As crisis after crisis swirls, Lib leader Speakman left in the dark

The fact that no-one on the Liberal’s federal executive felt the need to loop Speakman in on these issues is hardly a vote of confidence in the state parliamentary leader, James O’Doherty writes.

On Monday, Liberal volunteers were dropping council election flyers in Pittwater mailboxes that featured an endorsement from an alleged child sex offender who until last week was the local MP.

The material promoting sole Liberal on the ballot for the Northern Beaches council, Mandeep “Sunny” Singh, encapsulates the twin catastrophes faced by the NSW Liberal Party: first, the diabolical council candidate fiasco which sparked a drastic federal takeover; and second, an upcoming by-election triggered when a Liberal MP resigned after being charged with 10 child sex offences.

Of the former, the immense bloodletting within the NSW Liberals after head office failed to meet council nomination deadlines has this week exposed Opposition Leader Mark Speakman as entirely out of his depth.

In a 45 minute grilling on Wednesday, Speakman struggled to keep a straight face while insisting that the voters should not care that his party is in chaos, while mounting a central argument that he had no idea what was going on.

Mandeep 'Sunny' Singh, a Liberal Party member who will run in the election for Northern Beaches Council.

Speakman’s enlightening contribution came the morning after federal party bosses sacked the entire board running the NSW party and tried to impose a three-person babysitting committee.

But in what one journalist described as a “stuff-up spiral,” one of the three men drafted to oversee the NSW division, former Minister Rob Stokes, refused.

Speakman argues that he had no idea Stokes was set to be drafted into service.

His federal counterpart, Peter Dutton, argues otherwise: “his name was put forward by the NSW Division,” Dutton told 2GB’s Ray Hadley on Thursday.

The other things Speakman says he doesn’t know include the details of a report which triggered the federal takeover, whether or not the man ordered back into service as State Director had agreed.

Rob Stokes will need this hard hat if he does wind up trying to clean up the NSW Liberals. Pics by Julian Andrews.

The fact that no-one on the Liberal’s federal executive felt the need to loop Speakman in on these issues is hardly a vote of confidence in the state parliamentary leader.

Speakman threw himself into the council candidate debacle from day one, calling for the head of Richard Shields as state director (effectively, the Liberal Party CEO), while backing President Don Harwin to the hilt.

The Liberal Leader is still backing Harwin: “I just don’t see that he has any sort of culpability for what has happened,” Speakman said on Wednesday.

The council nomination disaster aside, Harwin has presided over a dysfunctional party that has lurched from one scandal to another. Harwin has been intimately involved in a division embroiled in factional infighting.

After winning the presidency by a single vote, Harwin failed to make any inroads in much-needed party reform.

In voting to take over, federal party bosses agreed that the state executive was incompetent, dysfunctional, and understaffed.

They also argued that there had been a “lack of material progress” from the NSW division on party reform.

Mark Speakman reportedly still backs Don Harwin

Speakman may have felt the need to stand by his factional figurehead to try to stop the right wing of the party taking over. That comprehensively failed.

Now, facing a trio of state by-elections in a little over a month, the NSW division will be overseen by at least two Victorians, whose main focus will be on preparing for a federal poll next year.

One of those by-elections, Pittwater, is a write-off. The poll was called when former MP Rory Amon resigned after being charged with serious child sex offences.

The circumstances surrounding Amon’s charging present the second crisis for the NSW Liberals.

Questions are rightly being asked about what, if anything, Amon’s party colleagues knew about the allegations dating back to 2017 - and what they did about it.

Rumours have been swirling that the former MP was under a police investigation for more than a year.

Speakman insists the first he knew of any police investigation, or the allegations, was when The Sunday Telegraph Chief Reporter Linda Silmalis broke the news last Friday.

But was everyone in the party similarly in the dark?

That election flyer for Sunny Singh featuring Amon’s endorsement that hit mailboxes this week has since been replaced with a new version, stripped of all references to the former MP.

The NSW Electoral Commission requires candidates to register election day campaign material for approval.

Curiously, the NSWEC gave sign-off to the new flyer on August 29 - a day before Amon was charged.