The NSW Supreme Court has braved the wroth of “Psycho” Morrison’s dark and hungry god by shooting down his attempt to stack the NSW branch with sleaze cult loons:
Scott Morrison’s bid to take over the administrative wing of the NSW Liberal Party ahead of the federal election has suffered a setback.
In a major development late Friday afternoon, the Sydney Supreme Court found the Liberal Party’s trouble-plagued NSW executive could continue to hold office beyond next week.
Infighting within the NSW division has stalled candidate selection in nine important NSW seats just months out from the nation heading to the polls.
The celebrations are premature:
Friday’s ruling does not prevent a federal takeover of the NSW division, but will put pressure on party officials to cast aside their factional warfare and endorse the three sitting MPs – Mr Hawke, Sussan Ley and Trent Zimmerman – and select candidates quickly in six other seats.
All the seats are ordinarily winnable for the Liberal Party, including Hughes (held by turncoat MP Craig Kelly), Bennelong (where Liberal John Alexander is retiring), Warringah and Eden-Monaro.
NSW Liberal senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, a factional ally of Mr Camenzuli, emailed party members on Friday evening to celebrate the victory and praise Mr Camenzuli for his “courage”.
“We now have certainty. There is no need or basis for any federal intervention,” she said. “Those seeking to impede democracy in the party should get out of the way and respect the important role that the membership is entitled to in selecting their candidates.”
Many NSW Liberals believe Mr Hawke and Mr Morrison deliberately frustrated the preselection process in order to run down the clock and justify a federal intervention, through which they could directly appoint candidates ahead of the election, expected in May.
The public record is clear that the party hates Alex Hawke and, I suspect, wants to see him voted out by enraged members:
At the heart of it is Scott Morrison’s New South Wales consigliore, Alex Hawke.
…Since 2007, Hawke has been the member for the electorate of Mitchell, part of the outer north-western “Bible Belt” of Sydney. He is currently a member of the Morrison cabinet and minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs. Like Morrison, he is of Pentecostal faith. More importantly for this story, he is the leader of the Morrison faction in NSW, the centre-right, and is Morrison’s appointed delegate on the party’s state executive.
The other two, larger factions are the right, sometimes called the hard right, which is the faction of Premier Dominic Perrottet, and the moderate or left faction, led by the treasurer and minister for Energy and Environment, Matt Kean.
Hawke is reviled by both.
As one senior right faction member says, Hawke “has used his time as Morrison’s representative on the state executive in an endeavour to advance their factional position to the detriment of both the conservatives and the moderates – to the point now where the conservatives and the moderates are in an alliance against Hawke. And that means against Morrison.”
The anti-Hawke feeling goes beyond institutional opposition. It is personal. Like his prime ministerial mentor, Hawke is hard-charging and abrasive. While the left and right have in recent years come to a sometimes-uneasy agreement in sharing the spoils of power, Hawke has a winner-takes-all approach. It has come back to bite him, his boss and the party.
…“So then you had the same factional fighting … in the state executive about who should be preselected,” Dwyer says.
Eventually, says Dwyer, the state executive made a curious decision. They said: “It’s all too hard. It’s, it’s just bringing the party into disrepute. We’re not going to preselect anybody.”
The executive instructed potential candidates not to run as independents. But Dwyer, who had already nominated as No. 2 on a ticket with Georgina Valjak, decided to run anyway.
“Anyway, she won. Effectively, on Parramatta council, there is now one unendorsed Liberal conservative person … and that’s it. The rest are Labor, Greens or independents.”
But sleaze cult pontiff, PM Morrison, is terrified of divine retribution if his fellow Pentecostal is condemned so there’s no resolution here yet. The risk is the “Psycho” will destroy the party rather than lose his jihad.
Let’s hope that the holy war being prosecuted upon traditional liberal members by Morrison’s sleaze cult insurgency ends precisely the same way that it did in local Parramatta elections.
What a fitting end to the most inept Conservative administration since Governor William Bligh in 1806.
