Double dissolution (maybe) minus 14 weeks

Senate preselection wreaks more discord among the NSW Liberals; Tim Wilson snatches victory in Goldstein; Stan Grant fields approaches from the Liberals; preselection challenges aplenty to sitting Liberals in WA; and Bronwyn Bishop reportedly in strife in Mackellar.

As the likelihood of a July 2 election firms, the preselection treadmill gathers pace. All the action this week is on the conservative side of the fence:

• New discord has emerged in the fractious New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party over its preselection for the Senate, after a party vote on Saturday delivered top position to Hollie Hughes, Moree-based autism support advocate and the state party’s country vice-president. This reduced the remaining incumbent, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, to number two, in defiance of the wishes of the Prime Minister, who had recently signalled his support by promoting her to the ministry. With number three reserved for Nationals Senator Fiona Nash, the result also meant neither of the Liberals’ winnable positions was available to Jim Molan, a former senior army officer who was heavily involved in the government’s efforts against unauthorised boat arrivals. Hughes has since forestalled a looming state executive intervention by agreeing to be relegated to number two. At issue was the presence on the preselection panel of two lobbyists and moderate factional operatives, Michael Photios and Nick Campbell, two years after Photios had been forced off the state executive by a Tony Abbott-sponsored rule forbidding the involvement of lobbyists. Opponents of the moderates cited in a report by David Crowe of The Australian claim that without the involvement of Photios and Campbell, Fierravanti-Wells and Molan might have taken the top two spots, with number three going to Andrew Bragg, policy director at the Financial Services Council. Tony Abbott described the outcome of the vote as “another exercise of stitching up”, which had been “tainted” by the involvement of Photios. If a double dissolution elections is called, the entire process will need to be revisited in a way that also accounts for Marise Payne, John Williams and Arthur Sinodinos, who were elected in 2013.

• Outgoing Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson has been preselected to succeed Andrew Robb as Liberal candidate for the Melbourne seat of Goldstein. The Australian reports Wilson prevailed in the local party ballot over Denis Dragovic, a “lecturer, former hostage negotiator and columnist”, by the paper-thin margin of 142 votes to 140. Eliminated in the first round were Georgina Downer, with 66 votes, and Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief executive John Osborn, on 18 votes. The vote came shortly after a pamphlet was distributed to preselectors describing Wilson as “a danger to our families, schools and the local community”, owing to his “unrelenting campaign for gay rights issues”.

• The Daily Telegraph reports Bronwyn Bishop faces defeat in the Mackellar preselection at the hands of Jason Falinski, owner of aged care business Carewell Health. Falinski was Malcolm Turnbull’s Wentworth campaign manager in 2004, and has worked for John Hewson and Barry O’Farrell. While Falinski is strongly associated with the moderates faction, the Telegraph reports he “will get the support of much of the Right because of an anyone-but-Bronwyn attitude caused by her switching sides on Tony Abbott”.

• A further three challenges have emerged against federal Liberals in Western Australia, in addition to the widely reported contest between Tangney MP Dennis Jensen and the state party’s former director, Ben Morton. Liberal sources invoked by Andrew Burrell of The Australian suggest Nola Marino is under pressure from Ben Small, although all I can discern of Small is that he lives in Bunbury. Elsewhere, Swan MP Steve Irons faces Carl Pallier, state manager of Suncorp Insurance, and Durack MP Melissa Price is opposed by David Archibald, a geologist.

• Seven Liberal Party members have nominated for preselection in the new southern Perth seat of Burt. Andrew Burrell of The Australian suggests the front-runner is Matthew O’Sullivan, “who runs Andrew Forrest’s GenerationOne philanthropic movement aimed at ending indigenous disparity”. However, Gosnells councillor Liz Storer is reported to be “backed by conservative forces”. Also in the field are Marisa Hislop, a small business owner; Daniel Nikolic, a company director; Lance Scott, the party’s divisional president; and a low-profile figure named Lesley Boyd.

