Alex Antic dismisses Liberal concerns over his senate ticket hit on Anne Ruston as ‘grievance’
Jane Hume says she’s ‘disappointed' after Conservative firebrand Alex Antic knocked off his party’s highest ranking woman from SA’s number one senate ticket spot.
Opposition Finance spokeswoman Jane Hume has called Alex Antic’s defeat of Anne Ruston for the number one spot on the SA state Senate ticket a “mistake,” but admitted she was powerless to intervene.
“Personally, I’m disappointed,” Ms Hume told Sky News. “Anne Ruston is a senior member of the shadow cabinet, she’s an exceptionally good shadow minister.”
The conservative firebrand made good on his plan to oust South Australia’s most senior female Liberal Anne Ruston for the number one spot in a preselection brawl that has split the party.
His boilover win is a microcosm of the debate gripping the Liberals nationally, with moderates arguing the party will never regain Teal-held seats if it keeps alienating small-l liberal and female voters by ignoring gender concerns.
While expressing her disappointment at the result Ms Hume acknowledged she could not intervene.
“Frankly I think that this was a mistake but it’s a mistake of the South Australian Liberal division, it’s not a decision I can make,” she said.
In his first comments since his preselection victory on Saturday, Senator Antic told The Australian that gender was “a grievance narrative” and that the party needed to get back to its conservative roots.
The backbench senator prevailed 108 to 98 votes over Senator Ruston, who is shadow minister for health and aged care and was Minister for Families and Social Services in the Morrison Government.
While putatively counted as a moderate, Senator Ruston is not a factional player and is understood to be dismayed at having been challenged for the top spot.
Many in the party regarded the preselection battle as unnecessary and divisive given that both the number one and two spots are guaranteed victory anyway.
One senior Liberal described Senator Antic’s challenge as “an indulgent ego trip” and said there is concern that the issue will hurt the party at next Saturday’s state by-election in Dunstan, a middle class, inner city electorate held by retiring former Premier Steven Marshall by just 260 votes.
But Senator Antic said he believed the party needed to be much bolder in pursuing a conservative policy agenda, pointing to Scott Morrison’s 2019 victory as an example of how the party can succeed when championing “the quiet Australians”.
“It is a great honour to have the endorsement of our Liberal Party state council to lead the Senate ticket at the next election,” Senator Antic told The Australian.
“I’m looking forward to continuing my work promoting true Liberal values in South Australia.
“The ALP is obsessed with inner city green politics and to be successful, we must win the town halls and football clubs of our regions and outer suburbs.
“The results of the Federal election in 2019 remind us that Liberal Party is at its best when it is speaking on behalf of the quiet Australians.”
Senator Antic also disputed that the defeat of the state’s most senior female Liberal would result in any voter backlash.
“The “gender card” is nothing but a grievance narrative, constructed by the activist media and a disgruntled political class,” he said. “We need the best person for the job regardless of race, gender or sexuality.”
While Senator Ruston declined to comment on the result, others in the party said they were “shaking our heads that this even happened”.
“The whole thing is completely bloody stupid,” one party source said.
Some SA Liberals believe Senator Antic should have been kicked out of the party when he vowed to withhold his vote from the Morrison Government in protest at vaccination mandates, and are enraged he is now the state’s lead Liberal Senate candidate.
It is the second time in 12 months that the SA Liberal Party has been beset by dramas over female representation.
Last year the former deputy premier and Attorney-General Vicki Chapman quit her inner eastern seat of Bragg, with State Liberal Leader David Speirs publicly declaring he wanted to see a female candidate installed to replace the state’s longest serving female MP.
However, grassroots members in the Bragg electoral college opted instead to preselect lawyer Jack Batty over a field of female candidates, despite the SA Liberals having just two female MPs out of the 16 seats they hold in the state’s Lower House after their 2022 election drubbing.
In contrast, the Malinauskas Government counts 14 women among its 27 Lower House MPs.
Senator Antic has been extremely vocal about the SA Liberals’ leftward drift under moderate influence, with the party seeing a surge in conservative memberships in protest at Steven Marshall and Vickie Chapman’s support for late-term abortion and euthanasia laws, and their perceived ambivalence to the impact of Covid rules on the private sector.
Hundreds of new members have flooded the branches in the past two years, many of them from socially conservative churches who felt the SA Liberals had lost their way.
Senator Antic’s victory confirms the growing conservative influence over the state party.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said last month that he would not pick winners in the contest between Senators Antic and Ruston, nor whether third-placed Senator David Fawcett should be spared from being pushed further down the ticket.
“The decision for number one is an issue for the members within the South Australia Division,” Mr Dutton said.
“Any member of the Liberal Party, including from the Leader down, has one vote and Leaders often have – I think there’s a great history in our Party of Leaders directing people where to cast their votes and people doing the opposite.”
“Anne is a very valued colleague, I’ve worked closely with her, she’s in the leadership group, she’s in the Shadow Ministry now doing a great job in the Shadow Health Portfolio, she would be a Minister in my Government. Equally, Alex and David are great colleagues, and each brings different skills and different attributes. “
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