By Kishor Napier-Raman and Noel Towell
Macquarie Street can be a place for second chances.
In 2018, Clifford Jennings was at the centre of a plot to stack the Young Nationals with his fellow alt-right sympathisers and drag the party down a nationalist rabbit hole. He subsequently resigned from the party and was banned for life amid an investigation into alleged ties to alt-right groups.
Five years on, Jennings is working in NSW parliament as a senior adviser for Liberal Democrat upper house MP John Ruddick.
Jennings, who’s also worked for veteran Bible basher Fred Nile, wound up in the office of Wagga Wagga independent MP Joe McGirr this year. Upon learning of Jennings’ past, which included expressing views such as banning immigration to Australia from non-Western countries, McGirr dumped him.
That’s when Jennings got on the phone to Ruddick, with whom he’d already interviewed for a job.
Ruddick told CBD he was aware of Jennings’ past, but after some initial hesitation, he hired him because the party “believes in rehabilitation”.
Ruddick, who’s a staunch supporter of Israel, told this column he’d reached out to David Adler, head of the Australian Jewish Association, infamous for his unsavoury comments about Stan Grant and Lidia Thorpe during the Voice to parliament debate.
Adler vouched for Jennings’ pro-Israel bona fides, and recommended him as a staffer.
“He’s made some poor decisions in the past, but bottom line is he’s a consummate professional when it comes to staffing,” Ruddick told CBD.
“Will [Jennings] just wants to be a staffer, and he’s really, really good.”
PETER’S PICKS
Dutton’s dud choices.Credit: Shakespeare
Poor old Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has had a dodgy couple of days – brightened only by a bit of horror polling for his opposite number Anthony Albanese.
First, the Liberal Leader’s two endorsements for a vacant NSW senate spot – Zed Seselja and Andrew Constance – lost out to former Wentworth MP Dave Sharma, who pointedly did not have Dutton’s backing.
Further south that day, a sort of winnable spot on the party’s Victorian Senate ticket went to some dude called Kyle Hoppitt, who hopped over the top of Dutton’s pick Greg Mirabella in the contest.
Then on Monday, former Department of Home Affairs boss Michael Pezzullo – with whom Dutton had enjoyed a certain simpatico when they worked together enforcing the hardline “sovereign borders” policy on refugees and asylum seekers – was told his services would no longer be required.
Some of the thousands of indiscreet text messages from the former senior bureaucrat unearthed by this masthead’s investigation showed Pezzullo lobbying the Liberal Party hard for Dutton to get the Home Affairs ministry after Scott Morrison’s ascension to the prime ministership.
Dutton returned the favour after the text message scandal broke in September, publicly praising Pezzullo and his “passion” for home affairs, not that you’d expect any of that to save the departmental boss from his fate under a Labor government.
Still, you’d have to think that Dutton – whose office wasn’t going anywhere near our request for a comment on Monday – would be due a win soon.
HAWKE’S HOME
Sticking with Sunday’s NSW Liberal Senate preselection, party insiders are trying to figure out just how Dave Sharma, an outside shot days ago, managed to Steven Bradbury his way to victory.
Everyone across the party’s divided, broken factional landscape is trying to take a bit of credit for that win. Meanwhile, Sharma isn’t the only one who lucked out this week. Former immigration minister Alex Hawke, who shifted his supporters toward Sharma over the weekend, had another bump in his own road to another term in parliament.
CBD readers might recall Hawke harnessing the powers of Photoshop to win a preselection challenge in his own seat. But that preselection needed to be rubber-stamped by the party’s state executive, a formality that nearly didn’t happen, thanks to a rogue push from conservatives to delay Hawke’s endorsement until a motion to expel him from the party had been heard.
That motion related to allegations Hawke delayed preselections before the last federal election, leaving the party scrambling to find candidates at the eleventh hour. In the end, Hawke’s endorsement passed narrowly on Monday morning, with 17 voting in favour, against 10 non-responses and one abstention.
BY THE BOOK
The cat is well and truly out of the bag on the Netflix drama about the life and times of conwoman Belle Gibson, who found fame and fortune peddling false claims she had beaten cancer using wellness remedies, with the six-part series shooting in Melbourne.
US star Kaitlyn Dever, whose credits include Justified and Dopesick, was spotted by media filming in the central role last week.
But what is less well known is that the source material for the series comes from former journalists at The Age Beau Donelly and Nick Toscano and their 2017 book on Gibson’s fraud, The Woman Who Fooled the World.
The lads were tight-lipped when we asked them about their book being brought to the small screen and referred us to publicists for the drama’s producers, See-Saw Films.
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