The battle for the soul of the LNP continues in NSW as Morrison’s sleaze cultists rend the party:
Liberal members are preparing to go to court to block a decision that could help Prime Minister Scott Morrison choose candidates for the coming election in a brawl over the rights of party members to vote on whom they want in Parliament.
The federal executive rejected the idea of telling the NSW division to endorse the MPs. Several members of the federal body, including former federal cabinet minister Nick Minchin, argued this would set a dangerous precedent.
Behind the clash is a widespread belief among Liberals that Mr Morrison has allowed Mr Hawke, one of his closest allies, to refuse to attend meetings to vet aspiring candidates for at least a year and therefore denied members a chance to vote in preselections to choose who should stand for Parliament.
The argument on Thursday included claims Mr Morrison was trying to flout the party’s constitution by imposing his preferred candidates in key seats where independent candidates are mounting strong challenges.
“We expect bastardry in politics but when you engage in political bastardry you still have to do it by the book, you still have to comply with the party constitution,” said one member.
Another Liberal said the moves could trigger legal fights over the right to choose candidates in seats such as Bennelong, Dobell, Eden-Monaro, Hughes, Parramatta and Warringah, where the party does not have candidates even though the election is likely to be called in six weeks.
…One member of the state executive, Matthew Camenzuli, has engaged lawyers to argue in favour of membership ballots to choose candidates, while others are also preparing legal disputes over decisions taken this week.
It’s off to the courts:
Next Tuesday, NSW Liberal Party president Philip Ruddock and all other senior office holders will no longer hold their positions, leaving the party leaderless.
Or maybe not. It depends on which lawyer you speak to. Liberals have asked two. They don’t agree.
…Meanwhile, in North Sydney, where there is no Liberal candidate, a Simon Holmes à Court-linked independent, Kylea Tink, disclosed on Sunday she had raised $680,000, a phenomenal sum for a political outsider.
For political watchers, it might be worth noting that money gravitates to perceived winners. Losers fight among themselves.
There are now no candidates on the ground in many key NSW electorates:
Three months, at most, from the next federal election, the seat of Hughes, in Sydney’s Sutherland shire, should be a prime target for the New South Wales Liberal party.
After Craig Kelly’s defection to the United Australia party, the seat, which the Liberals won with a 10% margin in 2019, became a key battleground. In a normal year, the party would already have a high-quality candidate knocking on doors and nodding encouragingly behind Scott Morrison at press conferences.
Instead, this year, there’s no one. Kelly has renominated to run for the UAP, spending Clive Palmer’s money freely on newspaper and television advertisements, as have a handful of independents and Peter Tsambalas for the Labor party.
The story of a missing Liberal candidate is repeated in a clutch of key seats across the state. In Dobell on the Central Coast, Tony Abbott’s former seat of Warringah, Parramatta in Sydney’s west, and also Bennelong, Eden Monaro and the party’s key NSW Senate spots.
Who has sabotaged the party so? The Pentecostal duo:
The two main factions blame Mr Morrison’s close ally in NSW, Alex Hawke, the secretive Immigration Minister, for holding up the selection of candidates.
…“Hawke has been up front that elections will not give us the candidates they want,” said one participant in the negotiations. “We’re in procedural warfare. Everyone’s hands are tied.”
What kind of candidates do Morrison’s missionaries want? Over even John Howard’s dead body:
A rare, glowing endorsement written by Mr Howard for St Vincent’s Hospital cardiologist Michael Feneley labels him an “outstanding person” and an “ideal candidate”.
…“The Liberal Party is in need of candidates who have achieved esteem and success in the real world. Professor Feneley certainly falls into this category”.
The endorsement comes despite the Prime Minister’s backing for businesswomen and Pentecostal preacher Jemima Gleeson.
Is that why Morrison and Hawke are so recalcitrant? When one is applying the commandments of a dark and hungry god there is no free will:
Nathan Zamprogno is a teacher who was sacked by a Christian school because he is gay. He is, as he testified before a parliamentary committee hearing last week, just one example of “very many” such cases.
The story he told the committee – of the circumstances of his sacking, and the years of casual homophobia he silently endured before it happened – is not what makes him exceptional.
What makes him different is the fact he is a 30-year member of the Liberal Party who, until July last year, sat as a Liberal on the Hawkesbury City Council in New South Wales. He was dumped amid factional intrigue precipitated by Scott Morrison’s consigliore and co-religionist Alex Hawke.
…“You could only conclude that Scott Morrison is hell-bent – pardon the pun – on pushing this because his religious judgement is superseding his best pragmatic political judgement.”
…Zamprogno ran as an independent in December’s local government elections and won. He still hews to the values that made the Liberal Party a “comfortable ideological home” for three decades.
“I want governments to live within their means,” he says. “I want them to balance their budgets. I want policies that are evidence-based. I want them to be broadly consonant with Australia’s founding as an enlightenment nation.”
However, he’s concerned that the party’s religious right is taking it in a direction that is “very, very socially conservative … often ignoring, I think, the pragmatic political centre that the rest of Australia occupies”.
It is leading, he says, to a “huge outflow of previously devoted Liberal Party members … seeking greener pastures with a party that’s, you know, less morally ideological and more pragmatic on key issues”.
Another example of Morrison sleaze cult methods is playing out in Perth:
Simone McGurk, Western Australia’s minister for women’s interests and child protection, has issued an open invitation for former residents of the Pentecostal-linked Esther Foundation to put their concerns directly to her.
