Jess might survive this

The Liberal Party made the right decision to accept the resignation of their candidate in Lyons Jessica Whelan after a series of anti-Muslim social media comments emerged this week.

Jessica Whelan at Agfest this week. Picture: Gary Ramage

THE Liberal Party made the right decision — of course — to accept the resignation of their candidate in Lyons Jessica Whelan after a series of anti-Muslim social media comments emerged this week that appeared to have been posted under her name in recent years. Such views are sadly far too common in our community, but they clearly have no place among our elected representatives.

Ms Whelan, for her part, admitted yesterday to having made “some ill-advised and misinformed comments in the past”. But she says she now plans to run as an independent seeing as her disendorsement came too late to remove her from the ballot paper. This remains her right, a right enjoyed by every Australian citizen. And Ms Whelan — who is also a Brighton councillor — says she will take it seriously, in that she intends to “campaign a bit on social media and actively campaign locally”.

I’M STILL RUNNING, SAYS WHELAN

The timing of Ms Whelan’s disendorsement throws a serious spanner in the works. It means that she will appear on the ballot papers given to all voters in Lyons as the Liberal candidate for that seat. And while some of the Liberal Party corflutes advertising her candidacy across the electorate were removed yesterday, hundreds remain in place through the sprawling seat that takes in so much of Tasmania — and they likely will until polling day. This episode has also further boosted Ms Whelan’s profile. And what do they say? All publicity is good publicity.

It is a situation reminiscent of 1996, when an essentially unknown Liberal candidate — and local councillor — in Ipswich to the west of Brisbane was identified by the local paper as having written letters to the editor warning Australia was being swamped by Asians. In that instance too, the candidate — Pauline Hanson — was disendorsed too late by the Liberals, and so still appeared on the ballot papers as a Liberal candidate. With the additional votes garnered by the publicity, she won her seat in the Federal Parliament and then started her own political party that has been a consistent fourth-force in Australian politics ever since.

There is no suggestion that this is what Ms Whelan plans. Equally, none of us should assume this is the end of the road for her politically. In the “personal statement distributed at the request of former Liberal candidate for Lyons Jessica Whelan” by the Liberal Party of Tasmania’s media unit just before lunchtime yesterday, Ms Whelan said she was looking forward “to continue contributing to the community”.

Meanwhile, the person with the biggest egg on his face is Liberal Party state director Sam McQuestin (the driver of the getaway car when Ms Whelan fled the cameras after the Prime Minister’s campaign stop at Agfest on Thursday). When the Mercury on Wednesday afternoon showed him two of the social media posts apparently made by Ms Whelan, it took him five hours to respond. When that response finally arrived, it said that one of the posts “appears to have been digitally manipulated” — a phrase then repeated by Prime Minister Scott Morrison the next day. Yet not much more than 12 hours after that — following another Mercury front page article with allegations about more posts — the federal Liberal Party’s campaign spokesman Simon Birmingham announced that Ms Whelan would be disendorsed (she ended up “resigning”).

Prime Minister Morrison yesterday: “The information in front of us yesterday was not the information that we were able to receive overnight.”

Journalist: “Have you been lied to?”

Prime Minister: “Yes”.