Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week I urged the Prime Minister to turn his mind from moralising about the Big Brother program and focus on the task of cleaning up the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party. Tonight I draw the attention of the House to the branch stacking in the Prime Minister’s own electorate and renew my call for him to take action against the rorters in his party. I recognise it is an uncomfortable call for the Prime Minister, because it is his own faction responsible for the rorting. Nevertheless, the issue is too important for the Prime Minister to maintain a disdainful distance. To borrow an image from this morning’s Matt Price column, there is ‘an extra-large and malodorous Sandwichus Excretus’ in the Prime Minister’s own backyard, and he can ignore the stench no more.

I have previously brought to the attention of this place revelations about the rotten underbelly of the New South Wales Liberals in the book The Education of a Young Liberal by John Hyde Page. In this book this Liberal insider has revealed the rorting, deception, fraud and violence that characterises the Liberal Party in New South Wales.

The consequences of the recent right wing power grab are on display for all to see during the current Epping preselection contest. Ethnic branch stacking, rorting of rules and bribes—they are all features of the contest between Pru Goward, Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner and prime ministerial mate, and Greg Smith, the right wing’s anointed candidate.

Mateship is not the only link between the Prime Minister and this contest. The state seat of Epping falls, in part, within the federal seat of Bennelong. Through control of the New South Wales state executive, the right wing has manipulated the preselection timetable for Epping to allow a large number of ‘stacks’ in the Cherrybrook branch to gain eligibility to vote. Cherrybrook is not located in Bennelong but in the adjoining federal electorate of Berowra, held by the Attorney-General. It is reported that up to 130 members of the Lebanese Maronite community have been stacked into the Cherrybrook branch by Mr David Baynie, an associate of right wing powerbroker David Clarke MLC.

As late as last week Mr Baynie was reported to be still building the numbers. Mr Baynie is a bankrupt property developer who first attracted public attention early last year when his supporters were accused of wielding pistols at a meeting to establish a new branch in Kellyville in the federal electorate of Mitchell. Through Mr Baynie’s stacking of Cherrybrook, the right wing controls up to 40 per cent of branch votes in the state electorate. The Epping preselection brawl is the latest in a series of events that reveal the impact of the right-wing takeover of the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party.

In this case, rules have been made to bend to the will of the right wing. Not only have the rules been ignored, so has the will of Goward supporters, including the Prime Minister and the New South Wales Leader of the Opposition. The Minister for Education, Science and Training and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on Women’s Issues bragged in question time today about the number of women who have found a job. But the one job she will not or cannot deliver is for Pru Goward in the rorted preselection for the state seat of Epping.

This takeover has clear federal implications. It is bad enough that power in the New South Wales Liberal Party has fallen into the hands of a small extreme clique. That right wing clique now has the power to determine the outcome of preselection ballots in a swag of safe federal Liberal seats in New South Wales, including Bennelong, Berowra and Mitchell. And it is likely to engineer the demise of moderate Senator Marise Payne when the New South Wales Liberal Senate ticket for the 2007 federal election is determined. Where the right wing clique lacks the numbers to get its own way in local preselections, it is clear it will do what it did in Epping and stack branches and rort the rules in order to prevail.

It is not often I see eye to eye with the likes of Miranda Devine and Janet Albrechtsen. But I endorse their recent criticism of the Epping preselection process in which a naked grab for power by the right wing has prevailed over all other considerations. It is time the Prime Minister showed some leadership and lanced the boil growing in close proximity to his own backside.