Why Howard loyalists decided to talk about branch stackingIrfan...

Why Howard loyalists decided to talk about branch stacking


Irfan Yusuf, former delegate of the NSW State Council, writes:

When I was first approached by the Four Corners crew to go on the record, they told me they had already secured a large number of other NSW Libs to do the same. From talking to them, I thought perhaps three or four people would speak out.

But watching the show last night, I was truly gobsmacked to see all these former factional hacks I hadn't seen since the last factional meeting I attended in early 2002.

Betty Mihic, Fran Quinn, Ken Henderson – hardcore Howard loyalists with rock-solid conservative credentials.

They are the last people I'd expect to go to the media. And they would probably expect me, who they'd remember as editing the conservative anti-Group magazine pro-Action, to be the last person they'd expect to see talking publicly about factional politics.

I guess what shook many of us up was John Brogden's suicide attempt. Before the nasty whispering campaign happened to John, it had already happened to people within the conservative faction. Before the neo-conservatives could take on the Group, they had to drive out their internal opponents.

The NSW Liberal Party was a broad church. Within that church, the conservative wing was itself a broad church of conservative Christians, ex-DLP people, economic rationalists and small “c” conservatives.

People like Ken Henderson and myself were small “c” conservatives. We resented the influence of Hansonism in the Party. We were allergic to racism. We opposed the Group. But we still had friends in the Group. And we believed the Group did have a place in both the organisational and parliamentary wings of the party.

The allegations cannot be dismissed as just the rantings of small-time disgruntled former members or failed preselection candidates. They've been made by people who seriously care about the party, who don't want it railroaded by narrow sectarian agendas.
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9. An ugly challenge for the PM on his home turf


Christian Kerr writes:

Dark and dirty deeds are always going on in political parties. It's part of the nature of politics. Systematic, directed dark and dirty deeds, however, are different. As the old Chicago gangster saying goes: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times it's enemy action.”

Last night's Four Corners hasn't really told us anything new about the state of the New South Wales Liberals. Little old ladies are always going to be upset when confronted by branch stackers. People who treat political parties as polite social clubs are going to have their sensibilities offended by activists who want to play hardball.

What Four Corners has done is spell out the scope of the activities of the party Uglies – and create a real challenge for the Prime Minister.

It's a hard ask for the NSW Liberals to win next March's state election. Hard, but not impossible. What they need is unity and focus – two keys to victory that vanish in the face of faction fighting.

It doesn't matter if they come from the right or the left. If a hard core of single issue activists hijack any party, ordinary members will be driven away.

That's what's happening with the NSW Libs. We've described the ins and out of the Epping preselection over recent months. Four Corners covered it too, as it's the perfect microcosm of what's going on.

There's nothing new in saying that the zealotry of the uglies, of the hard right, could cost the NSW Liberals the next state election.

What hasn't been pointed to, however, is the impotence of the party's state executive.

At their meeting on 16 June, the NSW Liberal state executive voted to suspend all internal elections until 2008. A memo to this effect from state director Graham Jaeschke went out on 20 June.

The memo says elections are suspended to allow branches to concentrate their activities on the state and federal campaigns. That's wishful thinking. What executive hopes is that members might concentrate their fire on Labor, not each other. But prolonging elections isn't going to stop the ugly deeds in the NSW Liberals. They're designed to win positions and power in the party. They'll continue until 2008, until the posts are voted on.

A firm lead from the state executive could put a lid on the right. The will to tackle the problem, however, is lacking – even at the very top.

The most senior NSW Liberal is the Prime Minister himself, John Howard – and he's unwilling or unable to tackle the rot.
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10. Four Corners didn't spill all the beans: former Lib


Jane Nethercote writes:

Last night's Four Corners expose of branch-stacking in the NSW Liberal Party was a "credit to the Four Corners journalists" but it didn't spill all the beans, says John Hyde Page, former Young Liberal, one-time political staffer and author of the new book The Education of a Young Liberal.

The program picked up on the "general texture of intimidation and latent physical violence" of the right faction's branch-stacking activities, he says, but it didn't fully spell out the fact that the "use of intimidation and violence" by the right faction to sway voting is often "premeditated".

And he claims some allegations were omitted – such as the claim that when Alex Hawke was elected president of the Young Liberals for the second time a number of the ballots submitted for him were forgeries.

As for that infamous meeting of the Bankstown Young Liberals in May 2004 which turned violent, there's some evidence to suggest the possibility that when factional heavyweight David Clarke learnt that the right faction didn't have the numbers, he left the parliament sitting without permission and came to the meeting and started directing members of the right-wing, says Hyde Page.

Within the Liberal Party there are "numerous pockets of criminality", says Hyde Page. I would "often see things" like the forgery of signatures on membership forms, untruthful statutory declarations and forgery on party instruments.

And, he asserts, the misuse of government resources to fund this activity is rife. It's often said that when the Liberal Party controlled state government, government cab charges would be used to ferry stacks around to meetings. This is just one example of a number of different ways in which taxpayer money was misappropriated for factional reasons, says Hyde Page.

So what's the way forward? Firstly, the Liberal Party needs more "real members", says Hyde Page. But more importantly, the role of paid ministerial staffers and parliamentary staffers needs to be reassessed. At the moment, some of them "spend almost all of their time involved in factional activity", making sure branches are in line, stacking branches, etc. To stop this, we could simply "make it unlawful for people on the public payroll to be involved in branch politics" After all they should be doing the "work of the people, not the work of the faction".