• Sarah Martin of The Australian reports the Liberal Party has approached indigenous journalist Stan Grant about running for preselection against Labor’s Julie Owens in her highly marginal seat of Parramatta. The Liberals will be choosing their candidate for the seat through a trial plebiscite of local party members of more than two years’ standing, amid an ongoing brawl within the party over the power of head office in the party’s preselections.

• Melissa Grant of AAP reports on a second contestant for the Liberal National Party preselection to succeed Ian MacFarlane in the Queensland seat of Groom, joining the widely touted state member for Toowoomba South, John McVeigh. The candidate is Toowoomba general practitioner David van Gend, who describes himself on his Twitter bio as a “combatant on matters of life and death: euthanasia, cloning, abortion, gay ‘marriage’, faith and freedom” – his perspective on such matters being conservative.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

1,390 comments on “Double dissolution (maybe) minus 14 weeks”

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  7. Oh yes, please make sure Tony visits as many marginal seats as possible — perhaps the ALP could chip in to help with his expenses?

  8. BK:

    [Mr Abbott is expected to use his travel entitlement as a former prime minister to conduct some of the domestic travel. All retired PMs ­secure access to additional entitlements, including more travel and more staff even if they stay in politics.]

  9. [FORMER prime minister Tony Abbott will launch his own DIY national election tour, campaigning in marginal seats across Australia, after the Liberal Party failed to organise him a formal role.
    ]

    “Hello, I’m Tony. I’m here to help.”

  10. shea mcduff

    Thanks for the link to Loon Pond. So he’s travelling on his Parliamentary entitlements? That must warm Mal’s heart. 😉

  13. Well, looks like it is going to be very easy for Labor to sell the, ‘If you vote for Malcolm you get Tony’ line. 🙂

  16. Discussion point. Does any clever Bludger have a suggestion as to how Mal could sheath Tony’s claws? Would it have been better to offer him a ministry, or would that simply have made things worse?

  18. Macca this morning has his usual collection of truckies driving through the desert, drought stricken wheat farmers, and anti-wind turbine crazies… all begging for someone to hear their pleas.

    Australia is a wide brown land, it is naturally prone to drought, the rains will come (but in the meantime could we have some right now?), cattle are dying and the country is parched.

    Macca summed up: thank God Climate Change is a myth, because if it did then we’d really be in trouble.

    (Meanwhile their heads hurt. It’s the subsonic boom from the turbines, don’t you know?)

    Sheesh…

  20. Henry @ 964,

    What’s Mark Simkin doing these days, anyone know?

    Mark Simkin has moved on from Tony Abbott’s office to work as Media Advisor to Social Services Minister, Christian Porter.

    Must be fun working on media strategies to demonise the Unemployed, the Disabled and Pensioners.

    He might even be allowed to run for the Liberal Party one day if he does a good job.

  21. The last paragraph from Maidens article on Abbott
    [
    That is what makes him so dangerous — a man with nothing left to lose, who refuses to do what everyone expected and just go away.
    ]
    I put this up with PvOs comment where he is surprised that Abbott is sniping after he said he wouldn’t.

  22. lizzie

    [Would it have been better to offer him a ministry, or would that simply have made things worse?]

    Abbott wouldn’t take one as then he’d be bound by Cabinet rules.

  24. lizzie

    [Does any clever Bludger have a suggestion as to how Mal could sheath Tony’s claws?]

    I don’t think the old horse-head-on-doona-in-the-morning would work with Tony. For a start I don’t think he cares about animals.

    Also putting a contract on Abbott, which Turnbull could easily afford, would be out off the question. Too much in the public eye, and too illegal, even for a merchant banker, and Malcolm would likely end up in jail. Far worse than the Greche incident.

    What Malcolm needs is a political king hit, exposure of some major Abbott indiscretion, not involving email, but I am sure he would have already had his team working on this option for months if not years.

    I am afraid Malcolm is in for an election campaign of political ping pong, tit for tat, dog eat dog in an endless cycle of death and rebirth.

    It will be fascinating.

  25. Gotta go out but looks as if Bernie Sanders is still in the race. Reports coming in of big turnout in Washington. This is a big state. Mind you from what I have read it is not a surprise as Seattle is pretty much “socialist green” central for the USA.

