Bullying has become a "team sport" in the ACT Labor Party and behaviour in the local party is riven with "sheer nastiness", according to a leading party left-winger.
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In the wake of her defeated tilt for the job of branch secretary at Saturdays Labor Party conference, Barbara Phi has resigned from the partys left faction, but not before firing a parting shot.
Ms Phi, in a letter to her left-wing colleagues announcing her resignation, wrote that the grouping had lurched politically to the right and alleged that young members needed to be escorted to their cars after party activities for fear of bullying and intimidation.
The veteran activist challenged branch secretary Elias Hallaj at Saturdays conference but was roundly defeated by 165 votes to 16 after failing to secure the official backing of her faction.
There has been lingering resentment in some sections of the local party since Mr Hallaj was installed as ACT branch secretary, a post traditionally filled from the left faction, in an "intervention" by the partys national leadership in 2009.
The lefts secretary Sue Ducker also announced her resignation on Saturday morning, both from her post as secretary and from the faction itself in the wake of the lefts failure to get behind Ms Phis challenge to Mr Hallaj.
The Canberra Times reported on Saturday that Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, a member of the left, would walk away from the faction if it tried to force her to vote against the incumbent. The faction voted in a meeting last Wednesday that it would not support Ms Phis candidature.
In a letter sent to left caucus members early on the morning of the conference, the former public servant wrote that she was resigning, disillusioned, from the grouping.
"Caucus is no longer a place for free discussion of ideas [and] views, it is a forum in which only numbers matter, votes are based on personalities rather than on the qualitative aspect of the issue, and bullying is a team sport," Ms Phi wrote.
"My particular concerns are the sheer level of nastiness directed at some of our hardest-working comrades.
We have descended beneath compassion fatigue to something I no longer recognise."
Ms Phi wrote that younger members of the faction did not feel safe going to their cars after caucus activities.
"Our young people are bullied and comrades feel the need to escort each other through car parks, etc.
"This is not a healthy environment, nor is it conducive to developing future generations of the ALP in the great traditions of the left.
"I do not believe that this caucus wants to evolve into the NSW right."
Mr Hallaj said yesterday he was not aware of the content of either of the resignation letters but said that any suggestion of improper conduct within the party would be thoroughly investigated.
