Failure to launch: Inside the NSW Liberals’ slippery slope towards council nominations fiasco

As voters go to the polls on Saturday, we explore what’s at stake in the NSW local government elections.See all 10 stories.

On Tuesday night, local Liberals filed into the Market Street offices of a communications firm to launch the party’s campaign for next month’s City of Sydney council election.

Drinks and canapes flowed, but the candidates, including mayoral contender Lyndon Gannon and number two on the ticket, Patrice Pandeleos, were nervous. They were yet to actually submit their nomination, and the deadline was noon the next day.

As soon as the event ended, Gannon, Pandeleos and the rest of the team high-tailed it to Liberal Party headquarters on Macquarie Street to fill in their forms. They finally finished about 11pm, and their nominations made it.

They were the lucky ones. Also present at head office that night scrambling to complete their paperwork were preselected candidates for Lane Cove Council, which currently has a Liberal mayor. But by late Wednesday it became clear none of them had actually got on the ballot.

And they were not alone. We now know the NSW Liberal Party failed or partially failed to nominate 140 candidates across 16 local government areas, with party leader Mark Speakman pinning the blame on state director Richard Shields, who has been in the role nearly a year.

NSW Liberal Party state director Richard Shields.Credit: Dion Georgopoulos

“The first rule of getting elected is actually nominating,” a furious Speakman said on Thursday. “Our party administration has let the candidates, the party members and the general public down. This is a debacle, there’s no other way to describe it.”

In politics, things often get done at the last minute – but they usually do get done. Among shell-shocked MPs, candidates and other party members, the question everyone was still grappling with was: how did this fiasco happen? How did a major party machine whose key task is preparing for elections fail to make the deadline – or, it seems, ask for any help?

By Thursday night a full blame game was under way and tearing apart the party, with Shields releasing a dramatic statement claiming party president Don Harwin “volunteered to run the local government nomination process”, and he had “full trust” in Harwin to deliver.

“Calls for my resignation are premature,” Shields said, claiming he had been unaware the deadline wasn’t going to be met until it was too late, and that a review must take place “to establish the full facts”.

NSW Liberal Party president Don Harwin.Credit: Sam Mooy

Harwin, who called an emergency meeting of the party’s state executive for Thursday night, told the Herald in response: “Claims that I had responsibility for the nomination process are completely wrong. I think that’ll do.” The state executive sacked Shields late on Thursday.

Shields was appointed state director (equivalent to Labor’s party secretary) in September, having been head of government relations at Westpac and the Insurance Council of Australia. He had only just been elected mayor of Woollahra by his fellow councillors, and opted to stay in that role too.

Some senior party members were uneasy about that decision. One Liberal source said this week’s events had “vindicated all the people who were raising alarm bells about that at the time”.

Mary-Lou Jarvis, who serves on Woollahra Council with Shields and is a former NSW Liberal Party vice president, said on Thursday the party had done everything it could to support Shields as he juggled the two roles. “But unfortunately the job of mayor and state director is too much for one person,” she said.

Indeed, Shields had a busy week. On Monday night, he chaired a four-hour council meeting that ended about 10.30pm, including a long debate about parking arrangements at Camp Cove. (Liberal nominations for Woollahra made the deadline, but Shields is not running again.)

Downward slope: A now-deleted Facebook post by Woollahra Council showing mayor Richard Shields opening a playground on Wednesday morning.Credit: Facebook

On Wednesday morning, as the midday deadline fast approached, Shields attended the official opening of a newly upgraded playground in Rose Bay’s Lyne Park. On Facebook, Woollahra Council posted, but later deleted, a photo of Shields next to a slippery slide. It quickly angered many Liberals.

Shields told the Herald he had been at the office until 5am. “I slept for two hours, and then I drove past that park for one photo. I was there for two minutes, and it was on the way to work,” he said.

Furthermore, Shields said he remained as mayor because of “strident antisemitism in my community” following the atrocities of October 7 in Israel, “and the [party] leadership was happy with that position”. (Shields is Jewish.)

