Peta Credlin: With friends like Alex Hawke, ScoMo doesn’t need enemies

Alex Hawke sees himself as a factional kingpin in NSW and as a powerbroker in Canberra but he is doing Prime Minister Scott Morrison more harm than good, Peta Credlin writes.

When the history of the Morrison government comes to be written, a likely judgment is that the PM tried to do it all himself and not enough pressure was put on ministers to perform.

Some are good, Peter Dutton a prime example; others deserve to be sacked. Take the ongoing disaster that is the NSW division of the Liberal Party, which still hasn’t picked candidates for the key seats it must win to keep the government in office.

This should have happened months ago, and would have, under the more democratic rules put in place four years ago but for the Machiavellian interventions of the PM’s personal representative on the state executive, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke.

Hawke sees himself as a factional kingpin in NSW and as a powerbroker in Canberra. His “centre-right” sub-faction has operated in conjunction with the left faction associated with the lobbyist Michael Photios to give a basically conservative party a decidedly “progressive” character.

It was Hawke who marshalled Scott Morrison’s supporters to replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull in the 2015 coup.

Immigration Minister Alex Hawke. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Hawke has aroused such animosity inside the normally easygoing branches of Sydney’s Bible belt that he faced a challenge at his own pre-selection.

To avoid the embarrassment of a pre-selection challenge he was no sure thing to win, it seems that Hawke deliberately stalled the setting of pre-selection timetables so that the state executive would have to endorse candidates without a rank and file ballot.

A few weeks back, as the clock was ticking over, a cross-factional deal was hammered out to protect sitting members (including Hawke) and to allow some rank and file preselections to go ahead, while parachuting hand-picked candidates into a few key seats.

But, with all the bad blood, this couldn’t get the required super-majority on state executive.

Hence the need for federal intervention, which has now placed the entire management of the NSW Liberal party into the hands of an insiders’ committee to decide who can run for seats and how they should be picked.

The problem is that rank and file members who’ve been looking forward since 2017 to having their say over who runs for their party feel cheated.

At the first election where they were meant to get democratic pre-selections, they’ve been dudded via the machinations of a lifelong apparatchik who’s put his own interests ahead of the party’s and the country’s.

Watch Peta Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm