by SEAN BURKE – MATT Kean’s radical Left faction that led the NSW Liberals into electoral wilderness last March is quickly losing its grip on the Party.
This startling revelation comes after an internal Party ballot for State President held last week saw the Left’s candidate shed 30 per cent support, compared to a similar presidential vote in 2022.
- Falinski lost his safe federal seat with a 24 per cent two Party swing against him.
- He was one of 11 Left faction Liberal MPs to lose their seats.
- Philip Argy, who also ran in a 2022 presidential ballot, has committed to run again.
Despite the significant swing, the Left faction retained the Party presidency, with former federal MP Jason Falinski, who self-identifies as a “modern” Liberal, securing the win.
The centre-Right candidate, Philip Argy, who also ran in a 2022 presidential ballot against the Left’s Maria Kovacic, is understood to have committed to run again.
LEAKING
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Falinski won last week’s ballot 291 votes to 223 – leaking 122 votes from Ms Kovacic’s 413 result in 2022.
Last week’s presidential ballot was to fill a casual vacancy, after Ms Kovacic resigned her position in order to replace the late Jim Molan in Canberra.
A new presidential ballot is due to be held later this year.
Mr Falinski last year lost his safe Northern Beaches federal seat of Mackellar with a 24 per cent two Party swing against him.
This was after he spearheaded the Left’s campaign against Federal Electoral Conference President Walter Villatora’s Democratic Reforms – thereby denying grassroots members’ the right to vote on Party matters, including the right to vote for the presidency.
He was one of 11 Left faction Liberal MPs to lose their seats – including his “modern Liberal” mates David Sharma and Tim Wilson.
Working as a John Hewson staffer and Malcolm Turnbull acolyte, Mr Falinski is a spokesman for the Australian republican movement.
He was among the Liberal Left who pressured then PM Scott Morrison to commit to the economy-killing net-zero carbon target.
It is also reported he publicly defied former PM John Howard, calling on him to “welcome all boat people”.
Mr Argy, on the other hand, held the backing of Mr Howard and used his 2023 presidential campaign to target factional powers that were electorally crippling the Liberal Party.
“I will not allow our hard-working members to be treated like the enemy by the Party organisation,” he said in his campaign literature.
“Weaponising the Party constitution against branches and conferences for trivial non-compliances must stop – especially when egregious breaches by factional powerbrokers and selfish former MPs are conveniently ignored.
“We must accommodate a range of views and not demand political correctness nor appeasement of socialists and the woke – who would never vote for us anyway!” PC
Could you please provide more context or information about the Democratic Reforms and their impact on the Left’s campaign and Walter Villatora’s presidency?
I very much doubt the Liberal left had a grip on anything other than the adulation of their YL fanboys.
Despite an unbroken sequence of electoral failures, the Liberal left haven’t dropped a stitch in their quests to undermine every traditional Liberal Value, and to remove every liberal MP or member representing values upon which the party was established.
– Victorian Libs have trashed two of their few remaining MPs in the short time since their last defeat.
– NSW The Photios Division, is riddled with wokes, snakes like Kean and Bragg a bigger threat to any Liberal than political opponent.
– WA couldn’t fill a maxi-taxi with their entire elected representation.
– SA preoccupied with branch stacks.
– QLD just wrote off their most effective senator.
– TAS Bridget Archer has crossed the floor so many times to vote against her own party that there’s a track worn into the carpet.
If the Liberal Party was your daily drive, you’d have cut your losses long ago and told Sims Metal to come and get it. Impractical to repair and never to be re-registered.
My hope is that the the transition of disillusioned ex Liberal and the few decent Liberal MPs can find a new home within the Libdems or one of the other emerging libertarian / conservative parties. They’d feel a lot more at home and would likely catch up with many old friends and like minds.
The party of Menzies is dead, the values he espoused are alive and well within better political alternatives. Time to back the alternatives.
The libs are like ‘conservatives’ all over the world: weak, spineless, ludicrously believing the left still play by the rules, or there are rules. All except for Trump; and look at how so called conservative leaders treated Trump; that was the true mark of how false these b..tards are: from little johnnie to turdball they all maligned Trump. In a sense our conservatives are worst than the left because they give a false impression. At least the left are honest about their intentions.
