It's back to 1950s in Adelaide as ALP Groupers flex muscle

One of the great achievements of the Reformation and the bloody wars that followed,was to remove the Catholic Church from government and replace it with men and women who prized humanism over the doctrinaire, a commonwealth over theocracy and openness over cloistered secrecy.

There are ten Catholic MP's and fellow travellers in the ALP in South Australia who belong to a Catholic right wing faction. They are members of the Catholic controlled Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association (SDA), which is the beating heart of this group of Groupers.

The Catholic right don't always act in concert on conscience votes but use their numbers with other ultra-orthodox members, to vote against legislation on same sex marriage and the decriminalisation of prostitution, to name just two.

Bernie Finnigan was a key member of the faction but he left parliament after being found guilty of obtaining access to child pornography. In his 2006 maiden speech Finnigan said, "I am a servant of Christ and a subject of His reign in history."

The right to practice religion is sacrosanct but in a in a secular society, a politician must act for the common good. Not a Vatican edict. Representative democracy serves the people, not the Pope.

South Australia is decoupling from the Federation on a raft of levels and this political regression is as astounding as it is under reported. One can't reconcile it with the political realities of a modern Australian state.

Don Dunstan wrote in his memoir, Felicia, "the Movement in the 1950s aimed to make the Labor Party the political instrument of Catholic social policy." The ghost of Bob Santamaria's Movement still stalks the Labor Party in South Australia.

With Attorney General John Rau's "crime and punishment" regime in full swing - which is aimed at young people and the poor - it's back to the 1950s in the City of Churches. This is not a liberal, progressive city. It's a frightened city that knows that deflation and rising unemployment and under employment are killing the state. This is fertile ground for ecclesiastical hardliners.

Ten years ago I worked as a senior media adviser to the leader of the Australian Democrats in Melbourne. Senator Lyn Allison visited Adelaide to talk about the RU486 abortion pill legislation. She had sponsored the Bill to removeapproval of RU486 from the Minister for Health and Ageing (Tony Abbott), so it could be listed directly with the Therapeutic Goods Administration.

The abuse didn't come from the anti-abortion groups (which made a change) but Catholic MPs in the state Labor Party and Catholic members of Adelaide's electronic media. Maybe we didn't kiss enough rings. Nonetheless, the Bill was passed on a conscience vote.

In South Australia the power of the dissenting churches and Chartist ideals has crumbled as the cold winds of Vatican orthodoxy blow hard. Yet no story about this incense-swinging faction, which has nested itself like a cuckoo in the state ALP, would be complete without some history on the union that supports them.

The genesis of the SDA's power goes back to the 1950s, when it was feared that communism would take over the Australian union movement.

Lay Catholic leader Bob Santamaria and the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, fought against the "Godless Reds" by forming the right wing Catholic Social Studies Movement, better known as the "Movement". The Movement infiltrated the Shop Assistants Union (now the SDA) and made it their own.

In the great Labor split of 1955, the "Shoppies", as they are called, were expelled from the union movement for supporting the Catholic controlled Democratic Labor Party (DLP). The DLP helped keep Federal Labor out of power for 17 years by directing its preferences to Menzies' Liberals.

In the 1980s, Bob Hawke re-admitted the SDA in to the ACTU. With the support of SDA titan Joe De Bruyn and local power broker Senator Don Farrell, the union soon became the dominant faction in the South Australian ALP. Their socially conservative politics has not changed much since the 1950s.

The sheer number of current or former members of the SDA, who either work for the ALP in South Australia, and who have filtered through the party to senior public service roles, isnepotism on a grand scale.

In a parliamentary speech in 2008, Rob Lucas MLC said, "Their (SDA's) influence on the party (ALP) and the government is cancerous in terms of its arrogance, and they are treating it as a job network for friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, brothers and sisters in terms of jobs within ministerial offices, on boards, on committees, etc."

The SDA controls about 45 per cent of state ALP conference delegates with almost 30,000 members. This dwarfs all other affiliated union memberships in the state. With the weakening of the dominant left wing Australian Manufacturing Workers' Union, the SDA's power is growing.

But change may be at hand. A recent Fairfax Media investigation called "Shopped Out" revealed workers at large fast food and retail outlets across Australia, were being underpaid more than $300 million a year in deals struck by the SDA.

Dozens of agreementswill now be investigated by a parliamentary inquiry, including those with Australia's three biggest employers: Woolworths, McDonald's and Coles. The Shoppies are in deep trouble.What union advocates lower wages for its members?

They have gotten in to bed with the employers, which is an image not condoned by the Church of Rome.

Rank and file SDA members who are predominately young female South Australians, have no say in a union that is against abortion, same sex marriage and euthanasia.

If SDA members refused to renew their SDA union dues, then this Goliath would fall. That would be a mighty leap forward for progressive politics in South Australia.