The Liberal peacemakers in NSW

How the NSW party’s left and right factions thrashed out a compromise.

 

The last time Matt Kean had contact with Tony Abbott was when Kean was an 18-year-old work experience kid in Abbott’s electorate office.

That was until a little more than a week ago when, on Kean’s invitation, the former prime minister called the NSW Minister for Innovation and Better Regulation just before 11pm on a Thursday night to spend an hour attempting to thrash out some kind of agreement on Abbott and his team’s “Warringah motion”: the introduction of a system of political plebiscites for NSW and federal Liberal preselections.

Kean’s “moderate” Liberal left faction and a large breakaway group of the right headed by NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet had come up with the “Bennelong motion”, which proposed 75 per cent of votes for preselections to involve branch members, but also allowed for a 25 per cent state council and state executive “central component”.

Kean and Abbott spoke for more than an hour — including about potentially bringing plebiscites forward and making upper house votes more democratic.

Early the next morning, Kean felt so confident about the likelihood of a deal that he rang Premier Gladys Berejiklian to see if she was happy for it to go ahead. She said she was.

However, Abbott says that once he was hit with the detail of the supposed deal, including that he would have to move matters he did not believe in at the following Saturday’s state council meeting, he pulled out.

Speaking to The Australian, he has described his conversation with Kean as a “discussion, not a negotiation”. And in the state council meeting that followed, Kean and the group of left and right delegates defeated Abbott.

For decades the NSW Liberal Party has been engaged in a bitter war characterised by branch stacking, dirty tricks and a level of hatred between left and right that reaches Labor Party proportions.

In recent years the NSW factional structures have turned into a tussle between the left and centre-right on one side and the right on the other, with lobbyists Michael Photios and Nick Campbell controversially working for the left and centre-right respectively at the same time they were lobbying state and federal ministers.

But two relatively young bucks believe that last weekend they made a major dent in that conflict — creating the potential for peace and the possibility of moving ahead. One is Kean, 35. The other, on the right of the party, is Perrottet, 36. Depending on who you speak to in their factions, Kean and Perrottet are the saviours of the party or pariahs.

What is certain is that, last weekend at least, they replaced the contentious Photios and centre-right federal Assistant Home Affairs Minister Alex Hawke as the key powerbrokers in the party.

Last July, ordinary members of the party voted at a special conference at Rosehill in western Sydney by 746 votes to 476 to implement the Warringah motion. But to be ratified, the proposal required 60 per cent support on February 9.

The first version of the Abbott-backed Warringah motion, calling for unadulterated plebiscites, went down 235 to 288 on Saturday before last, with a second version failing 216 to 300.

A show of hands was all that was required for the Bennelong proposal to succeed, with the Kean camp claiming as much as 90 per cent of the membership voted for it. Disappointingly for Abbott and his supporters, this means the plebiscite system will not be in place until after the 2019 state and federal elections. As Abbott says: “All I know is that 55 per cent of the state council voted against 65 per cent of the membership. And he says he does not know who “was pulling the strings”.

Kean and Perrottet have known each other since their teens.

Even though Kean has always been in the left and Perrottet in what is known as the “hard right”, they have always respected each other and lately they have come together to find a way to squeeze out the centre-right faction led by Hawke, to quell the ambitions of Abbott forces in the party, and to attempt to push out what they see as lobbyists and “lurk merchants”.

The pair were Young Liberals who travelled together to National Union of Students conferences. Perrottet became a lawyer and Kean an accountant, but both entered NSW parliament together in the Barry O’Farrell landslide of 2011. Perrottet is being touted as a ­future premier should the Coalition remain in power, and Kean as a potential opposition leader should Berejiklian lose next year.

There is no doubt that Abbott and his team forced this month’s push for democratisation. But it was Kean and Perrottet who massaged it into a form that allowed it to pass state council.

