James O’Doherty: Why nothing should be off the table for Libs trying to rebuild

Some NSW Liberals have been quick to torpedo the idea of candidates being selected in US-type primaries – but that is a prime example of why the division needs to be rebuilt, writes James O’Doherty.

As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

It is in this context that the NSW Liberal Party should be considering its future.

Thrust into a period of mandatory self-reflection by its own incompetence, nothing should be taken off the table.

The fact that some NSW Liberals have been so quick to torpedo the idea of candidates being selected in US-type primaries is a prime example of why the division needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Berowra MP Julian Leeser first proposed the idea way back in 2008, as a way for candidates to better reflect the electorates they want to serve.

Former premier Dominic Perrottet is a fan, too – telling me in 2022 that the party should be “open” to a primaries model to better engage with voters.

Since then the party’s problems have gotten even worse.

Bernie Sanders (l to r), Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg ran in their party’s presidential candidate primary process in 2020. Picture: Getty Images

From the council candidate nomination fiasco to getting pantsed at the May election, the NSW Liberal Party needs a complete overhaul.

Trialling a primaries model to choose candidates in certain seats – like those lost to the Teals – would be a good place to start.

Take the seat of Bradfield, for example, where Liberal Giselle Kapterian lost out to Teal Nicolette Boele and her phalanx of “community independent” supporters.

Leeser’s electorate of Berowra was another where the “community independent” movement garnered thousands of volunteers.

The Teals pretend to be chosen by the community; a Liberal Party primary process would be a way to beat them at their own game.

MP Julian Leeser thinks a primaries model is worth a try. Picture: NewsWire/Martin Ollman

As conventional wisdom has it, a campaign needs three things to win in an election: A good candidate, money, and people on the ground.

Primaries, Leeser says, address at least two of those hurdles.

“A primary system actually tests whether people can build a supporter base, whether they can raise the necessary funds, (and) whether they can develop a profile in the community,” he says.

Supporters also argue that the primary model could re-engage Liberal-minded voters that have abandoned the Coalition.

“The objective here has to be to rebuild the grassroots political movement, one that stands for our values, and to do that, we’re going to have to involve and engage people in ways we haven’t before,” Liberal frontbencher Angus Taylor told me this week.

Critics of the primaries model argue that it would be too expensive and prone to manipulation from hostile actors – like Labor and Greens voters, or fringe groups like the Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (members of which turned out en masse to campaign for certain Liberal candidates in May).

Liberal Charlotte Mortlock, whose group Hilma’s Network exists to get more Liberal women elected to parliament, is one of those critics.

Liberal Charlotte Mortlock thinks a primaries system could be problematic.

“I’d very nervous that the same community groups, who have a vested interest in Australia’s policy platform, may stack primaries,” she says.

These concerns are valid, and would need to be addressed, but should not be a reason to scratch the idea before it even gets to the starting gates.

Some Liberals have even suggested that sitting MPs could be turfed out by the party if their preselection was opened to a community vote.

If sitting MPs are worried that they would not have enough support in their electorate to win a community preselection vote then that says more about them than any would-be challenger.

Primaries also have the benefit of putting candidates through a pressure test that is far more strenuous than doing the rounds of Liberal canape functions.

And – while it sounds crazy – the process might even create room for candidates to go to the electorate with some new policies of their own.

It is a shame that Liberals, primarily those from the left-wing Moderate faction, have been so quick to hose down this idea.

Mortlock believes that the suggestion of primaries is a distraction from the main problem facing the Liberal Party: “The women’s crisis”.

Other moderates agree, suggesting that prominent right-wingers like Taylor have only jumped on the concept of primaries as a way to distract from the push for gender quotas, which has descended into an even more toxic civil war.

Invariably, it seems that the debate about primaries will end like myriad other attempts for Liberal Party reform: With a factional stalemate.

Warring factions are a large part of why multiple attempts at cleaning up the NSW division have fallen by the wayside.

Allowing a factional fight to get in the way of reform, now, really would be insanity.