Grattan on Friday: Liberals send in veteran warhorses to deal with party’s hot mess

Finally, just months out from the election, the Liberal Party is tackling the Augean stable that is its New South Wales division. It is a task that should have been a priority two years ago, after the division’s toxic factionalism had been on inglorious display in the run-up to the 2022 federal election.

As Liberal leader, Peter Dutton has performed better than most observers expected. In this week’s Newspoll, the opposition is equal with the government on a two-party basis. On current polling, Dutton could push Albanese into minority government.

But, until now, Dutton had not managed to force the NSW Liberal organisation to undertake reform.

This week the Liberal federal executive finally intervened in NSW. The trigger was an unbelievable snafu that saw a raft of Liberal local council candidates miss the deadline for nomination because the party didn’t submit their names in time.

Even the intervention was botched (inviting the well-worn joke, if you can’t run yourselves, how can you run the country?).

A three-man panel was announced to oversee the ten-month takeover of the NSW division. It included two former federal presidents of the party, both Victorians: Richard Alston (a former federal minister) and Alan Stockdale (a former Victorian minister). The third member was Rob Stokes, a former NSW minister, who was nominated by NSW. But Stokes’ participation was not tied down before the announcement and he immediately ruled himself out.

Apart from that bungle, the panel quickly came under fire from within the party. Stockdale and Alston were criticised for being from outside NSW, too old and part of an alleged right-wing seizing of a division where the moderates have the edge. And what party in its right mind that has been told it has a “women problem” would set up a panel without a woman? The Stokes misfortune at least allows that to be rectified.

After the nominations disaster, Dutton was alarmed. A report was commissioned into the stuff-up and also the state of preparations for the federal election. Done by former federal director Brian Loughnane, it highlights the rampant factionalism that has bedevilled the NSW division for decades.

This destructive behaviour parallels the disease we’ve seen in Labor over the years.

In the NSW Liberals, moderates and conservatives carve up preselections and often fight each other more bitterly than they do the party’s political opponents.

Before the 2022 election, manoeuvring by then minister Alex Hawke, Scott Morrison’s numbers man, delayed preselections until the death knock. Morrison then made a captain’s pick for Warringah. That was Katherine Deves, an anti-trans campaigner who proved a liability well beyond the seat, which the independent incumbent, Zali Steggall, held comfortably.

The NSW Liberals decades ago had some 50,000 members; now, the number is reportedly about 10,000. One senior member of the division (from the right) says members are “expected to turn up, pay up and shut up. They are frozen out of preselections and discouraged from debating policy issues.”

There is a wider issue: few people want to join political parties these days. But the parties still need robust organisations for their “ground games”, going door to door and handing out how-to-vote cards in individual electorates.

This campaigning is as crucial as ever, and probably even more so, because contests in many seats are becoming more local. The importance of local volunteers was shown in 2022 by the success of the “teal” candidates who managed to mobilise enthusiastic bands of volunteers.

The need for local presences is one reason the absence of so many Liberal-labelled council candidates is a negative for the NSW party. For example, in the highly marginal south coast federal seat of Gilmore, held by Labor, the Liberals’ Andrew Constance will be hampered by the Liberal team being unable to stand for the Shoalhaven council.

More widely, the party’s campaigning capacity is weakened by being in opposition at state level, so it has fewer MPs with resources to help out in the federal election.

If Dutton is to eat into Albanese’s majority significantly, he needs to have wins in NSW, and that requires candidates who have time to campaign.

While the NSW party is doing better with its federal preselections than in 2022, some key seats are still to have candidates installed – among them Warringah and the teal-held Mackellar (although nominations have opened).

Next week the Australian Electoral Commission will release its final redrawn boundaries for NSW. On its draft boundaries, the teal seat of North Sydney will be scrapped.

Not only do the Liberals have to win seats in NSW; they also have to stop further erosion of their existing seats. The Liberal seat of Bradfield, held by frontbencher Paul Fletcher, a moderate, is potentially vulnerable to a teal.

It’s not just the NSW division that is a problem. Victoria is also faction-ridden, with the state parliamentary party consumed by the debilitating culture war between Opposition Leader John Pesutto and Moira Deeming. Deeming, who was expelled from the parliamentary Liberal Party and now sits as a Liberal independent, is suing Pesutto for defamation. This case is about to begin, with all the dirty linen set to be aired.

In South Australia, factionalism has long been endemic , and remains so. The state opposition leader, David Speirs, recently resigned, declaring he’d had “a gutful”, followed by the party’s state director.

Campaigning in Adelaide on Thursday, former prime minister John Howard condemned the factionalism in the party. “It’s true of the South Australian division, it’s true of the New South Wales division. Look, factionalism around policy differences is one thing, but factionalism which is no more than the competition between different preferment co-operatives is bad.”

The Western Australia Liberal organisation is less dysfunctional than its counterparts elsewhere, but heavy defeats there in the last state and federal elections have left the party depleted.

In finally driving intervention in NSW, Dutton is following a path taken by opposition leaders on the Labor side.

In 2020 Anthony Albanese spearheaded a takeover of the Victorian ALP after an expose of branch-stacking. Way back when, Gough Whitlam also forced intervention in Victoria.

For Dutton, winning next year’s election would be against the odds. But so were Tony Abbott’s chances in 2010 – when he came within a whisker of victory. Back then, some Liberals reportedly blamed the under-performance of the NSW party for not delivering the extra seats needed. Dutton doesn’t want to risk living with that regret.