James O’Doherty: Speakman blocks youth crime crackdown in Coalition civil war

Nationals Leader Dugald Saunders took legislation to crack down on youth crime to Shadow Cabinet last month. Mark Speakman shut it down, reveals James O’Doherty.

A holiday hotspot on the state’s mid-north coast has become ground zero for an eruption of green-on-blue violence in the NSW Coalition — fuelled by two men trying to keep a hold on their jobs.

Liberal Leader Mark Speakman and his National Party counterpart Dugald Saunders have, between them, turned an otherwise uneventful by-election into a “pissing contest”, Coalition MPs say, in which both leaders’ reputations are on the line.

The looming Port Macquarie poll has even led to claims from senior Liberals that Saunders has leveraged a regional youth crime crisis for political advantage.

The civil war boiled over last month, when Saunders attempted to discuss a plan to crack down on youth crime during a Shadow Cabinet meeting where tensions were described as “red hot”.

I can reveal that when the legislation was presented, Speakman “shut down debate, stormed out, and closed the meeting down,” one attendee says.

Nationals Leader Dugald Saunders. Picture: Damian Shaw

Saunders’ bill would have automatically denied bail for teens arrested for serious offences while already on bail, and overhauled the “doli incapax” principle, which assumes children between 10 and 14 years are “incapable of evil”.

As The Telegraph revealed last year, kids are so confident of getting away with offences that, according to police sources, some had even dubbed committing crimes as “doing doli”.

Under Saunders’ legislation, the onus would be on a recidivist offender to prove they did not know what they were doing was wrong.

But the Liberals “didn’t want a bar of it,” one Nationals source tells me.

Speakman insists he shut down debate only because Saunders had not followed the proper process, but that he was not opposed to the intent of the bill itself.

However, the messy fight has now left the Coalition at odds over one of the biggest crises facing the state’s regions.

NSW Liberal Leader Mark Speakman. Picture: Nikki Short

With no Labor candidate running, the Coalition will win regardless. But the decision to run competing Liberal and National party campaigns have turned a “nothing by-election into one where there is something really on the line,” one MP says.

The stakes could not be higher for either Speakman or Saunders, both of whom are facing persistent rumblings about their leadership.

This fiasco could have been completely avoidable, Coalition sources say, if the parties’ leadership teams were willing to work together.

Instead, it has devolved into a comedy of errors.

Saunders was forced to hastily dump a candidate four days after he was selected, Speakman tried to hold a fundraiser but no one wanted to come, and a parliamentary hearing last week devolved into a shouting match between two warring Coalition MPs.

Politicians are also being shipped up to the mid-north coast to help in a state by-election that may overlap with the official start of the federal election campaign.

The question of how Port Macquarie has turned into a power struggle between the Liberals and Nationals dates back to the Coalition’s brutal “koala wars”of 2020, when MP Leslie Williams sensationally defected from the Nationals to sit as a moderate-faction Liberal.

She resigned as a Nationals member over then-leader John Barilaro’s threat to implode the Coalition agreement over rules designed to protect koala habitat, which restricted land use and development. Among the Nationals, she has never been forgiven.

Five years on, they are still seething that Williams turned an electorate that the Nationals had held since its inception into Liberal seat.

Her defection was an “act of bastardry,” one Nationals figure says.

At the 2023 election, Williams held the seat for the Liberals against a challenge from Nationals candidate Peta Pinson.

When Williams resigned, the Nationals believed the seat was, by rights, theirs. There was never a question over whether they would run.

However, the Liberal Party’s decision to field their own candidate was not without criticism.

In internal party meetings, at least two Liberal MPs suggested the party should instead be directing its entire focus on the looming federal poll.

Cool heads among both parties believe that the Port Macquarie by-election could have been an opportunity to reach a sensible, mutually beneficial arrangement.

Instead, Port Macquarie is now being fought by a Liberal, a National, and a dumped National candidate who has gone independent. All three are throwing mud at each other.

There is a lot riding on the Port Macquarie result.

If Saunders loses, it will embolden his internal critics and potentially bring his leadership into question.

So too for Speakman, if he fails.

Says one Liberal: “if we win, we were justified in running. If we lose, that decision was a disaster.”