Eden-Monaro: Send in the clowns? They’ve already been and gone

John Barilaro, left, and Andrew Constance.

“Can of worms” no longer comes close to describing the situation inside­ the Coalition over the Eden-Monaro by-election. Try barrel of brown snakes.

The collapse of the campaigns of the two supposed frontrunners, John Barilaro and Andrew Constance­, even before they began, partly thanks to their spoiling tactics against one another, has seriously damaged them, smeared egg over Scott Morrison and his numbers man Alex Hawke, and left NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian with a Deputy Premier and a Transport Minister looking foolish, vindictive and/or inept.

Labor leader Anthony Alban­ese was alerted to Constance’s impendin­g withdrawal with a text message headlined “clusterf..k alert”. Impossible to argue with that.

A few journos have also been left looking dumbstruck, after first assuming Barilaro was a shoo-in, then that Constance was. They never were, although Constanc­e was the government’s best option to snatch the seat from Labor, according to its internal polling, one reason Morrison let it be known he backed his candidacy.

The other of course was the havoc a Barilaro candidacy would have wreaked inside the Coalition.

Morrison’s men made the mistake­ of thinking Constance would win the preselection, or that there might not be one at all, hoping­ that any other candidates would get the message not to run. Wrong on all counts.

Barilaro’s poll numbers were rubbery at best, based on a robopoll which put him only slightly ahead even before Labor’s attack ads started, and Constance gravely underestimated the reaction of locals­ to his decision to run.

On Monday night, amid the speculation of a sure win for Constan­ce in both the preselection then the by-election, despite Morrison’s support for his candid­acy delivered via surrogates, and in the face of suggestions by other surrogates to branch members that a contest was not needed, a determined Fiona Kotvojs quietly lodged her nomination.

Fiona Kotvojs. Picture: Supplied

Kristy McBain. Picture: AAP

Kotvojs had stripped back Mike Kelly’s margin to less than 1 per cent last year with no help from head office: no money, no resources­, few high-profile visits. She is now the frontrunner in the preselection, with her backers confident she can win that and the by-election — even though she will be up against Kristy­ McBain, Labor’s polished performer — and deliver all the kudos to Morrison without the heartache of a Baril­aro or Constan­ce candidacy.

While the blokes were dithering about whether or not to run, or which one would run, or who would support whom, or what deals could be engineered to get their candidate up, the two women were getting on with it.

News of Kotvojs’s nomination would have unsettled Constance, as would the insistence by the locals­ of a ballot, along with the view that his recor­d and behaviour would count against him.

On March 10, Constance complained that politicians including him spent too much time on internal­ machinations. Constance found it so distasteful, he said, that he was going to call it quits.

After he announced his candid­acy, he faced accusations of complicity in deals and double deals, which led to Barilaro’s withdrawal. Returning the favour, Barilaro reporte­dly called his supposed friend a short, unpublishable word. Attempts by powerful backers such as Hawke to have nominations close early to block other candidates and so give Constance a clear run also hurt him.

Initially, self-interest had appeared­ to trump personal animosities going back almost 20 years when two brash young men clashed over the decision by Constance to contest Bega, the seat he was preparing this week to vacate. As state director of the NSW Liberals, Morrison was flat-out opposed to the then Darlinghurst resident running for it in 2003, even though Constance was born in the region, with family there dating back to the 1860s. His friends speculated it was memories of this that emerged earlier this year after the Prime Minister, without paying Constance the courtesy­ of forewarning him, visit­ed the devastated region to try to make amends for holidaying in Hawaii while bushfires raged. Constance said Morrison got the “welcome he probably deserved” in Cobargo when locals refused to shake his hand and abused him.

It takes a while to recover from the trauma of fires, more so if you witness them, as Constance did, and even longer if, as Constance’s friends say, he has suffered attacks from the black dog. Constance tried to address references to his “emotional fragility” by saying it’s a positive with voters, reflected that there were “key learnings” out of the bushfires for Morrison, who was now doing a stellar job on the corona­virus, and promised to continue speaking his mind.

Sick of the manoeuvring and duplicity, locals had a simple message: if the party wanted another Gilmore, abandoning a fair pre­selection was the way to achieve it. That was a reference to Morrison’s imposition of Warren­ Mundine on Gilmore Liberals, who refused to campaign for him in the south coast seat. The disunity ensured he lost at last year’s federal election.

Locals insisted if the party expected­ volunteers in Eden-Monaro to turn out in bitterly cold weather in late June or early July, when the by-election is expected, then members deserved the right to choose the candidate. They threatened a revolt that would have matched the one prov­oked by the leaking to Sky’s ­And­rew Clennell of Barilaro’s text messages to federal Nationals leader Mich­ael McCormack.

Barilaro wanted to get into federal­ parliament to knock off McCormack, then lost it after McCormack refused to be a party to his own assassinatio­n by enthusiastically backing his assassin. ­Federal Nationals­ are now convinced Barilaro will suffer the fate he had planned for McCormack at the hands of state nationals.

Berejiklian should not have to call for the resignations of Barilaro and Constance: they should do the right thing by her and resign their ministries, serve until the next election then quietly disappear.

It has been politics at its most brutal, most farcical and most self-serving for a week now, then just when you thought it couldn’t get any madder, there were reports that Liberal vice-president Teena McQueen was sounding out people to see if they would support a run in the seat by her great friend and former prime minister Tony Abbott. The behaviour will only deepen the despair of ­voters in the electorate who have been to hell twice this year, once with the fires, then again with COVID-19, who are still living in tents or caravans.

It is simply unforgivable.