James Campbell: Matt Kean Deves whodunit reveals real division in the NSW Division

Painting the NSW Lib wars as a straight fight between progressives and conservatives seems a bit off the mark writes James Campbell, who reveals the “deepest hatreds” inside the party.

When things go as badly wrong as they did for the Liberal Party last month you can be sure it won’t be long before the briefing and counter briefings are as high as an elephant’s eye. If you like this stuff – and who doesn’t who follows politics – you need to get hold of the Weekend Australian and sit back with a cup of tea to enjoy some good old fashioned Liberal-on-Liberal violence courtesy of Sharri Markson.

Markson reports that a bit over a week out from polling day NSW Treasurer and Left faction heavyweight Matt Kean messaged a journalist travelling with the then PM encouraging her to ask Kean’s fellow state government minister Natalie Ward about Katherine Deves, Morrison’s doomed captain’s pick in the seat of Warringah.

Ward was making an announcement with Morrison so it wouldn’t have been a great look for the government if she’d paid out on his candidate.

The suggestion, dear reader, is that this was not helpful to the Morrison government’s quest for re-election.

That Kean was trying to get the journalist to ask about Deves is disputed by sources close to both the journalist and the NSW Treasurer.

Minister for Metropolitan Roads Natalie Ward and Treasurer Matt Kean during a press conference in Sydney. Picture NCA Newswire/ Gaye Gerard

Somehow, Markson reports, the existence of these messages came to be known to the Prime Minister’s inner circle who contacted Kean to have a chat about them. As you would do if you were fighting for your political life and you thought a senior state politician from your own side was trying to sabotage you.

The outcome of this exchange was unclear, but clearly less than a month later memories are still raw and so someone felt now was the time to let the public know.

How “photographs” of the messages came to be in existence has had journalists’ tongues wagging.

There are three possibilities.

The first is that Kean either shared the exchange himself or someone he shared it with gave it to people around the PM who have later shared it.

The second is that the journalist herself shared the exchange with someone who later shared it with the PM’s people who later shared it with the Australian.

The third possibility – favoured by a number of people – is that someone either wittingly or unwittingly took “photographs” of the phone and that these ended up in circulation. What to me is more interesting than the whodunit is what this episode shows about how everyone is feeling about each other at the moment in the NSW division of the Liberal Party.

Defeated Liberal candidate for Warringah Katherine Deves proved a divisive figure, embraced by the party’s right and shunned by the left. Picture: Jeremy Piper

That Kean has been a hate figure for some conservative commentators and federal Liberals has been obvious for a while. But the attempt to paint the NSW Lib wars as a straight fight between moderates versus right-wingers or to put it another way – progressives versus conservatives, seems a bit off the mark. Kean might be the leader of the party’s Left but he seems to get along just fine with the Premier Dominic Perrottet who is the leader of the Right.

The deepest hatreds inside the Liberal NSW Party, from the people I speak to anyway, seem to be directed at the in-between grouping of Morrison and Alex Hawke, who everyone else seems to agree were between them responsible for that state’s preselection debacle that ended up in the courts.

Former Immigration Minister Alex Hawke was seen to be Scott Morrison’s right-hand man, and was blamed for the state’s preselection debacle. Picture: Jason Edwards

Markson’s piece also revealed that NSW senator Andrew Bragg had pissed off a number of senior campaign folk for committing the unforgivable sin of commissioning his own polling.

That a mere senator would second guess the Liberals’ pollster Crosby Textor, the closest thing the party has to a college of cardinals, well I’m not sure I can even begin to describe what an affront that is to the proper order of the universe. A world in which candidates have precise information about how they’re going or their electorates’ feeling about the leader, it just doesn’t bear thinking about. If there’s one thing I can guarantee will be in the review currently being undertaken by its former federal director Brian Loughnane it will be a strong recommendation that this shocking behaviour be outlawed.

Unsurprisingly, the central charge against Bragg was not just that he’d done it, but that he’d done it and got it wrong and that CT’s polling had been much more accurate. Some have suggested it might have been more accurate than Bragg’s but that doesn’t mean it was near the money. You can tell that from the genuine Liberal surprise the teals didn’t just get Goldstein but Kooyong, North Sydney, Wentworth, and Curtin.

There are plenty of Liberals in Victoria who wish there’d been a rogue senator down there prepared to spend money polling seats that weren’t on campaign HQ’s radar. If someone had done that, the party might not have been blindsided by the big swings against it in Menzies, Deakin, Aston and Casey.

Originally published as James Campbell: Matt Kean Deves whodunit reveals real division in the NSW Division