Some significant wins as the NSW Liberal Party faithful fight Morrison’s army of evil:
An attempt to endorse three prominent sitting Morrison government MPs without the need for plebiscites has been rejected by warring factions of the NSW Liberal party, dramatically increasing the prospect of federal intervention.
A motion sponsored by the prime minister’s office and sent to the 27-strong NSW state executive as a “fax ballot” has failed to pass.
It asked the state executive to bypass the preselection process in North Sydney, Farrer and Mitchell – effectively saving the careers of the moderate faction leader, Trent Zimmerman, the environment minister, Sussan Ley and the immigration minister, Alex Hawke.
The vote required 90% support to pass but the motion was rejected by “double digits” of the state executive, one factional organiser said.
…The result suggests there is now such a level of distrust between the factions that a deal will be hard to reach, despite the prime minister, Scott Morrison, taking a direct interest.
“Some people voted on a point of principle and do not want to bypass democracy, some want to poke the PM in the eye,” said one observer.
…Two contentious seats – Dobell and Hughes – are still be to resolved, as are preselections for several others with vacancies including Warringah, Bennelong and Parramatta.
Morrison’s preferred candidate for Dobell, Jemima Gleason, a pentecostal preacher, has withdrawn and another potential candidate – a well-known cricketer – has also cooled on the idea. That leaves just one candidate, Dr Michael Feneley, who is backed by the right faction.
John Howard’s man wins (hopefully). Recall:
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.
But others have had enough:
The presumed Liberal candidate in Tony Abbott’s former seat of Warringah has pulled out of the preselection process amid turmoil in the party’s NSW branch over its failure to lock in contenders ahead of the federal election.
Barrister Jane Buncle, who had been courting preselection in the northern beaches seat since the last election, withdrew her nomination on Monday night, four Liberal Party officials confirmed.
Why would she want to join an organisation under intense assault from Morrison’s sectarian sleazebag shock-troops?
Recall from recent western Sydney local elections:
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.
Why so absolutist? Well…one is not pragmatic when applying the commandments of a netherworld diety. To wit:
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”.
The AFR is so spooked it running expose’s on Morrison’s cult links:
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.
“The Filipina who cleans your house is more your average Pentecostal,” says Elle Hardy, author of a new book on the global rise of the Pentecostal church.
…Pentecostals are increasingly “concerned with the here and now”, says Hardy, 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.”
Too right. And the demon’s legions sure ain’t the latter.
Indeed, there is one final parallel between the cult and its political missionaries to observe:
Hillsong founder Brian Houston has stepped down as the global leader of the Pentecostal church as he prepares to defend court charges that he covered up allegations of his father’s child sexual abuse.
In a video address to the faithful on Sunday, Mr Houston, flanked by his wife Bobbie, admitted his “shock” that last year he “received unexpected news of charges against me that allege the concealing of information that may have been material to prosecute” his father Frank Houston.
A methodology of denial uploaded directly from shepherd to flock as twenty or so alleged sexual assualts in your parliament are buried by Morrison’s army of evil.
Liberal Party faithful are fighting a war against an insurgency of absolutist sectarian cultists and today they had a win!
