A Solution to Branch Stacking???

In his excellent BLOG Bob Carr has floated the idea of US style Primaries as part of a reform package for the ALP in NSW. I think it is a great idea. Read Simon Schama's excellent and optimistic book "The American Future". His description of the Iowa Caucuses is inspiring. Of course every US state does not have primaries and those that do conduct them in a variety of ways and the rules governng delegates to conventions also vary widely. But the concept of all voters in an electorate voting in a preselection ballot for a party's candidate to go forward to the general election is an attractive one.
In the NSW ALP what is meant to happen is that every branch member in an electorate who has been financial for at least two years and has attended three branch meeting in the last 12 months gets a vote in the preselection. fine in theory. But sometimes head office decides to not have a preselection if it is going to produce the "wrong" result. Of course it's much neater if you have a well funded machine like the Terrigals who can "join up" a few hundred new members. It's not new, it used to be that you got everyone from your local union or church group to join up. They tried to address that by making membership expensive but I believe that it just drove good people away.
I worked as a scrutineer in some funny preselections. One included an entire branch where every member eligible to vote had the same surname and there were HEAPS of them. There were about three addresses between a fifteen or more of them.
They were also all completely genuine and eligible to vote but the scrutineers for the Left candidate examined them closely. No harm mentioning their name, the Goulds of Croydon and a more decent bunch you could not hope to meet. No relation to Bobby Gould the Newtown bookseller, a sincere socialist leftie in those days but another good bloke though.
In one preselection (for a seat  that we won in Wran's '76) the Left were particularly scrutinising the credentials of everyone in the Concord-West/Rhodes branch assuming (we reckoned wrongly) that they would all vote for the branch President who eventually won the seat. Is that their signature in the attendance book? ,have they signed the pledge book with the correct date? etc. etc. I argued over every on but conceeded them three and let them knock those ones out. Those were the three that we reckoned were going to vote for the Lefts candidate. If only all the opponents had been that dumb.
Happy days but as Peter Fitz will tell you, it was a simpler time.