Election 2022: Libs deny Deves pick was ploy to lure religious vote from Sydney’s west

Senior NSW Liberals admit Katherine Deves’ views on transgender people became a “costly distraction” for the party.

Katherine Deves. Picture: Monique Harmer

Senior NSW Liberals have debunked claims the party’s failed candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, was hand-picked by Scott Morrison because her views on transgender people could lure votes from religious conservatives in western Sydney seats.

But in an election post-mortem, they conceded Ms Deves’ troubled campaign became a “costly distraction” for the Liberals and she had no hope of winning back Tony Abbott’s former seat from independent MP Zali Steggall.

The result in Warringah was one of the NSW Liberals’ most ­disappointing, with a primary vote of just 32.4 per cent – a 6.6 per cent swing against.

Party insiders say Mr Morrison wanted Ms Deves for Warringah because he thought she was the best candidate to match Ms Steggall, as a female lawyer from the local community.

They say Mr Morrison’s later defence of Ms Deves, when she was criticised over her headline cause of opposing transgender women competing in sport against biological women, was an afterthought. They dispute it was a premeditated message to voters, saying the former prime minister had little choice except to back his candidate.

The Australian understands Ms Deves, as a novice to politics, first wanted to nominate for ­preselection in 2022 as a trial run to gain experience for the 2025 election.

Mr Morrison instead wanted her to become the candidate ­immediately, after ­Warringah had been caught up in delays to other NSW preselections and the job of choosing a candidate was passed to him in late March, along with NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and former party president Christine McDiven.

So close to the election, ­detailed candidate vetting was rushed. As a Liberal Party member for less than six months, Ms Deves also required a party dispensation to be eligible to seek preselection.

Picking Ms Deves in a hurry, it appears Mr Morrison was unaware of her social media history which included tweets not only criticising transgender women in sport but referring to “vulnerable children surgically mutilated and sterilised”. Gender reassignment surgery is generally not lawful for children under 18 in Australia.

Liberals believe that, while Ms Deves tried her best, her inexperience showed. She struggled to shift attention from her transgender issue to others, such as health, education, transport and climate change, that mattered most to local voters.

Mr Morrison’s office intervened, appointing former journalist and now public relations consultant Mark Westfield as a party-paid adviser. But tensions emerged quickly as the Deves team allegedly “went rogue” by running its own campaign in isolation from the party and Warringah’s federal electoral conference. After an earlier apology for using language about transgender people that was “not acceptable”, Ms Deves reverted to her harder line.

Following complaints from Ms Deves, the Liberal Party hired two security guards to protect her every day of the campaign, ­although the nature of security threats to her remains unclear. Two out of three threats allegedly occurred before she was a ­candidate and came from outside Warringah.

Liberals in neighbouring seats say Ms Deves’ inability to shrug off the transgender issue became a huge distraction for them. One said it also “encapsulated what people thought of Morrison and why they disliked him”, even though the former PM was not driving the Deves campaign.

Another said: “We weren’t to know how this was going to run with someone who wasn’t accustomed to the intensity of an ­election campaign, it was an ­experiment.”