Supporters of NSW Liberal Right leader David Clarke are confident the powerbroker will retain his NSW Upper House preselection, albeit by a narrow margin, this Friday night.
Clarke has been under threat from former protégé and federal MP Alex Hawke in a clash between what are labelled as Hawke’s “Ambition Faction” and the Howard Right, from which Hawke emerged as a staffer to Clarke earlier in the decade.
The Clarke camp believes that at this stage he is 2-3 votes in front, but expects he will receive support from moderate delegates in the preselection contest, which would boost his margin to 12-13.
Liberal moderates would have been unlikely saviours of Clarke two years ago when the NSW Liberals were engaged in open warfare between moderates and the “religious right” that wrecked moderate leader John Brogden and, many say, lost the party the 2007 election.
However, since power-sharing reforms in 2008 and the installation of Greiner-era moderate Michael Photios as vice-president, peace, at least by the standards of the NSW Liberals, has broken out. Clarke supporters believe the Left will honour the power-sharing deal and vote to retain the conservative Legislative Councillor rather than see a return to civil war.
The threat to Clarke has come not from the Left but from Alex Hawke and NSW party president and Hawke ally Nick Campbell. The Ambition Faction’s candidate is veteran North Shore Liberal David Elliott. Elliott is currently NSW head of the Civil Contractors Federation but was previously the high-profile head of the Australian Hotels Association and one of the most visible faces of the successful Australians for Constitutional Monarchy campaign to derail the republic vote a decade ago.
Campbell is still pursuing the Clarke camp over the now-famous Alex Hawke Downfall video from last year.
Tony Abbott, closely aligned with Clarke, tried unsuccessfully in early February to call for peace and rein in Hawke, who appears anxious to shed his reputation as a religious Right attack dog by publicly terminating the career of his mentor.
Abbott is understood to have demanded Hawke, who had his hopes for promotion to the frontbench dashed under Malcolm Turnbull, concentrate on being an effective backbencher and serving his electorate rather than risking a renewed outbreak of factional hostility just as the party is presenting a united face to the electorate in the lead-up to the 2011 election.
Clarke supporters have suggested that “it will be WW3” if Clarke loses, endangering what should be a gimme election against a truly rotten Labor Government. This is rumoured to extend to the Clarke’s colleague Charlie Lynn resigning from the Liberal Party and attack Hawke and Campbell from the cross-bench.
There are bigger stakes than just Clarke’s preselection in play on Friday night.
This is a disappointing and superficial analysis of the events unfolding within the NSW Liberal party.
Both Hawke and Campbell owe their positions, and influence, within the party, in no small part, to the encouragement and support of Clarke.
The video, which is hilarious, highlighted the machiavellian behaviour of Clarke’s opponents, and especially Hawke, with the ‘Hitler figure’ in the clip telling his principal aide that there was no other option than to ” call the cops”
This refers to an incident in which Hawke called local police, who understandably, given the general security concerns surrounding any public office holder, arrived in force, since the request had emanated from a Member of Parliament, to a local branch meeting in Hawke’s Federal seat of Mitchell, situated in the North-West of the Sydney metropolitan area, in which he was about to be defeated by force of numbers attending the meeting.
It was a calculated move by a politician about to defeated in a democratic vote, to disrupt the meeting.
The incident prompted a local police commander afterwards to publicly state that the police felt that they had ” been used” .
Used indeed!
The State Liberal administration is still investigating the incident.