Anti-Voice band back together as Price, Abbott back Warren Mundine for key seat

Australia’s conservative establishment has mobilised in a bid to secure Nyunggai Warren Mundine, one of the key Indigenous advocates against the Voice to parliament, the prized Sydney seat of Bradfield that the teal movement is hoping to win.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott, former deputy prime minister John Anderson and senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price are lobbying local branch members to back Mundine, who is in a tight contest to be the Liberal candidate for the wealthy northern Sydney seat.

Mundine, a former federal Labor president who switched parties and ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals in 2019 on the NSW South Coast, helped deliver the party a major political win as a director of the main group opposing the Voice.

Price said she travelled across Australia with Mundine leading the anti-Voice movement that generated big momentum in Liberal branches in 2023, helping to grow the profile of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

“I truly believe with him [Mundine] as one of our candidates, we have a better shot at winning this next federal election,” Price said in a video sent to party members and obtained by this masthead.

But Mundine’s opponents on the left of the party argue the 68-year-old conservative is not the right person to take on a well-funded campaign from teal candidate Nicolette Boele, whose years-long run for the seat received a boost from incumbent Liberal MP Paul Fletcher’s December decision to quit politics.

Fletcher said late last year that the choice of candidate was up to the party. But, he added, “I will say just one thing: I think it would be a smart move to choose one of our outstanding Liberal women to carry the Liberal banner in Bradfield”.

Mundine is in a field of four for a vote to be held on an unconfirmed date in the middle of the month: moderate faction candidate and technology executive Gisele Kapterian, local councillor Barbara Ward and cardiologist Michael Feneley.

Abbott praised Mundine, who lives locally, as a person of moral and intellectual strength who would be an “adornment to the parliament”.

“The fact that Warren was once the national president of the ALP, I see as an asset for us Libs, not a problem to be explained away,” the former prime minister said in a statement to this masthead.

Warren Mundine, left, has won backing from Tony Abbott and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.Credit:

“Warren has always been about doing the right thing by the battler … [and] is living proof that it’s the Liberal Party, and not Labor, that’s best for the people on struggle street.”

Mundine, who could not comment due to party rules about speaking to the media, was the national president of the Labor Party between 2006-07, but quit the organisation in 2012, saying it was “not the party I joined”.

He had been in line for a Labor Senate spot that did not eventuate. Mundine then unsuccessfully ran as the Liberal candidate for the federal seat of Gilmore in 2019. In September 2023, he pulled out of a hotly contested race for a NSW Liberal Senate position.

Holding Bradfield will be crucial to Dutton’s chances of winning the election due by May.

Bradfield was the only Liberal-held seat in which more people voted for the Voice (52 per cent) than against. All former Liberal seats held by teal independents voted “Yes”.

If Mundine were to win preselection, the Coalition would have at least three Indigenous candidates alongside incumbent senators Price and Kerrynne Liddle. Labor will likely have four Indigenous MPs in the next parliament.

Mundine, backed by the right faction, and Kapterian, supported by the moderates, are considered frontrunners, with Kapterian seen by most as the favourite. Mundine’s chances are boosted by right-wing branches moving into Bradfield in a redistribution of electoral boundaries of the seat that takes in suburbs such as Chatswood, Lindfield and St Ives.

Due to low population growth, teal MP Kylea Tink’s neighbouring seat of North Sydney will be abolished at the next election, shifting Bradfield southwards and cutting its margin from 4.2 per cent to about 2.5 per cent for the Liberals. Tink weighed a tilt for Bradfield, but decided against it.

Ahead of announcing his resignation last year, Fletcher lashed the teal movement, drawing a rebuke from teal MPs.

Fletcher gave a speech at the Sydney Institute in December arguing candidates such as Tink represented a “giant green con job”, with campaigns “carefully designed to dupe traditional Liberal voters”.

Boele did not comment on Mundine’s candidacy, but said, “the people of Bradfield want a representative who works for us, not a political party”.

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