Blunder. Noun. A gross, stupid or careless mistake. See also boner, botch, bungle, befoul, gaffe, goof, flub, and fudge. There is another synonym beginning with the letter ‘f’ and you should be able to hear it in all its profanity shouted out into mobile telephones if you’ve been anywhere near Liberal HQ in Sydney’s Macquarie Street in the last three days.
The Liberal Party has failed to nominate a catalogue of candidates in the coming local government elections in New South Wales on September 14.
The date for nominations came and went with a lot of paperwork missing. Around 140 of the party’s candidates have disappeared into the ether, with as many as 48 elected councillors now looking for something to do with their spare time.
Liberal Party candidates will not appear at all in a dozen council elections while as many as six other council elections will feature only a smattering of blue on ballot papers.
Deep in their hearts every member of the NSW Liberal Executive believes their party is the natural party of government at local, state and federal levels while appearing to have no working knowledge of the Gregorian calendar.
To be honest, they didn’t have to learn everything about the Gregorian calendar. No furrowing of brows around spring and neap tides, winter and summer solstices or that leap years have 366 days. They did not have to commit to memory the number of days in each month, possibly by the use of a helpful mnemonic, “30 days has September, April, June, and November, when short February’s done, All the rest have 31.”
All the NSW Liberal Executive had to do was put a large red circle around Wednesday, August 14, midday to be precise, although let’s not take them down a tangent on the space time continuum. They’re confused enough as it is.
They could have etched in some skull-and-crossbone motif on said date on the calendar for extra effect or simply scrawled in the word ‘deadline’. Anyone who works to one will tell you, they are called deadlines for a reason in that if you miss one, you may still be respiring but you have ceased to be in the eyes of your overlords.
To quote the recently departed and much loved Jack Karlson when rudely interrupted from his succulent Chinese meal, “This is democracy manifest.” Rest in peace, King.
The botch, blunder, blooper – take your pick – won’t quite lead to Saddam Hussein’s stunning win in the 2002 Iraqi Presidential Referendum where with a recorded 100 per cent voter turnout, the old mass murderer won every single vote, a swing towards of 0.01 when he managed 99.99 per cent of the vote seven years earlier, but it is getting close.
In Penrith’s East Ward, for example, there will be no election because the only five nominations received on time came from Labor and as there are only five spots up for grabs, all five Labor candidates will be elected automatically uncontested.
In Wards Two and Four in the Blue Mountains, voters can take their pick between the Greens and Labor. There are no other options available. In the Northern Beaches all current Liberal councillors have now lost their jobs. Two elected councillors in Camden in Sydney’s burgeoning south west corridor, have also had their political careers roughly ended and understandably on Thursday, were not taking calls.
It’s a disaster, not just for the Liberal Party but for good governance at the lowest tier of government in Australia. Too often we dismiss local governments as bin collectors and road pothole fillers but in reality local government has a close touch to our communities, how they are managed, developed and made liveable or not.
What we are bound to see is that people with little or no experience of government will have oversight of millions of dollars with little sense of accountability or the experience to make good decisions. My hot tip when all the votes are counted, is that more than a few councils will be pushed into administration over the next four years, brought under the control of the state government.
Worse, this local election (and one on the other side of the Murray in October) will feature the rise of a group of wannabe politicians known as My Place, running as independents. The loose collective is a veritable grandma’s fruitcake in that it may contain traces of nuts. My Place is an open sewer of pseudo-law advocacy, a dystopian cult that regards 5G, vaccines, chemtrails and fluoride in water as a means of government control of the populace. Oddly, they hate government so much they want to become part of it.
My Place leader Darren Bergwerf, a Victorian in Frankston was interviewed last year where he opined that he could not be sure the Holocaust occurred because he “wasn’t there when it happened.”
Where My Place candidates might have struggled to garner enough votes to ease their backsides into council seats, now their chances of being elected have increased threefold or more They are prominent in the Hunter Valley and in the mid-North Coast.
So how did this happen? This is not the first time the NSW Liberal Party has shown itself to be dysfunctional but it is almost certainly the largest episode of administrative buffoonery in the party’s history. The NSW Liberal Executive summarily dismissed its state director, Richard Shields in the wake of the bungle. For what it’s worth, Shields blames state party president, former MLC and state minister, Don Harwin for a failure to act decisively in preselections. One strongly suspects that Shields will not be the only member of the state executive given their marching orders in the coming weeks.
The faction-riddled party now faces the huge task of rebuilding its administrative base before the next federal election, to be held on or before September 27, 2025.
Damn that tricky Gregorian calendar.
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