  26. C@tmomma

    I have read praise for Christian Porter as efficient, or something, but when I saw him in QT he came over to me as a typical RW welfare basher and a Labor hater – by which I mean that anything Labor has done must be overturned.

    Maybe I’m wrong.

  28. One commentator summed it up

    We are lucky – we have choice betweeen two good people.

    The real dilemma for the democrat heavies will be – who will win against the republicans

    National polls showing both Sanders and Clinton comfortably beating trump, Sanders easily beating Cruz with Clinton probably beating Cruz, Kasich beating Clinton but Sanders probably beating Kasich.

    So far Clinton is ahead in most of the key marginals – North Carolina, Georgia Florida Ohio and Virginia, although Nebraska, New Hampshire and Colorado went to Sanders. Sanders also picked up two less marginal states a Michigan, Minnesota with Massacheusetts an even split.

  29. Bushfire Bill@968
    [ (Meanwhile their heads hurt. It’s the subsonic boom from the turbines, don’t you know?)
    ]

    As you are aware, the science has been done, and there is no effect.

    If there were an effect, we would have people suffering the ill effects of the subsonic boom of waves crashing on beaches.

  30. What an easy gig for Simkin – media adviser.
    “Hey Christian, I can get you an interview on Lateline, I know some people there.”
    “Thanks Mark, I’ll have a biscuit now”.

  31. Peter Costello is a bit underwhelmed:

    [ The struggle for the soul of the party

    By boldly setting the terms for an imminent election campaign, Malcolm Turnbull may succeed in rallying the Liberal troops, at least temporarily, but his party’s soul searching will not be resolved with a poll.

    A political eon ago, in 2013, Tony Abbott promised to end the soap opera. But the show goes on, viewers both entranced and appalled, into its umpteenth season.

    Then it was Labor that lay in ruins, convulsed with division, confusion and rancour. Today the fallout from the Abbott ascendancy and subsequent meltdown continues to shake the Liberal Party.

    It looks like there are two Liberal parties, and they don’t much like each other.

    Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-liberal-partys-identity-crisis-wont-be-solved-with-a-poll-20160323-gnp9mr.html#ixzz443DqHMFx ]

  33. dtt

    Not really – Clinton only needs 700 delegates to win, Sanders needs over 1400. She can afford to lose a lot of primaries before he gets to just level pegging.

  34. Morning all

    Due to it being Easter, no Insiders today, but there will be a qanda tomorrow night. Notably Mr Roy is going to be on the panel

    [Wyatt Roy – Assistant Minister for Innovation
    Ed Husic – Opposition innovation spokesman
    Holly Ransom – Entrepreneur and Youth Advocate
    Sandy Plunkett – Venture capitalist and consultant
    Michael Biercuk – Quantum physi]

  36. Interesting thing about the Clinton/Sanders race, is that polling indicates Sanders to be a better overall electoral proposition for the Democrats against the current Republican field.

  38. Fairfax is busy dropping hints that Turnbull has a bold cities plan for the future. Meanwhile the likes of Bolt are talking about karma to the “plotters”

    And among the plotters, more karma:
    This week the electoral commission deemed that the NSW Liberal party was complicit in relation to its use of the [Free Enterprise Foundation] to “disguise” the identities of illegal donors to its 2011 state election campaign…

    Malcolm Turnbull’s hand-picked cabinet secretary, Senator Arthur Sinodinos … was the party’s treasurer at the time of the payments.

    Sinodinos has demanded the electoral commission excise any mention of him in its damning report, claiming that the party’s current refusal to nominate the donors has nothing to do with him.

    But the commission said it based its finding on evidence given to the ICAC’s landmark 2014 investigation into NSW Liberal party fundraising… Under oath, Sinodinos, the party’s honorary treasurer and finance committee chairman, refused to accept “any responsibility for money being raised from prohibited donors” who were encouraged to donate via the FEF. Instead he claimed it was the responsibility of the party agent, finance director Simon McInnes to ensure all was above board, and that it was not his role to “micro-manage” others.

