking seriously about life after Parliament. But before I conclude, there is another part of my political life that, for the historical record, I cannot simply pass over. I have moved on, but it was too central to the circumstances in which my career changed so dramatically to leave unaddressed.

The Labor Party is a very Byzantine organisation, with its factions and sub-factions, elaborate branch structures, governing committees and endless internal elections. Perhaps there was something in my Turkish heritage that made the Byzantine complexity irresistible.

By Sunday afternoon, 14 June 2020, I had well and truly conquered the Byzantine organisation that is the ALP. I was governing the Victorian branch through an alliance that controlled about two-thirds of the party. I was also one of Victoria’s two Right representatives on the ALP National Executive, one of the party’s principal national governing bodies. Taken together, that gave me considerable influence across the national party.

That was a very unusual position for a member of a state upper house to be in. No self-respecting federal MP should really have to put up with that sort of arrangement. It would be a bit like us in this place accepting that a local councillor had significant influence over what happened here.

But it was not a position I had spent years longing for. It was really the by-product of something else. Since around 2008, the Victorian Right had been fragmented and at the mercy of the Socialist Left. My objective was to put the Right back together so the Socialist Left could be reined in and the party brought back towards the centre.

Because I was the architect of that arrangement, I also became responsible for maintaining it. That meant acting as the go-between for union leaders and sub-factional leaders who, in some cases, had barely been talking to each other for a decade. When problems arose between them, they came to me. I negotiated between them, settled disputes and kept the arrangement together.

That is how the power accumulated. It was not really the object of the exercise. It was the consequence of being the person holding together a structure that otherwise had a tendency to fall apart.

By 9.30pm that Sunday night, my objective of serving one term as a minister before leaving Parliament was over. My victory lap had been cut very short.

The program’s narrative was that I had become the all-powerful faceless man of the Labor Party, had taken control of the Victorian branch and accumulated an unprecedented level of factional power. The secret recordings were used to give that story colour and movement.

It is worth remembering that this was, fundamentally, an internal Labor Party matter. It is the sort of issue that would normally struggle to interest anyone outside the political beltway. Yet I was featured for an hour on prime-time national commercial television. In one sense, that fact itself says something about the level of influence I had accumulated and the interests that had lined up against me. I do not say that as a boast. Much of that influence had come reluctantly and almost accidentally, as a consequence of holding together the factional structure I had helped build.

The problem with the program’s account was not that I had influence. Clearly I did.

The distortion was in how I had come to possess it and why. It portrayed me through what I regard as an almost Orientalist caricature: the ethnic branch stacker who had acquired enormous power by flooding Labor branches with hordes of ethnic members supposedly devoid of agency and simply under my control.

I reject that characterisation, and I reject the proposition that branch stacking was the source of my political influence.

That distinction matters to me, particularly as I look back on my career tonight. One version is simply about accumulating power for its own sake. The other is about trying to influence the direction of a political party I had devoted much of my adult life to – a party that was in government and making decisions that affected the lives of millions of Victorians. I had strong views about public policy and about the direction I believed Labor should take. Whatever mistakes I made along the way, power was never the ultimate objective. It was a means of trying to shape that direction.

Those recordings had been made by Anthony Byrne MHR and his staffer Alexander Stalder, two people I had regarded as among my closest political friends for more than two decades. By then, they had been secretly recording me for about a year. Byrne was also an important source for and a friend of the journalist who ultimately produced the story. The recordings continued during a short-lived branch recruiting war in the south-east, a return to the bad old days after years of factional peace in the region. In the aftermath, I came to suspect that the conflict itself had been deliberately manufactured, to draw me into situations that would produce more damaging material.

The irony was that Byrne himself was the branch stacker. Within only a few years of arriving in Victoria from South Australia, he secured preselection for Holt, then one of the safest Labor seats in the country, through the very branch-organising practices that later became central to the story told about me.

I think the elephant in the room has now been properly acknowledged. I will leave the fuller history to the book and return to my parliamentary career.

President, given the colourful nature of my political career, I could probably finish tonight by belting out a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s My Way. I will resist the temptation. But I will borrow one line from that wonderful song: “Regrets, I’ve had a few.”

And I have.

Once I had reached the ministry, I should have walked away from factional politics altogether. I did not owe my ministerial position to factional activism. But my demise was entirely due to my factional activism. That is probably the clearest lesson I can draw from my own career.

By then I had convinced myself that, because I had built the arrangement, I had a responsibility to keep holding it together. In hindsight, I should have recognised that my responsibility as a minister to the public mattered far more, and simply walked away.

Another regret is that I did not do more when it became obvious that Anthony Byrne was struggling. I saw the anger, the resentment, the constant sense that other people were responsible for his disappointments, and I heard things from him that should have troubled me more than they did. Rather than confront it or encourage him to get help, I rationalised it as Anthony being Anthony.

