Vikki Campion: Liberals and Nationals fight in Port Macquarie an ugly look for the Coalition
Liberals should focus on seats in Sydney’s west but, instead, they are wandering around a conservative electorate they have never won and it could come at a huge cost, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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It’s no MONA but Australian art going under a wrecking ball will have a massive say in setting the political future of NSW. The Liberals will destroy sea-splashed memorials in paint – an impromptu public art gallery of the thoughts and joys of families who have holidayed at Port Macquarie over decades.
As well, Norfolk pines shade and a world-class surf break will also be lost – all for a new bike path.
This – and an unsuspecting constituency more than 400km from the bellwether seats of western Sydney – will determine the next NSW premier. And it’s not just a choice between Dom Perrottet or Chris Minns.
The rapidly growing coastal city of Port Macquarie – a conservative stronghold that threw out National-turned-independent Rob Oakeshott after he backed the Gillard Labor government – must choose between National-turned-moderate Leslie Williams, who criticised her leader on the way to the Liberals’ partyroom, and a strong businesswoman and popularly elected mayor, Peta Pinson, who has the tenacity to talk back to bureaucrats.
The wall that creates the unique surf break is symbolic of Port Macquarie. The bike path is symbolic of Sydney transport policy. Both are symbolic of bureaucracy ignoring the community.
While Williams backs Transport for NSW bureaucrats in ripping out the breakwall to put in a 5m-wide bike path, Pinson supports three-time world champion bodyboarder Damien King and small businesses who raised more than $8000 for an independent analysis so that the breakwall, shade and surf can remain untouched.
Pinson stands to return Port Macquarie to Nationals territory. Williams stands to insert the lab-grown-meat-munching republican-in-name-yet-giddy-over-King-Charles-on-a-$72,000-taxpayer-funded-trip, methane-taxing, woodfire-banning, wind factory-building, utter disaster for the regions Matt Kean as the next premier.
Toxicity is alive and well between the Coalition partners.
Pinson, Port Macquarie’s first female mayor, was secretly blocked by the Liberal Left, who publicly espouse how essential women in politics are, from attending the same business chamber event where Premier Dom was guest speaker.
A prime spot was reserved for Williams, who used Nationals volunteers, smarts and sweat to take the seat of Port Macquarie 12 years ago, only to quit the Nationals less than a year after she failed to win the grand party title of state chairman.
As the turncoat former Nationals candidate cosies up with her Labor opposition in posed photographs, a slew of Moderate Liberal ministers have been landing at Port Macquarie Airport flashing cash.
Liberals should focus on seats in Sydney’s west but, instead, find themselves wandering around a conservative centre they have never won in their own right and barely have a branch in.
In Kean’s Treasury office, any Nationals requests for funding for election promises in Port Macquarie drag on, with local volunteers ordered not to say anything that will upset Liberal chances.
As Perrottet is out fighting the Labor Party, one particular faction is fighting him. With his wife in hospital, the dad of six has been hauling his little ones on the campaign trail across NSW, leaving his self-interested colleagues to learn the hard way that the state election is more than a factional game.
Port Macquarie is not the only three-cornered contest in the upcoming election. It’s not even the only regional Liberal seat, but it is the only one where the Liberal candidate is a vote for Kean as the Liberal leader.
Polling predicts a narrow win for either Labor or the Coalition across the state. While Perrottet is trying to win NSW, Kean is trying to win the Liberal leadership. Kean has been tone-deaf and blind to regional Australia.
There is not one regional issue he has championed, instead forcing us to pay for intermittent power under his Renewable Energy Zones, which explains his notable absenteeism from Port Macquarie, where he is electoral poison.
A Kean-led Liberal Party could not rule NSW, simply because the majority of real Nationals – not Lib-turned-Nats political careerists or Nat-turned-Libs political opportunists – could ever form a happy coalition under his direction.
Many in regional areas would consider Minns if the alternative is Kean. Under the burden of Kean’s one-eyed climate policy, a Nationals team would struggle in a Coalition where regional people do not want transmission lines or wind towers over their land, or to lose their jobs in power stations and coalmines, and who are not interested in his global peacocking on climate change.
Instead of doorknocking Sydney’s west to win the election, his pod of moderate nobodies thrust a crazy agenda fed by a Tiffany-teal urban minority on Wauchope and remain deaf to the soaring frustration of NSW politicians outsourcing their decisions to bureaucrats.
Which brings us back to the break-wall. Be it that or communities across the Renewable Energy Zones rallying against wind factories, ignored by the ministry and the mainstream media, a wave of white-hot anger is growing.
Where Pinson stands with the community, Kean’s Port Macquarie puppet blindly follows a nameless bureaucrat’s advice.
Where NSW Nationals leader Paul Toole, the Bathurst boy who is also a former mayor, vowed to stop it, the Liberals were quick to undermine them, quickly issuing a department statement that the development would proceed.
Who exactly are the Liberals fighting here? They still need a candidate in eight seats where they are supposed to be fighting Labor.
Unless the Liberal moderates work out how they will keep their backsides on shiny leather, they might win Port Macquarie but will lose the election.
They can spend the next eight years in opposition, patting themselves on the back at their semi-secret selective moderate club.
No one but Kean’s clique is counting moderate seats on election night.
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