Dutton bitten by Britton and the NSW Libs’ calamities

If there is one thing that has come to define the NSW Liberals, it is their uncanny ability to botch the selection of their candidates. This week voters in NSW were reminded of this in no uncertain terms.

The second week of the federal election campaign kicked off with the Liberals having to axe their candidate in the Illawarra seat of Whitlam, thanks to comments he made about “beautiful women” not being suitable to serve in the Australian Defence Force. For a party that has long battled an image problem when it comes to women, the Liberals had no choice.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton with the former Liberal candidate for Whitlam, Benjamin Britton, in January.Credit: Facebook

Before his preselection, former solider Benjamin Britton appeared as a guest on fringe podcasts, where he said such things as the ADF was weakened by having women in frontline combat positions. It was clear the party had to cut him loose. The real question, however, is how did Britton – who ran for Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party at the last federal election – get preselected in the first place?

A loss of a candidate in a safe Labor seat is not the end of the world for the NSW Liberals. Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had previously described Britton as an “outstanding candidate” but the party quickly installed NSW Master Plumbers chief Nathaniel Smith (who lost his state seat of Wollondilly in 2023) and hoped they could move on. Wishful thinking.

In one of the country’s most marginal seats of Bennelong, Liberal candidate Scott Yung has his own troubles. There is simmering unease in sections of the party after my colleague Max Maddison revealed that Yung may have breached electoral funding rules for enlisting the help of a digital marketing agency to produce Chinese-language social media advertorials.

Yung did not declare that work to the NSW Electoral Commission and has not responded to Maddison’s questions, other than to tell him at a candidates’ forum on Monday night that he had done nothing wrong. Yung has told other media he did not need to declare the work because it was done on a volunteer basis. This has only muddied the waters.

Yung is close to Dutton and had his backing for preselection. The opposition leader wrote a glowing reference for the Liberal up-and-comer, describing him as a talented campaigner who adeptly used social media to almost unseat now Premier Chris Minns in the 2019 state election.

Britton is gone, and Yung is hanging on (admittedly, according to some Liberals, by a thread) but for a leader from Queensland, the NSW division of the Liberal Party must be causing Dutton some sleepless nights. While Dutton may hail from the Sunshine State, he cannot wipe his hands of the NSW division’s woes, not least because he was an enthusiastic backer of a candidate who is now dumped and another with question marks over him.

It goes beyond that, too. Dutton was also behind the federal intervention of the NSW division, which included installing a three-person committee to clean up the mess inside the state party. That mess has only worsened this week when one of the party’s most embarrassing debacles re-emerged.

Two Liberal Party members who had been preselected to contest last year’s local government elections as party-endorsed candidates filed a class action in the Supreme Court. The pair missed out on running because, in one of the worst displays of administrative incompetence, the NSW Liberal Party missed the deadline to lodge nomination forms.

The two party members, John Moores and John Paynter, hoped to be elected to Cessnock City Council. They are the lead plaintiffs, but the class action captures all 150 candidates who also had their political careers thwarted thanks to the NSW Liberals.

While Dutton cannot be blamed for the party failing to send forms off in time, there are questions around why his panel, made up of Victorian senator Richard Alston, ex-Victorian treasurer Alan Stockdale and former state MP Peta Seaton did not do everything they could to settle the matter before it landed in court. Mid-election campaign, no less.

Too often, the NSW Liberals manage spectacular own goals. Dutton’s intervention, hugely unpopular among the moderate faction in NSW, was meant to sort out the dysfunction inside the division. Instead, it has seemingly continued. An ominous sign for a party that must do well in NSW if it has any hope of claiming victory.

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