By that Wednesday morning, it was clear things had gone badly awry. As far back as the weekend, people who spoke with Shields’ deputy at party HQ, Dorina Ilievska, said it was clear that she and the secretariat were “under the pump” with council nominations.

Staff at Liberal HQ were emailing candidates at all hours of the night. According to a senior party source, who requested anonymity to speak freely, there were only three staff, and three computers, and given the backlog it soon became clear this was not enough. Candidates were driving around at night trying to find justices of the peace.

Senior MPs said they had no inkling something was seriously awry with the party’s council nominations.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Oatley MP Mark Coure, who is Speakman’s representative on the state executive, heard early on Wednesday morning that secretariat staff were “in meltdown” and it was evident they would not make the deadline for many LGAs. He called Speakman just before 10am and relayed that several nominations were outstanding, and he would speak to Shields.

But Coure could not get through to Shields or others until after the deadline had passed. Speakman said it was only when he spoke to Coure later, about 12.45pm, that the full horror show became clear. “I was told nominations had not been lodged in a number of LGAs,” Speakman said. Before that, he says, “I had no inkling … and others will have to speak for themselves.”

Speakman texted Shields on Wednesday, asking him to come to parliament to brief MPs on what went wrong. They later spoke on the phone, and “he was pretty clear he was not going to provide that briefing”, Speakman said. One journalist suggested to Speakman it was an embarrassing state of affairs: “He [Shields] has ghosted you, he’s not coming.”

Others also said they had trouble contacting head office. Wollongong councillor Cameron Walters said local Liberals offered to help with lodging paperwork but “no calls or messages to the secretariat were returned”. Shields said if people couldn’t get through, it was because HQ was “at action stations”, endorsing 249 candidates over 31 councils in one week.

Deputy Liberal leader Natalie Ward said she had no warning of the disaster. “The CEO’s job is to be the CEO,” she said. “The secretary has two jobs: administer the constitution of the party and administer electoral matters. It is clearly within his [Shields’] purview and that wasn’t done, and he, in my view, didn’t give appropriate notice that anybody else needed to help.”

Speakman said he had not received an apology from Shields. But Shields did say sorry to affected councillors, and to all party members, in a statement on Wednesday afternoon, in which he blamed insufficient resources for the catastrophe. Speakman publicly demanded Shields resign, but as of Thursday evening, he had refused, instead releasing a fire-and-brimstone statement shifting the blame to Harwin.

Down in the Shoalhaven, mayoral candidate Paul Ell and his Liberal colleagues only received their documents through the electoral commission portal about 1am on Tuesday. Like hundreds of others, they had to rush to sign the forms, lodge them and confirm with Liberal HQ so that the party could finalise and pay for the nomination. They did their part, but the party bosses did not do theirs.

Ell – a lawyer and sitting Liberal councillor who narrowly lost preselection for the federal seat of Gilmore earlier this year – explained the situation in a Facebook post. “As candidates for a registered political party, we needed the registered officer of the party to prepare these forms in the system for us. We couldn’t have done it ourselves even if we wanted to,” he wrote.

“They were only completed and ready for us to sign at midnight Monday night and we managed to get everything prepared and lodged for all our candidates on Tuesday. I, of course, wish that all the paperwork was ready for lodgement last week. I think people should show some compassion for people who have been prepared to step up and serve our community who have been denied the opportunity to do so due to no fault of their own. This is bad for local democracy, plain and simple.”

Ell, who is a respected Liberal figure on the south coast, already had corflutes up along the Princes Highway, and he has been flooded with messages of sympathy from fellow Liberals on Facebook. Paul Ritchie, a former speechwriter to prime ministers Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison, said: “Our shared work is now to activate for change – because what happened must never happen again.”

Meanwhile, in Labor circles, there was bewilderment at the Liberals’ incompetence and bemused jubilation that some candidates would be elected unopposed. Penrith’s east ward is uncontested, with all five Labor candidates, including at least one university student, guaranteed to get up.

The kicker? Voters in that ward don’t even need to show up on polling day.

With Max Maddison, Alexandra Smith and Anthony Segaert

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