The political future of the renegade Queensland Liberal senator Gerard Rennick will be determined on Friday amid a push to remove him from a winnable spot on the party’s Senate ticket.
Rennick is vying for a third spot on the ticket in Queensland, with hundreds of state councillors to determine preselections at the Liberal National party’s state conference in Brisbane.
Party insiders say the vote will be tight, with one warning success for the sitting senator would be a “recipe for oblivion”.
Rennick had stirred controversy in 2021 when the Morrison government was forced to abandon controversial plans to mandate voter identification at polling booths, after he withheld his vote from the Coalition in protest against Covid-19 mandates.
This was followed by calls for Rennick to be kicked out of the LNP after he labelled the then prime minister Scott Morrison “pathetic” for comments he made about George Christensen.
Senior party sources told Guardian Australia that Rennick’s preselection could isolate voters.
“Running further to this smaller group of fringe people is not an answer for us,” one insider said.
Rennick’s challengers will be the former Young Liberal federal vice-president Nelson Savanh; the party treasurer, Stuart Fraser; Sophia Li; a political staffer, and the former Rennick staffer Mitchell Dickens.
The incumbent Liberal senator Paul Scarr and Nationals senator Susan McDonald are set to nab the top two spots on the ticket.
The federal Nationals leader, David Littleproud, is expected to back Savanh.
Fears of the party’s departure from the centre were articulated by Savanh, a former staffer turned lobbyist, in a blog post after last year’s election loss.
“In too many Australians’ eyes [the party is] facing our nasty party moment,” he wrote.
“We’ve just seen an election dominated by coarse debates about trans kids, the safety and agency of women, climate denialism and integrity in politics.”
It comes as a list of 129 LNP conference resolutions, seen by Guardian Australia, include a call for gender affirmation surgery to be banned for children and for the ABC to become a “patriotic” broadcaster.
Another resolution involves a move to audit “sexually explicit materials” in Queensland state schools.
Any debate on the federal Indigenous voice to parliament and the Palaszczuk government’s bid for a treaty with First Nations people will probably take place behind closed doors.
Unlike Labor, resolutions which pass at the LNP conference are not binding on the parliamentary party, but they do provide an insight into the views of the party membership.
Paul Williams, a political analyst with Griffith University, said if Rennick is placed on a winnable spot on the ticket, some of his more controversial comments may bolster his personal vote below the line and act as a “dog whistle” to conservative voters in regional Queensland.
But his high profile could go both ways, he said.
“I think he expressed himself best when he said, ‘I’m well known, my rivals are not’,” Williams said. “But the idea there’s no such thing as bad publicity is clearly not true in politics.”
However, Amanda Stoker’s loss in the 2022 election has shown a third spot on the Senate ticket does not a guarantee a seat in parliament.
Pandanus Petter, a research fellow at Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy, said if Rennick won third spot on the ticket he was unlikely to attract more voters for the party.
“The kinds of people he’s going to attract probably already send their preferences that way,” he said.
Williams said a move further to the right would be “lunacy” for the party and not bode well with younger voters.
“Australia moved to the centre-left in 2022 and for the first time ever, gen Y and gen Z voters … outnumbered baby boomers, [who] are dying off,” Williams said.
Guardian Australia has contacted Rennick for comment.
