Stand by for a fresh eruption of factional warfare in the NSW Liberal Party at its State Council meeting on December 8.

It will be held in the grim shadow of the humiliating defeat of the Howard Government, the PM’s history-making defeat in his own seat of Bennelong and the expulsion of state executive member Jeff Egan over the letter-boxing of a racially and religiously bigoted leaflet in the seat of Lindsay.

Also on the agenda will be appeals by former state president Michael Osborne (1977-2000) and former MLC John Ryan against two-year suspensions following public attacks they made on the ruling right-wing faction. Osborne made his remarks on a celebrated Four Corners investigation of Upper House MP David Clarke and his fundamentalist Christian gauleiters while Ryan called a press conference the day after the March 24 state election to launch an attack on Clarke and another Upper House right-winger Charlie Lynn “who had their staff totally devoted to the task of branch stacking and factional activity right up to the very last minute before the election.”

The Osborne-Ryan appeals were postponed until after the federal election because Prime Minister John Howard didn’t want factional division hurting his re-election chances. (How out of touch was this man?) The appellants need a 60 percent majority to have their suspensions – imposed by the right-dominated state executive – overturned.

The December 8 meeting will also receive a report on the fate of Egan and his two accomplices in the Lindsay leaflet scandal which is being investigated by the Australian Electoral Commission and the Australian Federal Police.

Egan’s private PR company, Flagship Communications, has lost a couple of valuable clients since the eve-of-election incident and the former deputy mayor of Blue Mountains City Council, who planned to stand at the next state election in 2011, is said to be devastated.

The loss of Egan from the state executive and the defeat of Howard has shattered the right-wing’s grip on the NSW party and will offer the incoming party leader, in all probability Malcolm Turnbull, a strategic window of opportunity to bulldoze the factionalists into the sidelines.

From a peak membership of 50,000 in the 1970s, the division’s membership has dropped to under 10,000 and it’s continuing to fall, largely as a result of the unsavoury activities of the right-wing cabal. Because of the March state election and the federal election, branch, state council and state executive elections were postponed until 2008.

The incoming federal leader will have to be prepared to take on the dregs of the Howardised party who are flaring monarchists, xenophobes, warmongers, union haters and Abo bashers and rebuild the party on the middle ground (now occupied by Labor). Good luck, Malcolm.