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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-02-28 Daily Xml
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Liberal Party

Mr PICTON (Kaurna) (15:23): There is now less than 13 months until the next state election and we are witnessing the four-yearly cycle of the Liberal Party tearing itself apart with its intergenerational factional feuds. In seat after seat across the state, there is turmoil underway in the South Australian Liberal Party. Their factions are as divided as ever, squabbling over the spoils of parliament rather than focusing on developing policies for the people of South Australia. InDaily's Tom Richardson has been writing a very interesting series of articles that reveal the level of dysfunction in the Liberal Party across the state.

In the western suburbs, the opposition has been grooming Matt Cowdrey to run for the seat of Colton. He has been lauded as a star candidate, only for the wet faction to go into overdrive to try to put a former premier's son into the seat. The member for Morphett himself, who is under preselection speculation, has reportedly signed the declaration for Alex Brown to run for the seat.

Then take the north-eastern suburbs and the seat of King, where the wet faction-backed Paula Luethen-Soper is so disliked that the former Liberal Party member and Mayor of Tea Tree Gully, Kevin Knight, has threatened to run as an Independent against her should she win preselection. He said, 'I wouldn't rule out running just to put a fact sheet [out about her].' If you want to learn more about this particular councillor and potential Liberal candidate you only have to read the excellent speeches of the member for Wright, who has held her accountable for her work on council, including the famous examples of ruined children's playgrounds and horses' heads in the park.

In the Mid North, we have former senator Sean Edwards, who has been forced out of the race to run for state parliament because he is actually pro growth, he has a pro growth agenda that sits opposite the anti growth agenda of the current Leader of the Opposition and the Liberal Party. He said to InDaily:

My long-held position in obtaining cheap baseload energy with zero carbon emissions, desperately required, is likely to put me at odds with the parliamentary team's newly-stated views on gas exploration and nuclear, and providing a contest of ideas in this space.

In the southern suburbs, we have the seat of Davenport, where the former member and minister Wayne Matthew is aiming for a re-entry into parliament. In doing so, he has taken a swipe at the poor performance and experience of the current members of the opposition. He has said:

There's certainly been a concern in business that the Liberal Party has lost a lot of their corporate knowledge…There's concern that they'll be very slow off the mark without some of that corporate knowledge…the only reason the Liberal Party is in opposition is because it tried to cut itself apart. They…lament they got [only] 53 per cent [of the vote] last time, but largely the Liberal Party is in opposition because it cut itself apart.

The factions are fighting back against that, with sources telling InDaily that his candidacy will be 'an unmitigated disaster'.

In the seat of Badcoe we have the Mayor of Unley, Lachlan Clyne, who has long been scoping out the seat and has moved a couple of times at least. This week, we have seen him backing down on a council proposal for developments that only four months ago he called a 'winning idea'. This is the same Mr Clyne who was, of course, previously charged with four counts of dishonestly dealing with documents and one count of using another person's identity information to commit an offence during the last council elections.

In the Hills, we have seen the likely candidate for Heysen, Stephen Blacketer, have this to say after Mr Turnbull took the prime ministership:

Well, ain't that f****d. Turns out I'm a member of the Labor lite party. I'm not a Malcolm Turnbull fan. Duplicity should not be rewarded. He split the party badly last time he was leader. He will do it again.

In the seat of Finniss, the current incumbent has threatened to run as an Independent if he does not get his way to support his preferred candidate of David Basham. In seat after seat, we are seeing this dysfunction and factional plays. Then there is a senior Liberal who is quoted as saying, 'If Steven Marshall wins the election and becomes Premier, he's in the most dangerous spot in politics—he is the only thing between Vickie Chapman and a premiership.'

The chaos of the Liberals is further reflected in their lack of diversity in likely candidates, with a shocking predicted male-female ratio of winnable seats of 83 per cent to 17 per cent, compared with the government's much more respectable ratio. There is no plan in the Liberal Party to arrest this decline, and it looks very likely that the preselections will once again return a Liberal team with diversity better reflecting 1918 than 2018.

Once again, the Liberals have proven that they are a party too focused on their own internal factional fights, feuds, hatreds and backstabbing to develop the policies to put the people of this state first.

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