A MOVE to expel former immigration minister Alex Hawke from the Liberal Party has been dismissed by officials on technical grounds.
According to The Australian newspaper this week, a motion to end Mr Hawke’s political career as a Liberal was rejected by Liberal State Director Chris Stone due to “insufficient notice”.
- The NSW Liberal Party expects that Members of Parliament be of good fame and character.
- Mr Hawke was one of the 12 selected without facing a members’ plebiscite.
- Only two of the 12 picks were elected in May, including Mr Hawke.
The motion was one of two passed unanimously last month by the Party’s Artarmon branch, which lies within the Liberal’s North Sydney conference.
The other motion sought to overturn the expulsion of former State Executive member Matthew Camenzuli who sued the Party on constitutional grounds earlier this year.
AGENDA
Both motions were discarded from the agenda of next month’s State Council meeting.
The motion against Mr Hawke highlighted allegations that he had bought the Party into disrepute by allegedly blocking the Party’s constitutionally required preselection process in a bid to create a crisis requiring federal intervention. Mr Hawke has denied the claims.
As a result of the NSW division’s inability to preselect Liberal candidates prior to May’s federal election, 12 “captain’s pick” candidates were parachuted in by a federal committee, which included former prime minister Scott Morrison.
Mr Hawke, an ally of the then PM, was one of those selected without facing a members’ plebiscite. Of the 12, only two were successful in May, including Mr Hawke.
MOTION
“Without passing any judgement concerning the truthfulness or otherwise of these allegations, the existence of unresolved allegations against Mr Hawke and the associated negative publicity poses a serious risk to the Division’s prospects of success at the next federal election,” the Artarmon motion read.
“The NSW Division of the Liberal Party expects that Members of Parliament to be of good fame and character.
“It is therefore recommended that State Council expel Mr Hawke as a member … of the Liberal Party.”
After learning the fate of the motions, a member of the Artarmon branch and Sydney lawyer Edwin Nelson wrote to members of the NSW State Executive, according to The Australian.
In his email, he said there were insufficient grounds for rejecting the motions, that no complaints regarding notice periods had been received from Artarmon members and that the Party’s constitution provided allowance for the motions to be included.
“I can only deduce that Mr Stone’s … failure to communicate is deliberate,” he continued.
“I am also deeply concerned that there may be some other ulterior reason why Mr Stone and (the Party official) do not want the two enclosed motions to be debated at the State Council.” PC
After 5 decades of Liberal Party membership and having held several organisational roles and also endorsement as a Liberal Party candidate at the 1980 federal election I almost did not renew my membership this year. The only reason I decided to continue as a member was the appointment of Peter Dutton. The Party’s move to the Left and support of people like Matt Kean will destroy the Liberal Party if urgent steps aren’t taken to re-align the Party to its Centre-Right origins. Peter Dutton’s appointment is a good move in the right direction but much more needs to be done.
At one time I said “Hawke & Kean Must go or I do”, that has played out to be true and they’re still there ruling over the last rapidly decaying corpse of a once great Liberal party.
Some think it’s still capable of being revived, I don’t subscribe to that theory, and every day still more of the few remaining party members are drawing the same conclusion as mine. Those like Hawke will burn the party to the ground before they’ll ever concede their hold.
The good news however, is that Menzies Liberalism is not dead, it just lacks a home and some organisation. Those of us with a clue will just need to hunker down till a few more catch on, and they will. There’s nothing like hunger and poverty to revise peoples perspective. The question now is, what form an inevitable revival of common sense, community values and national pride will take. The Hawkes and Keans of this world will be held to account when it does.
The Left faction invasion of the Liberal Party has been pronounced by those that do not have the courage to stand up for real & traditional Liberal values on which decent society has been built until recently, as expanding the Party to be a ‘broad church’. I would argue that it is akin to the Vatican being infiltrated by members of Scientology, another organisation that seeks to drain members of their money on false pretexts, to then making Catholicism a ‘broad church’. The Australian Liberal Party is in fact in the process of being taken over by what business would call a corporate raider. And anyone with knowledge of such an event would know that not much remains of such a business after that. EG take the example of Ansett Airlines. Unles the real Liberal members take a stand, then we can expect the same of what was once a proud Liberal Party started by Menzies as something entirely different from the current direction!
Get rid of Alex Hawke, he is a trouble maker.
Once again the factional arrogances have been able to rein in a justified move to muzzle them. It is clear that the only way to get their hands off the levers of power and to restore democratic rights to Party members is for plebiscite voting for all Party positions to be implemented as envisaged by the Democratic Reform Movement which these factional players and their minions successfully sabotaged.
Haven’t learnt a thing from the last election, deserted us genuine conservatives & wonder what happened, will get really thumped next year @ the State Election unless they drain the swamp & fast.
Shame the Enemedia isn’t doing due diligence on this as Turnbull would have been kicked out as well! Come on Libs show some real backbone and get back to the real people and get rid of the crooked out of the Group! Where’s the leader now 🙂
I understood that the Coalition was an alliance between the Liberal Party of Australia and the National Party of Australia but now I am losing confidence as the LINO left are definitely not traditional Australian Liberal MPs and executives and the NINO express the same leftist nonsense.
Maybe the position of most Australians on the political spectrum is not being considered, that being centre and slightly left or right of centre?
Labor won the last election with only about one third of the vote, the Coalition support was slightly more, the disenchantment most of us now have for our political representation is increasing.