There have been some documentaries on SBS on demand about how the Nazis came to power, The Rise of the Nazis, True Evil the Making of a Nazi and one other. The lesson is that anyone who tried to do a deal and thought they played by the rules lost and were exterminated. Marxism, Communism, Socialism only regard people of having value in how they can be used, they give nothing back. That’s where we are in Australia today, which is why they are banning Nazi symbols. Nazi = National Socialism, Victoria and some other states are under State Socialism (Stazi).
They allowed O Farrell to be set up by Baird and after his fire sale of NSW assets he ran like a dog (ironic banning Greyhound Racing) in order to develop Wentworth Park into units! And then they installed the Armenian Assassin to carry out the completion of selling off NSW thus making a killing (literally and figuratively) and where are they all now ???? Barry? Baird landed a job as NAB for $2.5 million, then they ousted him – while Gladys is working for Optus. Crime does not pay as well as politics .
Since the backstabbing of Tony Abbott, all downhill for LP, when will they realise they are a true Conservative party, not labour/lites, give us conservatives something to vote for again, Get the party faithful back, We can’t have 2 socialist parties.
With Falinski openly against early pre-selections and Dutton having asked for them, something has to give, but when will the Libs realise the enemy is the socialist ALP – not each other. Regrettably, united they’ll stand; divided they’ll fall. It has always been thus …
Archer from Tasmania should not get pre-selection. They should be searching hard for a high profile, well-liked person to replace her. She never fails to stick the boot into her own Party at every opportunity. Do that in Labor and you are gone by lunchtime!
Then start on Bragg.
I call him Jason Foolinsky. The fact that he’s the new NSW president says it all, under him and his acolytes, the party is, to put it mildly, stuffed. I doubt Foolinsky has ever read a word of what Menzies wrote back in 1942, and if he has, he doesn’t believe in those wise words, such unfashionable things as individual liberty, free speech, fighting for small and medium sized businesses, fiscal responsibility, religious freedom and so on, they’re now considered “far-right”, and the likes of Foolinsky, Bragg, Sharma and others would agree with that description. He loathes the rank and file of the party. Just remember that it was Sharma, Allen, Zimmerman, Archer and Martin who crossed the floor to vote AGAINST religious freedom, and they all solicited Morrison to sign up to net zero. And then what happened, they all, apart from Archer, lost their seats, and grotesque Allan and Martin don’t even have the excuse of losing to Teals, they lost their seats (one of which was Peter Costello’s old safe seat) to Labor. Seriously, if you don’t laugh, you’d cry.
Foolinsky doesn’t represent a party for the lifters in this country, he represents a party for the losers in this country.
Remember Rowan Dean’s words the day after the 2022 federal election, “if you stand for nothing, you fail”. I think Rowan said it best, I would just add “and you deserve to fail”.
It’s early days but the signs are encouraging. The new president of the Wentworth FEC is none other than former federal member Peter King. Close followers of Liberal politics will recall that King was toppled by Turnbull in 2004 after some industrial strength branch stacking. It’s hard to imagine King canvassing for a second coming of Dave Sharma, the Modern Liberal who voted against Morrison’s government five weeks before a general election. Do that and you shouldn’t be surprised when your electoral base turfs you out.
Peter King. What was done to him by the Turd still upsets me. King is a true Liberal. I live in Wentworth, and have lived in the electorate for most of my life. The thing is, given how the electorate has changed, I now doubt someone of the calibre of King, up against the shallow, vacuous Teal, “Da Big Spenda”, would be able to win the seat. And this is because the cancer of “affluent and very hypocritical progressivism” now runs amok in the electorate, as it does in other wealthy electorates, we know the names of those electorates….Warringah, North Sydney, Mackellar, Goldstein, Kooyong, Curtin etc. That progressivism comes marketed as SSM, climate change, renewables and so on. Who is to blame for this disease? Well, when treating cancers, you fight it aggressively. The Liberals haven’t fought anything for going on two decades, they have refused to fight on any of these issues…and I’m sorry, but Tony Abbott was also guilty of not fighting the cancer, I remember his government’s shameful capitulation on Section 18C, and other things.
Liberals In Name Only, the leftists of Turnbull Party.
The enemies within.