PM’s state of disarray an avoidable debacle
Scott Morrison has only himself to blame if NSW’s preselection mess costs him the election. Liberals say the foundations of the ‘democratic experiment’ were shaky from the start.
Scott Morrison’s prospects of a second election victory were looking bright 18 months ago, with Coalition MPs certain his home state of NSW would deliver a swag of electoral gains to more than offset likely losses in Western Australia and Queensland.
Fast-forward to the start of the 2022 election campaign and the Prime Minister is in a world of political trouble over his mishandling of the NSW preselection process.
The civil war in the NSW Liberal division – one of the ugliest factional disputes in the party’s history – was technically resolved this week when the NSW Court of Appeal upheld the right of the federal division to allow Morrison to cancel preselections and install candidates in 12 seats.
But the protracted dispute has put a sledgehammer through the party’s campaign in the most important battleground state and has assisted Anthony Albanese’s goal of entering The Lodge.
It paved the way for a fortnight of pre-election attacks on the character of the Prime Minister from his long-time factional enemies outgoing senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and former candidate for Morrison’s seat of Cook, Michael Towke.
The ingredients for the imbroglio include cumbersome party rules, a factional player in cabinet minister Alex Hawke, a hubristic Prime Minister, and Liberal members fed up with being taken for granted.
Liberal MPs are accusing the Prime Minister of working with Hawke to subvert rank-and-file preselections to install candidates in seats who would favour his Centre-Right faction, at the expense of the party’s rival Moderate and Right factions.
The plan – hatched at a time when the Coalition was eyeing up to 10 Labor-held seats in NSW, including three in the Hunter Valley – would have seen the Centre-Right faction hold more sway in the federal partyroom.
But while Morrison thought the party would heed his wishes, he misjudged the impact of the 2017 party reforms and the frustration of members not being given a say in the choice of their candidates.
And with the party now just putting candidates in the field ahead of the starting gun being fired, there is not much optimism in Liberal ranks of making a net gain of seats in NSW, the state considered Morrison’s “pathway to victory” a year ago.
Ambitious initiative
In July 2017, conservative powerbroker Walter Villatora believed he had secured the end of candidates being chosen by party leaders and faction bosses instead of the rank-and-file members.
His ambitious initiative – championed by former prime minister Tony Abbott – had passed with a strong majority at a special Liberal Party’s Future Directions Convention.
Known as the Warringah Motion, the reform was supposed to ensure state and federal candidates were chosen through plebiscites by party members without interference by faction bosses.
“The party members have clearly spoken. The era of brutal factionalism is over,” Villatora triumphantly declared.
Party reforms further strengthened the role of members by requiring 90 per cent of the party’s administrative body – the NSW state executive, comprised of members of the three factions – to agree to cancel preselections to install candidates preferred by the factions or party leader.
In early 2021, the prospect of statewide preselections for the federal election due by May 2022 appeared promising. A May 6 roundtable of NSW Liberal factional heavyweights agreed to implement a preselection timetable resolved by the party’s state executive five days earlier.
The Greater Sydney seats of Mitchell, Dobell and Reid would be part of the 13 seats in tranche one, opening nominations for preselections on May 3, and closing on May 21.
For the 12 seats in the last tranche, including Parramatta, Warringah and Environment Minister Sussan Ley’s seat of Farrer, nominations would open last, on November 1.
The Moderates were represented at the factional meeting by North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman; the Right faction by Charles Perrottet, the brother of the NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet; while Hawke was there as leader of the Centre-Right faction.
The Prime Minister’s senior adviser Yaron Finklestein participated as well too.
Despite the promising early signs, Liberal sources say that the foundations of the NSW Liberals’ democratic experiment appeared shaky from the outset.
“The view, in hindsight, is that there was never a genuine desire to have preselections,” one Liberal insider says.
Early nominations against Zimmerman in North Sydney and Hawke in Mitchell respectively had caused consternation within their factions. There was also a challenge against Ley in the seat of Farrer.
Plebiscites were fine, as long as they didn’t involve factional powerbrokers having to face challenges for their seats.
By September, concerns on the NSW state executive had erupted during meetings amid ongoing concerns about the four-month delay to preselections in the Central Coast seat of Dobell.
Three viable candidates – local cafe owner Jemima Gleeson, former Australian cricketer Nathan Bracken and St Vincent’s cardiologist Michael Feneley – were all vying to challenge Labor’s Emma McBride in the seat, which is held with just a 1.5 per cent margin.
The only problem was the alleged failure of Hawke to attend nomination review committee meetings – a vetting process that is required to green-light candidates – for months.
Liberal insiders claim the Prime Minister’s Office had declared there was “no way” Bracken or Feneley – who was belatedly endorsed as the seat’s candidate in March – could win the seat, instead preferring Gleeson, who is a Pentecostal preacher.