I also made the mistake of assuming that because we had been close for decades, and because I had stood by him politically, whatever resentment he carried would never be directed at me. That was a serious error of judgement.

After 15 June 2020 I saw Parliament from a very different perspective. For most of my career I had been inside one of the most disciplined political parties in the democratic world. I understood party discipline because, at different times, I helped enforce it. Once I was outside that structure, I came to appreciate much more clearly why this chamber matters.

The upper house is not supposed to be a smaller version of the lower house. Its job is scrutiny. That is why proportional representation matters. If a government controls both houses and every parliamentary committee, Parliament can too easily become an extension of the executive.

It is important to understand, though, that this great institution has its limitations. Many of its accountability mechanisms were designed at a time when disciplined political parties, as we know them today, did not exist. That creates a huge accountability gap when the executive controls a disciplined parliamentary majority. For all its imperfections, Parliament is still the least-worst system we have for holding executive government to account.

I have had a few political victories over the years. Some were hard fought, some were unexpected, and some probably meant more to other people than they did to me.

But the 2022 election remains one of the moments I am proudest of.

Almost everybody expected I would be gone at the 2022 election and never heard from again. When I announced that I was going to run, many people thought I was delusional. But I had crunched the numbers carefully and believed I could win.

What mattered to me was not the triumphalism of winning. It was that I had been returned directly by the electorate and had the opportunity to complete my parliamentary career on my own terms.

Looking back, I think what mattered most was not proving other people wrong, but proving to myself that my political career did not have to end in the way others had chosen for me.

President, I also want to acknowledge the people of the electorates and regions I have represented over almost twenty-four years. I came into Parliament from the outer suburbs and never stopped believing that the everyday concerns of working families; roads, schools, hospitals, jobs, housing, community safety and public services; deserve serious political attention.

I thank the many people who have worked with me in electorate, parliamentary, shadow ministerial and ministerial offices. Politics is a team activity, and I have been fortunate to work with many very capable people.

I also thank the staff of this Parliament who have supported members and kept this institution functioning with great professionalism over the years. I have spent the greater part of my working life in this building, and I have always appreciated the professionalism with which this place is run.

Finally, my family. Politics is not a normal occupation for a family. They live with the campaigns, the media, the constant demands and, occasionally, strangers camped outside the family home.

And that leads me to what is probably my biggest personal regret from my time in politics. I did not switch off enough. I took calls late into the night and across weekends when I should have been more present and more attentive to my children as they were growing up. At the time, there was always another issue, another call, another political problem that seemed urgent. Looking back, very few of them were as important as the time I was giving up with my family.

So if I can offer one piece of advice to members with young families, it is this: your work is important, but your family comes first. Children grow up very quickly, and the time you miss does not come back. There are times when you should simply switch the phone off.

My family has had to absorb the consequences of choices I made in pursuing a political career. They did not sign up for all of it, but they lived through it with me, and I owe them more than can properly be expressed in a valedictory speech.

I spoke in my inaugural speech about my parents coming to this country without English, working in factories and the sacrifices they made to give their children a better life. I will not repeat that story tonight.

But I do want to say this. When I became a minister of the Crown, I knew how much that moment meant to them. For me, it was bigger than the title itself. The son of migrant factory workers from a housing commission estate had become a minister in the government of the country they had chosen to make their home.

Whatever else happened later, no one can take that moment away from them or from me.

When I first stood here in 2003, I was 35 years old and thought I would be gone by 45. I am now almost 59. The journey was longer, rougher and considerably less predictable than I imagined.

There were successes and mistakes, victories and defeats, extraordinary friendships and some spectacular betrayals. I have seen politics from almost every angle, and I do not leave bitter about it.

More importantly, my years here have tested and refined the beliefs I brought with me, but in the end they have largely reinforced them: the importance of work, education, social mobility, strong public services, protecting working people and equality of opportunity.

President, I joined the Labor Party 30 years ago because I identified strongly with the values of the Labor Right. I came into this place as a Labor member carrying those values with me. I now leave with only one of those two things intact. I leave without membership of the Labor Party, but I leave with the values of the Labor Right.

My advice to members of this place who have been socialised into making their political party part of their identity is to think carefully about that.

Political parties are vehicles for values and ideas. They exist to translate those values into public policy and government action. They are not ends in themselves. They are not football teams, and they are certainly not your family, despite what you are sometimes told to keep you in line.

If a party no longer represents your values, and you have lost hope of pulling it back from a direction that is increasingly alien to those values, then it is perfectly legitimate to ask yourself why you remain so staunchly loyal to it.

That is where I eventually arrived with the Labor Party. I did not leave the values that brought me into Labor. In my view, the Labor Party moved away from them.

President, I thank the House for its indulgence tonight, and I thank the people of Victoria for the extraordinary privilege of allowing me to serve them for twenty-four years.