ICAC heard that staffer Kenrick Cheah kept it in the Aldi bag and took it home. (Did he get the bus?) He says Kaila Murnain, who was then assistant general secretary, warned him “to be careful”. Quite right – there are lots of crooks around. Illustration: Reg Lynch Credit: The honest Germans at Aldi might have some objections, but I think the sturdy, non-flash Aldi bag mocked by many on social media was very on-brand for the Labor Party. It is the party of working people, the party of the battler. Who does it represent, if not the ordinary workers who lug home heavy shopping bags from discount supermarkets – rushing from work to pick up groceries, battling commuter crowds to scrape home in time to collect the kids from school, then, without pause, beginning their evening shift, of bath and dinner, before collapsing into bed to sleep an honest sleep.

Brand Labor? The common-variety Aldi shopping bag in action. Credit:Viki Lascaris And they say the Labor Party has lost its way. The NSW Labor right, of course, is a breed of its own – numbers men, hard men (and women), head-kickers. It's a whatever-it-takes tribe with a ruthless reputation that it deliberately stokes. It has installed prime ministers and pulled them down. It has stacked branches for years. Its alumni have had more mentions at ICAC than they’ve had dumpling dinners. It is true that both major parties took buckets of money (perhaps literally, we can no longer rule that out) from Huang, whose influence, according to the security agencies who eventually barred his application for citizenship, was suspected to be wielded at least in part on behalf of the Chinese state.

The Liberal Party got plenty of dough from him too – slightly more than Labor. Both have taken over a million dollars from him. Neither side of politics has stayed dry from the tsunami of cash loosed by wealthy Chinese businessmen, some of whom wish to interfere inappropriately in our democracy. Loading Yet no entity seems to have been more permeable than NSW Labor, dominated by its right wing. Not only did they take the cash bags but, in the case of former NSW general-secretary-turned-senator Sam Dastyari, tipped off their wealthy benefactors that the intelligence agencies were spying on them. There was, of course, another option – saying no. West Australian MP Andrew Hastie, who is very hawkish on Chinese influence, realised last year he had received a $10,000 donation from Huang, delivered by Tony Abbott. He posted the cheque back to the billionaire.

What is astounding about the revelations heard by ICAC this week is how completely out of the question that would have been within the halls of Sussex Street. Loading Kaila Murnain, who was the NSW general secretary up until her ICAC appearance this week, gave evidence that, in September 2016, she took a phone call from state upper house MP Ernest Wong. He wanted to meet, and when they did, out the back of Parliament House, he seemed distressed, sweating and shaking. He had said the “true source” of the $100,000 donation was (banned donor) Huang, not the 12 punters that the Labor Party had told the Australian Electoral Commission were the source of the money. Some among this supposedly generous dozen were lowly waiters and waitresses. This revelation made Murnain very distressed, according to her evidence. She called her friend Dastyari, upset, for advice. She cried again in the witness box at ICAC.

Sweating, shaking, crying: the fact that so much emotional distress was caused by the untoward donation is probably a good sign that the moral compasses involved still knew their north. Loading But that didn’t mean the compass needle was followed. Murnain kept quiet about the source of the $100,000 donation. She admitted this week she misled the AEC over the donation, although not intentionally, she claims. According to her evidence, the Labor Party’s lawyer told her to keep quiet and forget her conversation with Wong. The lawyer denies that and he is set to give evidence this week. The culture she was steeped in, and part of, would not allow for an admission of that sort, a mea culpa. Within NSW Labor, there was no way to send the cheque back. It is said that in the wake of its devastating federal election result, Labor must use its time in the wilderness to redefine for voters what it stands for.

It doesn't take a strategic genius to declare that the “brand” Labor took to the election was all wrong. So what is Labor’s brand now, exactly? An Aldi shopping bag? After this week’s ICAC unpleasantness, it is doubtful how much the NSW Right will be able (or allowed) to participate in Labor’s planned renaissance. Last I checked Labor was supposed to protect and promote the interests of working people. But over decades of Chinese dinners attended by Labor bosses who moonlight at HQ before skipping off to lucrative private sector work with property developers and casinos, NSW Labor seems to have become detached from whatever soul it once had. Twitter: @JacquelineMaley Follow Jacqueline Maley on Facebook