The “Psycho” Morrison sleaze cult is on the nose everywhere. First, with the Liberal Party itself:
The venue had been booked. The numbers were being counted. The candidates were editing their speeches.
On Monday night more than 100 NSW Liberal Party members were due to choose their candidate for the federal seat of Parramatta at the Parkroyal hotel in the western Sydney electorate.
In the interests of expediency, political and chronological, the precious democratic exercise has been abandoned.
Party members are furious the remaining candidates for the House of Representatives, including the prized Hughes, will be chosen by an insiders’ troika: Prime Minister Scott Morrison, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and former president Christine McDiven.
They blame two men, Morrison and his factional ally, Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, who was booed at a meeting of 450 members on Saturday at the Sydney Hilton.
…What’s that saying about not being able to run the country if you can’t manage yourselves?
The Pentecostals don’t care. They’re on a mission from god. To wit:
One NSW Liberal who was involved in a string of failed negotiations on preselection said the internal disagreement was a political tactic engineered by Mr Hawke.
“This whole debacle has been consistently caused by Alex Hawke,” they said.
“Alex is bringing about circumstances that maximise his influence in the process.
“He believes the party will lose the next election, and the more time runs out the better the chance is that he will have a lot more friends in the next parliament than this one.”
Mr Hawke did not respond to text messages.
“How could he [Hawke] have been so consistently unavailable? What was he doing? If the bloke is that busy he should have resigned,” the senior Liberal said.
“It’s an extraordinary state of affairs when a state cannot go ahead with choosing its own candidates.”
The grassroots insurrection is not over with the NSW Supreme Court ruling on its challenge to the federal takeover:
The Liberal federal executive’s appointment of a committee to endorse Scott Morrison’s three senior MPs is “invalid” and breaches the party’s constitution, legal documents filed with the NSW Supreme Court say.
Scheduled for Thursday, the hearing will commence just days after the contested committee – comprising the Prime Minister, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet and former federal Liberal president Christine McDiven – was reappointed on Sunday to install candidates in a raft of NSW seats.
On March 4, the federal executive appointed the committee for 72 hours to endorse Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, Environment Minister Sussan Ley and North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman, who were all facing preselection challenges in their respective seats.
Meanwhile, an extraordinary parallel has developed between the Pentecostal’s dismembering the LNP and the demolition of their own church:
Scott Morrison’s desperation to distance himself from Hillsong founder Brian Houston and the pastor’s moral transgressions shows how treacherous Morrison is prepared to be — and what dark new territory he will go to — to save his political skin.
Yet Australia’s political commentariat has all but ignored Morrison’s reaction and the ugly truths it has shown about the prime minister’s character.
…But Morrison’s other major line of defence was even more cynical. Under the pressure of falling poll numbers, Morrison latched on to the pain of those hurt by Houston.
“My first thoughts were with the victims, as they’ve been rightly described,” Morrison said, taking the tone of the morally outraged.
…Morrison has had eight years to put the welfare of Hillsong victims ahead of the church and Brian Houston but has failed to do so.
In 2014 the McClellan royal commission into institutional responses to child sex abuse heard details of the case of Brett Sengstock who, as an eight-year-old boy, was sexually abused by Brian’s father, Frank.
The commission heard that as an adult Sengstock was paid off by Frank Houston with the princely sum of $12,000 in a grubby deal overseen by a still-serving member of the Hillsong hierarchy in a meeting at a McDonald’s restaurant. Brian Houston’s role in the deal was aired at the hearings.
There was also evidence tendered that one of Frank Houston’s victims from New Zealand directly approached Brian Houston for a form of recognition in the years after Frank had passed away.
In 2015 the commission referred information on Brian Houston to the NSW Police, recommending they investigate if there was a case to answer of concealment of information on child sex abuse.
In 2019, as we reported, a Hillsong employee was found guilty of indecently assaulting a young woman, Anna Crenshaw, who had attended Hillsong College as a visiting student from America.
Despite these incidents, all on the public record, Morrison continued his public support for Houston. The prime minister’s effusive endorsement of Houston at a national conference of Pentecostal churches on the Gold Coast in April last year (“just pay you honour, mate”, Morrison said) enraged victim Sengstock and his supporters. At the time Houston was under investigation for allegedly concealing information from police. (Charges have since been laid and Houston has vowed to defend them vigorously.)
This freakshow has no place in our secular politics.
