Bernardi makes his pitch in Liberal heartland

A welcome mat for party defectors is rare, but Cory Bernardi ­enthralled his audience in a Liberal heartland.

Branch president George Szabo with Cory Bernardi at Roseville Golf Club in Sydney. Picture: James Croucher

A welcome mat for party defectors is rare, but Cory Bernardi ­enthralled his audience in Liberal heartland.

Invited to speak at a fundraiser for the Roseville branch of the Liberal Party on Sydney’s north shore last night, the self-proclaimed ­leader of the new Australian Conservatives appealed to the frustrated and disillusioned members of the party he left behind earlier this year. “We’re positioning ourselves as a safe space for conser­vatives,” he told 300 avid listeners packed into the Roseville Golf Club’s auditorium.

To much applause, Senator Bernardi confirmed he intended to run candidates at the next federal election in the lower house as well as the Senate, where he is currently a party of one.

He insisted his objective was not to oust the Turnbull government, but to remind Malcolm Turnbull and his party not to take real conservatives for granted.

“Rather than a threat to the Liberal Party, I want to give it a robustness,” Senator Bernardi said. His core principles were based on helping families, deregulating the economy and strengthening small businesses.

The presence of Senator Bernardi has presented the NSW Liberal Party with a dilemma, deeply divided as it is between moderates and their conservative critics calling for reform that can give them what they say is lacking — a democratic voice based on “one vote, one value”.

At an event in which Senator Bernardi was asked by branch president George Szabo to speak on the topic of “Is the party over?”, even the Liberal brand was downplayed: the gathering was rebranded as the Northern Sydney Conservative Forum. Past speakers have included Mark Latham, Tony Abbott’s former chief of staff Peta Credlin and, last year, Mr Abbott himself. Organisers say the purpose is to get the Liberals back on their traditional conservative track.

“If the party is not over yet, it is well on the way,” Senator Bernardi said. He even suggested it might need a vodka, like a party running out of puff, to keep it going.

The now crossbench senator said he had grown tired as a Liberal of being told to “just shut up about things”. He was tired too of careerists in politics.

He did not aspire to high office, he said, but he did want to make an impact and believed he already was. “Politics has become a vehicle for people to pursue their own ambitions, rather than the ­ambitions of the country,” he said.

With 15,000 members and more than 20,000 individual donations, with an average of $35, he believed he was leading a grassroots ­movement.

He said he needed more volunteers and intended to build a state-based organisation.

Senator Bernardi said Islam had become “the single most hot-­button issue” for voters because Australia was taking the wrong sort of immigrants — allowing into the country those who “didn’t want to integrate but wanted to take advantage”. Legal changes were needed, he said, to “stop rorting welfare, visas and halal certification”.

While he had been advised it was not constitutionally possibly to outlaw the wearing of the burka in the street, he did support the idea of banning the burka in shops and ­other private businesses.

Introduced to the group by Mr Szabo, Senator Bernardi said: “It seems we have an agent provocateur. I thought I was the bad boy of the Liberal Party.”