    The corruption inquiry heard that the FEF was the single largest donor to the party in the lead-up to the 2011 state poll, giving $700,000. At the 2007 election, held prior to the developer donation bans, the FEF had contributed a mere $50,000.

    “What about this for a pub test: the chairman of the finance committee of the Liberal Party didn’t know the identity of the single largest donor to the Liberal Party in an election campaign. What do you think about that?” asked counsel-assisting Geoffrey Watson, SC.

    Sinodinos repeated his claim “that the responsibility for compliance rested formally with the Party agent.”

    Paul Nicolaou, the party’s former chief fund-raiser, told the inquiry that Sinodinos was chairing a finance committee meeting in 2010 when the idea of washing ­illicit donations through the FEF was first raised.

    Sinodinos said that if he had been present when this was floated “it went over my head”.

    UPDATE

    Eric Abetz, though, is a straight shooter and Turnbull made a big mistake to dump him. For one, Abetz has sound judgement. A pretty interesting profile of him, even though it appears in a Fairfax paper, is negative, makes mistakes and fluffs the biography of Abetz critics such as Greg Barns, advertised as a Liberal when he’s actually flirted with three far-Left parties since – even the WikiLeaks one. Kicking Barns off the Liberal ticket is actually one more sign of Abetz’s excellent judgement.

  41. Regarding wind turbines and their negative impact, surely countries such as the Netherlands would have reliable data ? They even have them next to farmhouses and I have stood under them . Magnificent, silent , windmills of the 21st century. Why the need to reinvent the wheel by setting up another inquiry? This happens so often as in transport ticketing fiascos which were successfully implemented in coutries such as HongKong back in the early 90’s. Do we only follow the UK and the US?

  42. [Regarding wind turbines and their negative impact, surely countries such as the Netherlands would have reliable data ? ]

    I believe so.

    Those making money from them show no negative impact.

    Those not making money report negative impacts.

  43. [ surely countries such as the Netherlands would have reliable data ]

    The Dutch have had bulk windmills for hundreds of years, and they don’t seem to have suffered. Although .. hang on.. there was Tulip Mania.

  44. Abbott’s involvement during the campaign could be of great help to Labor IMO if they are smart (and I think they are).

    It will enable them to run with the theme that Abbott wants his job back and that after the election the party may well decide to give it to him if they think he has played an important part in helping them to get re-elected.

    He may make a positive contribution in some seats, but the overall perception in voter land will be one of horror at the prospect that they might be saddled with this dangerous moron again.

  45. surely countries such as the Netherlands would have reliable data

    I suspect that it woulnd’t matter if the Netherlands (or anyone else) had irrefutable proof that wind turbines are harmless.

  47. Fairfax is busy dropping hints that Turnbull has a bold cities plan for the future.

    OK, so riddle me this, Batman. How is Turnbull going to transplant his ’30 Minute City’ idea to Australia from the UK when all of Britain could fit comfortably inside NSW? So a ’30 Minute City’ concept might be viable there but across this wide brown land? The logistics just don’t stack up.

    Unless, of course, Malcolm wants to give his mate and Liberal mega donor, Harry Triguboff of Meriton apartments, free reign to turn Inner Sydney into a simulacrum of Hong Kong, with high rise apartment block, after high rise apartment block in the Inner City suburbs when there doesn’t need to be BECAUSE we are a ‘wide brown land’ and people like to live in free-standing houses still, not cheek-by-jowl with their ‘cosmopolitan lifestyle’ just outside on the busy streets below.

    However, on the other hand, what Turnbull might be angling at is to site plenty of apartment blocks within 30 minutes of ALL cities in Australia, regional and capital, so that we end up with built-up areas concentrated around the city centre, wherever it may be, and more diffuse areas away from there.

    Still, is that the sort of future we want? Plus, is the looming oversupply of apartments going to cruel Mal’s Grand Plan from Day 1?

  50. c@t

    All Turnbull thinks he needs to do is babble on about innovation etc, and the public will lap it up. This from a person who has personally nobbled the biggest infrastucture tech project, the NBN

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