As one member of the party’s state executive told The Australian in late October: “He (Hawke) can’t win these selections democratically, so he is blocking them from happening in the hope of imposing factional candidates at the 11th hour and on a scale never seen before.”
The insight would prove to be prescient.
Just one month later, and using powers designed to ameliorate rare instances of corruption or gross financial mismanagement in a party division, Morrison urged the Liberal Party’s federal executive to intervene in the NSW branch to install his preferred candidates in outstanding seats.
His push was rejected by other members of the federal executive, with opposition led by former Howard government minister Nick Minchin.
Despite the threat and the array of Labor-held marginal seats seemingly within the Coalition’s grasp, the factional brinkmanship continued well into the new year as the Omicron variant swept through the country, denting Morrison’s personal standing with Australian voters over the way he handled the outbreak.
Conservatives were unwilling to yield to Hawke’s “my way or the highway” negotiating tactics, and Hawke refused to change course.
Of the 10 seats targeted by the Coalition in May (held by the ALP on less than a 5 per cent margin), five of those remained without a candidate into December last year: Eden-Monaro (0.5 per cent), Dobell (1.5 per cent), Gilmore (2.7 per cent), Greenway (2.8 per cent), and Parramatta (3.6 per cent).
Only two of them – Gilmore in December and Dobell in March this year – were resolved before the Prime Minister moved to install his “captain’s picks”.
In-principle deal
In January, Liberal factional powerbrokers began surreptitiously working to overcome the preselection impasse, working to negotiate a deal that would appeal across the factional divide.
On January 23, key stakeholders agreed to an in-principle deal during a Saturday midday Zoom meeting: incumbent MPs endorsed; Gleeson selected in Dobell; PwC consultant Alex Dore as the Hughes candidate; and automatically endorsing Foreign Minister Marise Payne in the No.1 Senate ticket.
The only problem was with an element of the NSW Liberals’ Right faction. Aggrieved by their representatives – Charles Perrottet and Catholic School NSW chief executive Dallas McInerney – failure to extract a fair cut from the agreement and the Left’s not upholding their part of the Unity pact (an uneasy alliance between the Liberal’s left and right wings), the faction used three votes on the 27-member state executive to block the backroom agreement.
By mid-February, fears about the party’s lack of candidates in vital seats had reached a frenzy. According to one Liberal source, the same factional agreement had been “revisited again and again, but it was always the same outcome”.
With the clock running out, the federal executive voted to temporarily dissolve the state executive, replacing the body with a panel comprised of the Prime Minister, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and former federal Liberal president Christine McDiven.
The task of the panel was to endorse the three sitting Liberal MPs who were facing challenges.
A month later, the same action was taken to endorse candidates in nine seats, but by this stage Morrison had to install candidates that were not his initial preference, including moderate Jenny Ware in the seat of Hughes and Maria Kovacic in Parramatta.
“This was all completely unnecessary because they have now ended up in a result where they have ended up preselecting a whole bunch of moderates because their candidates fall out of the field,” one Liberal MP said.
Sigh of relief
Enter Matthew Camenzuli, the 43-year-old IT millionaire who used his vote on the state executive to block candidates being installed without plebiscites.
In a move that could have brought Morrison’s campaign into further disarray, he asked the Supreme Court of NSW to invalidate the endorsements of three sitting MPs, arguing their appointments were in breach of the party’s constitution.
He subsequently sought a Supreme Court injunction to strike out last-minute Liberal candidates in Eden-Monaro, Parramatta, Hughes, Warringah, Fowler, Grayndler, Greenway, McMahon and Newcastle.
Morrison’s allies breathed a sigh of relief this week when Camenzuli’s challenge was rejected by the NSW Court of Appeal. But undeterred, he has taken the issue to the High Court.
While Camenzuli stridently believes he is working in the best interest of party members, his ongoing resistance has led to him being tagged a “terrorist” by members of the state executive. He was expelled by the NSW Liberal Party on Wednesday.
Uphill battle
On ABC’s 7.30 report on Tuesday night, Morrison said the reason he stepped in to take control of NSW preselections was to protect Liberal women, notably Ley.
His claim was widely derided within the NSW division, given two of the three sitting MPs he moved to save were men, including his ally Hawke.
Regardless, Liberal MPs say NSW seats the party could have won are now unlikely to fall their way because there have not been candidates door knocking and meeting voters.
“It is going to be very hard to win (seats in NSW),” a Liberal MP said. “When your leader is already a big drag on your vote, then you need to rely on local candidates to gain lost ground.
“If the local candidates are not known because they have only got five weeks in the field, then it is not a very good outcome.”
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