The minister made the offer in response to serious allegations of religious-based abuse made by former Esther residents, published in a Crikey investigation over the past two weeks.
Crikey reported that Prime Minister Scott Morrison visited the Perth-based organisation in the weeks before the 2019 federal election to announce a $4 million federal grant to back the foundation’s work with teenage girls. Our investigation revealed a murky process behind the approval of the grant, with the trail leading directly to the prime minister’s office. The Esther Foundation is located in the marginal seat of Hasluck held by the Liberal Party’s Ken Wyatt.
In a statement to Crikey, McGurk said that the claims made by the women in Crikey’s reports were concerning, “particularly given that some of them were children when they were allegedly mistreated”.
…One woman who was there at the time remembers the conflicted feeling she had. As a 14-year-old with nowhere to turn, Esther House gave her love and care that she had not known. On the other hand, it came with religious strings attached.
“I was told not to mix with anyone who did not share their particular Christian beliefs. This included my friends and family. They told me that if I mixed with non-church people I would go to hell. It was incredibly isolating.
“I still have a vivid memory of being in church with Patricia where she was speaking in tongues to me and trying to get me to speak in tongues,” she said.
Finally, what is the goal of stacking the LNP with Morrison cultists:
Scott Morrison may be Australia’s second most famous Pentecostal after his mentor, Hillsong founder Brian Houston, but he is far from the norm. Those who subscribe to the youthful, feel-good, glam-rock, self-help teachings of the Pentecostal church tend not to be white, 50-something and male.
Elle Hardy, author of a new book on the global rise of the Pentecostal church [says] Pentecostals are increasingly “concerned with the here and now” and that secular society, or the elites, are taking over the world and they need to fight back.
“Reshaping America and the world so that Christ can return just so happens to look a lot like gaining power in the here and now,” writes Hardy.
…Hardy makes the point that Christian Dominionism is about seeing a religiously run America that conforms to Pentecostal values.
“It’s pretty clear that a lot on the religious right in America have given up on democracy, they know they have lost the battle, and you hear instead the line that the US is a republic, not a democracy,” Hardy says.
“It’s about conquering and victory. That’s where the seven mountains come in because if you can control the seven pillars of society, you can transform society.”
Donald Trump was a gift to the Pentecostalists. His rise, along with Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, lies in no small part to the rise of Pentecostals. The movement has a penchant for populist, strong-arm leaders with a flair for entertaining the masses, on one hand, while simultaneously scorning the cultural Marxists with their post-modern notions of gay marriage, gender identity, racial and sexual equality.
A 2019 US study found that 53 per cent of Pentecostals agreed that Trump had been anointed by God.
“Long a shelter for the marginalised and the dispossessed, in an age of gross inequality, Pentecostalism is becoming synonymous with an anti-liberal worldview,” writes Hardy.
Along with a raft of other bad actors, Hardy says it comes as little surprise that the “Stop the Steal” storming of the Capitol in Washington DC on January 6, 2021 involved 7M soldiers.
As one pastor who spoke to the crowd that day put it: “We are not just in a culture war, we are in a kingdom war.” At the same time, a Pentecostal magazine put up a Facebook post that said: “There are but two parties right now, traitors and patriots.”
This sectarian freakshow has no place in our politics.
As Morrison tries to militarise the party for the Second Coming, will the LNP counter-reformation allow him to get to the election?
Liberal MPs who fear Defence Minister Peter Dutton is positioning to seize the prime ministership on the eve of an election are pressing the other would-be contender, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, to step up.
With the Liberal Party desperately trying to haul itself out of what some fear is an electoral death spiral, discussions about Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s leadership are ricocheting around the Coalition.
Liberal Party conversations over the past fortnight, both inside Parliament House and beyond it, have canvassed how much of the party’s travails are due to the Coalition’s policy positions and how much is related to Morrison’s plunging popularity.
Key Liberal figures are pressing the case for Frydenberg, seeking to position him as the only logical choice, at the very least after the election in the event of a loss, and possibly before. Some conservatives who backed Dutton in the last spill are believed to now be prepared to shift behind the treasurer, if it comes to a vote.
Let’s hope not. It would be better if the Morrison clergymen were crucified by the people. That way, the LNP faithful can salt the earth afterward to ensure no resurrection:
Hawke’s behaviour in these internal shenanigans has also been called into question. In 2020 Sally Betts, a moderate faction member of the state executive, accused Hawke of “appalling behaviour”, including making derogatory remarks about others present at a meeting. Betts made the complaint in an email to party president Philip Ruddock which she copied to other officials and federal Labor MP Linda Burney, and the email was revealed by the Herald at the time.
Contacted this week, Betts said: “I don’t think his behaviour has improved since then. He’s created a culture of bad behaviour. Whether you like us or not, we got elected to the committee and I think we should be treated with respect. I’m disappointed, especially after my letter, that that level of respect and courtesy, that way of debating, has not improved.”
Hawke declined to be interviewed for this story, as did several others including his former boss and ally David Clarke and former state Liberal leader John Brogden. In a demonstration of the passionate rhetoric Hawke seems to inspire among his critics, one Liberal who didn’t want to be identified says: “He’s not lord of the flies, he’s lord of the candidates who are dropping like flies.”
For now, Hawke remains a powerful figure in the internal machinations of the Liberal Party. But his fate is largely tied to Morrison’s. If the Coalition loses this election, Hawke may find himself, at 44, once again considering the appeal of a career on the outside.
How about a monastic life on the peninsula of Mount Athos. Far, far from Australia.
