Liberal Suicide in Three Seats

It's mid-July and many commentators believe an election will be announced shortly. Yet the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Liberal Party is only this week pre-selecting it's candidates for three potentially winnable seats (Greenway, Parramatta & Lindsay). What sort of election planning leaves such seats without a candidate right up to the start of the campaign (and potentially into it)?

The Liberal Party has not changed much since I was an enthusiastic party activist between 1970 and 1985. After the 1972 election that unleashed Gough Whitlam on a startled and unprepared Australia, I vividly recall moving a motion to preselect a local candidate quickly, to enable us to work hard and win the seat back. It easily passed branch and electorate levels and I was then required to move an amended motion at the Liberal Party NSW State Council to "preselect candidates in all non-Labor seats without delay."

To my delight it was carried by a very large majority but a month later my hopes were dashed. The Party's State Executive did not want to implement this progressive reform and organised it's NSW Vice President, a youthful John Howard (destined to enter Parliament a year later) to move a recission motion that resoundingly referred my hard fought resolution to the garbage bin. As it turned out, the next election was called mid-term and narrowly lost, so if the candidates had been selected earlier the overall result may have been different.

Maybe I was too idealistic in expecting candidates to be selected more than two years in advance but leaving the selection of candidates right up to the election, as they appear to have done this time, is suicidal in potentially winnable seats.

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POST-ELECTION FOOTNOTE (31st August): The election was held on 21st August. With over ninety percent of the vote counted, the results in all three of these seats fell short of the required swing. In the case of Lindsay the swing was 5.15% (required to win: 6.28%). In Greenway the swing was only 4.82% (5.67%). This is in Western Sydney, which had recorded a 25% swing in a recent by-election in Penrith.

What a shocking indictment of the Liberal Party campaign organisation. With a hung parliament, these two seats would have made all the difference, if their candidates had had time to organise a campaign a few months before the election was called.