Beware the Labor mutton dressed as Liberal lamb

These candidates are not independents, or mere disaffected ex-Liberals, they’re part of sophisticated effort by the Left to make inroads into Liberal seats, writes Peta Credlin.

Such is the contempt for Julia Banks in and around the Victorian Liberal Party that she’s now called the “five-minute Liberal’’, usually prefaced with an expletive.

Heaven help anyone now hoping to win preselection with a similarly short-lived party pedigree as the membership are demanding candidates have a longer and more demonstrated history.

Banks, despite all the talk of loving her marginal, multicultural seat of Chisholm, won’t fight for it as an independent and instead, is skulking down to Flinders, a prized seat down on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula currently held by health minister Greg Hunt; a highly effective and well-connected local.

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I said from day one that despite the dance of the seven electoral veils, Banks wouldn’t have the guts to run in Chisholm.

Some in the media said she would; after all, she’d won the seat before and now has strong name recognition. But these commentators know precious little about the work that goes into a successful campaign and I think they’re also missing the subterranean ground game being played by the left in some of the safest Liberal seats right across the country.

Rebekha Sharkie, Kerryn Phelps and Julia Banks in the House of Representatives in Canberra. Picture: Kym Smith

No, Banks couldn’t run in Chisholm with any chance of success because she needs to run with the backing and resources of the myriad of players on the Left, and they want Chisholm in the Labor column.

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So, to run and get their help (like Kerryn Phelps, Rebekha Sharkie, Cathy McGowan, and now new candidate Zali Steggall), they take on “safe” centre-right seats, play up their ex-Liberal background, sympathies and policy support, and downplay their leftist fundamentals hoping they can get through the campaign without being exposed, win with the help of preferences and once in parliament, emerge as the anti-Liberal crusaders they really are.

In short, Labor mutton dressed up as Liberal lamb.

There are others too, like Oliver Yates, the former head of Julia Gillard’s Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and once a card-carrying Liberal, who is now fighting Josh Frydenberg for his blue-ribbon Melbourne seat of Kooyong.

Oliver Yates thinks “the Liberal Part has lost its way. Picture: Twitter

Yates is fighting Treasurer Josh Frydenberg for his seat of Kooyong. Picture: AAP

Pushed hard this week, Yates refused to rule out support from Get Up!.

And who could forget that prize idiot from the Rudd-Gillard days, Rob Oakeshott? He’s backing up for another run at a parliamentary salary; this time in the Coffs-Harbour seat of Cowper.

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Let’s hope voters haven’t forgotten his appalling record in Gillard’s hung parliament.

These candidates are not independents, or mere disaffected ex-Liberals. They are part of sophisticated effort by the Left to make inroads into Liberal seats, remove incumbent MPs especially if conservative, and bring an end to policies they don’t agree with, such as coal-fired power and tough border protection measures.

I also suspect, based on what emerged after a series of secret meetings in the 2016 campaign, that these organisations such as Get Up!, are working with left-wing Liberal MPs and powerbrokers (“moderates”), to help bring about the demise of their right-wing conservative colleagues so that in the ashes of a Liberal defeat those remaining in the parliament could shift the whole party to the left.

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In 2019, the biggest of these contests to re-make the Liberal Party will be in Sydney beaches seat of Warringah, held by Tony Abbott.

Get Up! volunteers gathered at Manly Pavilion this week to ramp up the campaign to oust Tony Abbott. Picture: Darren Leigh Roberts

In the past, the former PM has always faced opposition from the left and as a consequence, even in the top job, always insisted on a regular schedule of electorate activity.

At the moment, the former Olympic skier, Zali Steggall seems to be the main anti-Abbott candidate, although it is a contested field. She’s presentable, articulate and lived locally, but like all the others, her claims to be “centre-aligned” from a “traditional Liberal” background don’t pass muster.

Last week, my Sky News colleague David Speers grilled her on this very point. While trying hard to burnish her Liberal connections (she’ll need them to have any chance to win the seat), Steggall claimed that like “many moderate Liberals”, she was dissatisfied with a Liberal Party that had gone to the “far right” with “unacceptable” positions on issues such as climate change.

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Asked if she had ever voted for Labor, she said she had not; but nor it seems, has she ever voted Liberal.

While cannily invoking John Howard in her interview, she can’t ever have voted for him, or even for Malcolm Turnbull, because when pushed, Steggall was forced to admit that in his 25 years in office, she had never voted for Abbott.

And if she hasn’t voted for Abbott, she’s never then voted for PM Howard or PM Turnbull.

Herein lies the lesson to celebrity candidates who have only ever faced a sympathetic media: national politics is tough and every word is scrutinised. Unfortunately for the lawyer Zali, who should know this or her degree isn’t worth the paper it is printed on, Australia is not the US where you get a separate vote for the President and one for the MP that will represent you locally.

The fact is that you can’t vote for a Liberal PM or opposition leader if you don’t vote for the local Liberal candidate.

Steggall was caught out, and she looked like a goose.