The Liberal Party blame game is in full swing after the “absolute disaster” on Wednesday when the party’s NSW division failed to hand in the nomination paperwork by deadline for several council election contests.
State director Richard Shields is being blamed for the stuff-up and it doesn’t look like he will be long in the job, with NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman declaring on Thursday morning he told Peter Dutton and other senior party members the state director has to go.
Crikey understands some within the party are questioning whether it’s fair Shields should get all the blame; he had apparently delegated responsibility for the council nominations while he focused on byelections for state parliament and preparations for the coming federal election. Others would like to shift responsibility to the state executive members for delaying the process by playing “factional games” and creating a situation no administrator could have helped.
Two sources with insight into the NSW division claimed people in Dutton’s federal team had suggested Nigel Blunden — a longtime Liberal strategist who worked for the Howard government ministers Brendan Nelson and Joe Hockey before becoming ex-NSW premier Mike Baird’s strategy director — could be brought in to replace Shields and fix the mess. Several other sources poured cold water on that claim. Blunden declined to comment.
“Peter Dutton can’t take any chances on the next federal election, as far as NSW goes. If there’s a new state director, it needs to be someone handpicked by Peter Dutton to give NSW the best chance of winning,” one of the NSW sources said.
The other alternative would be for the federal arm of the Liberal Party to intervene and take complete control of the NSW state executive. NSW Liberal sources believed the blunder on Wednesday certainly would justify such an action — but the last time Canberra tried, the matter dragged on for months and ended up in the High Court.
Liberal sources outside the state executive said many in the party were fed up with the “games” being played there.
“Just look at the postmortems from the 2022 [federal] and 2023 [NSW] elections,” one person told Crikey.
Both reviews, created by the Liberal Party after its losses at the ballot box, contained criticism of “the behaviour of some state executives in being unable to make timely and necessary decisions to put the party in a winning position in key electorates”.
“The fault is not with the people administering the process, it’s with the people throwing stuff into the process,” the person said. “The people on state executive are elected by the party members, and they get the numbers there because they’re in factions. So they’re going to play factional games. It’s built into the system.”
It’s understood some of the people on the state executive would rather blame the administrators, however.
“This is an absolute disaster, and state executive gets blamed for everything, but we’ve been begging for stuff to happen,” one person said. “In the end, in an organisation, isn’t the chief executive and chairman responsible?”
Crikey has been told there was a motion moved last September to have all the local government preselections wrapped up by March. It was voted down by factional players who would rather see the state executive itself have more power in the process, one source said.
“The conservatives constantly bring this up,” the person said. “It was voted down because it’s inconsistent with whatever plans the other factions had. If there is no time or framework for a formal preselection process, then it’s left to the state executive to decide the candidates that get selected — and it’s much easier to influence the outcome in a group of a handful of people than a large preselection panel with 300 people.”
Crikey has seen an internal Liberal Party document created last week where the state executive was warned: “We’re now at a stage where all remaining nominations for unwinnable positions are extremely urgent.”
The group was advised to use urgency provisions in the party constitution to directly endorse candidates for unwinnable positions rather than going through the normal and lengthy process.
It’s understood some ballots were being decided on as late as Wednesday morning. The deadline was midday.