On the right, joining Perrottet in the decision-making were his brother and former state executive member and NSW government staff member Charles; NSW MP Kevin Conolly, NSW Planning Minister Anthony Roberts and former NSW attorney-general Greg Smith.

Dominic Perrottet’s view was that the only way to get plebiscites through in any form was to do a deal. He believed the left would block any stronger reform, and this would lead to warfare that in turn could diminish the party’s chances of winning the next NSW election.

It was last September, while Perrottet and Kean were having dinner in the members’ dining room at state parliament, that the seeds of their collaboration were planted. Perrottet turned to Kean and said: “Why are we (left and right) always fighting each other? When we work together, we get good outcomes and get good people into parliament.”

This week Perrottet told The Australian: “I have long believed and advocated for many years that our grassroots members should have more of a say in the Liberal Party.

“This is why I — along with many other conservatives — supported the Rosehill/Warringah motions and voted for them.

“But perfection can’t be the enemy of the good. Unfortunately, the reality is the Warringah ­motion did not have the full support of the party.

“The subsequent motions that were passed were the next best option to bring full plebiscites and ban lobbyists from state executive.

“If this outcome had not occurred, the conservatives would have left that day with no reform and no voice within a divided party.

“But for the work of Tony Abbott and the Warringah conference, democratic reform would not have been achieved.”

There were other matters involved in the deal, including a set number of places for each faction on state executive, improving the right’s situation, and a decision to back Philip Ruddock, Kean’s great career sponsor, as party president.

Kean had his own barriers to get through to do a deal with the Perrottets.

He faced a meeting of the “moderates board” where lobbyist Joe Tannous, it is said, was directly hostile to him.

Tannous is said to have declared that the deal could not succeed and the faction could not trust the right.

Outgoing NSW party president Kent Johns, meanwhile, is said to have telephoned Kean afterwards and told him that if the deal fell over, his days as a faction leader would be over. Johns denies the exchange.

Kean talks of peace breaking out in the party: “What was clear is that we didn’t have to keep doing it this way just because we have always done it this way.

“Most of the differences in the factional divide were personality-based or issues unresolved from 30 years ago.

“The biggest threat to our re-election is division and infighting — we both made a decision that we had to find a way to bring everyone together.

“John Howard said it best. Our party is at its strongest when it embraces both its conservative and liberal traditions

“This was all about putting the party first, returning it to its members and clearing out the lobbyists and lurk merchants.

“It’s completely unacceptable that you have lobbyists using their political influence to cash in on the Liberal brand. Under this arrangement their days are over.

“This is the most significant reform to the NSW division of the Liberal Party in over a generation.

“We have delivered democracy, empowered the membership and cut out the lobbyists. One member, one vote means the party is returned to the majority and not run by an exclusive club of lobbyists and insiders.”

As with any true compromise, both men abandoned elements of what their respective sides stood for. The Perrottets moved away from what Abbott wanted and Kean moved away from what a Photios or Tannous would have wanted. Abbott bears no ill will towards Perrottet or supporters such as Roberts.

“Dom is a good guy. He’s doing a great job as Treasurer,” he tells The Australian.

“Robbo has been a conservative warrior. They're good blokes and friends of mine.”

Last week, following the failure to get the plebiscite vote up, Abbott wrote to all his conference backers telling them not to quit the party and saying they would have been happy with the reform three years ago.

“It’s disappointing that the faction-dominated state council did not simply ratify the (July 2017) Rosehill resolution for full one-member, one-vote control of everything but no insiders’ club readily surrenders power and, had these changes been made three years ago, the reform movement would have been ecstatic,” he said.

But he makes it clear to The Australian that the reform is the beginning, not the end.

“I think the party was morally obliged to improve the Rosehill resolution,” he says.

“I think it’s … wrong for a political party to establish a process and not respect the resolutions.

“Just as a point of principle, a party has to listen to its members.

“What’s the problem throughout the Western world right now?” He says it is the perception that leaders don’t listen. “There will come a time — maybe in a year, maybe in two — (when) it will be right to have another go.”