Senator Andrew Bragg has heralded the passage of reforms by the New South Wales Liberal party as important to avoid a repeat of its preselection fiasco before the 2022 election.
The state party’s annual general meeting on Saturday adopted the NSW senator’s proposed reforms requiring the party to publish and follow a timetable for preselections within 12 months of an election.
Before the election in May, divisions on the state executive and delays in vetting candidates prompted a federal intervention, allowing a three-person committee – including the party’s then-federal leader, Scott Morrison, and the premier, Dominic Perrottet – to select nine candidates just days before the election was called.
Bragg’s so-called Sydney motion allows preselections to proceed without the leader’s representative in the nomination review process.
In an email to members ahead of the meeting, Bragg and the NSW planning minister, Anthony Roberts, said this would ensure preselections were run “without interference”.
“It’s very important that the party modernised its mechanics,” Bragg told Guardian Australia.
“I’m very pleased that the state council supported the democratisation reforms, because it’s important we don’t have any repeats of recent events.”
Bragg said the Liberal party “needs to maintain our grassroots ethos and member-based preselections”.
“Members will be able to have their say on preselection … If we’re going to take the fight to Labor and the teal independents, we’ve got to be a genuine grassroots movement.”
In June the federal Liberal leader, Peter Dutton, warned the NSW Liberal party it is “completely unacceptable” to preselect candidates on the eve of an election.
Dutton said he wanted “candidates preselected earlier so that they can be out in the community, listening to their constituents, working on issues that are important to locals”.
The late selection of candidates hampered Liberal efforts to retain North Sydney, lost by MP Trent Zimmerman, and gain winnable seats including Parramatta and Warringah, where candidate Katherine Deves caused controversy over her anti-trans advocacy about women’s participation in sport.
The intervention sparked fierce recriminations in the party, including an unsuccessful election-eve lawsuit.
The former federal director of the Liberal party, Brian Loughnane, and the shadow finance minister, Jane Hume, are currently reviewing the Coalition’s worst result in 70 years, in which it lost 18 seats, including six heartland Liberal seats to independents.
