You can blame factional brawling and litigious former members if you like, but anything that goes wrong with last-minute NSW Liberal candidates is entirely the fault of Scott Morrison.
He’s the one who allowed his minion Alex Hawke to completely wreck the NSW preselection process because greater party democracy threatened Hawke. He’s the one who presided over the bizarre situation where his ministers faced disendorsement because they’d lost control of their branches. He’s the one who couldn’t call the election until last weekend because he was too busy wasting taxpayer money fighting his own party in the courts.
And he’s the one who picked Katherine Deves in Warringah in Sydney to take on Zali Steggall.
Readers with long memories might recall Morrison passive-aggressively trying to get Gladys Berejiklian to run there, before backgrounding against her (again) when she declined. Indeed any number of candidates, some of high quality, have put their hands up to run in Warringah. But Morrison put Deves in.
Deves is now shaping up as 2022’s Pauline Hanson.
Those with even longer memories might recall how the long national nightmare that is Hanson began when Hanson, then an Ipswich nonentity, was preselected in Oxley by the Queensland Liberals in 1996. She made racist comments about Indigenous Australians and was disendorsed after some media pressure on John Howard but too late for ballot papers to be changed. Hanson duly won and the rest is a particularly sordid piece of history.
According to Deves, trans kids have been “surgically mutilated and sterilised”. She claims to have been “triggered” by the rainbow flag because it meant LGBTIQA+ people were “demanding” something (and to think it’s usually conservatives mocking how progressives are “triggered”). Days that celebrate LGBTIQA+ Australians are “grooming”, which is designed to “capture children and adolescents as profit centres by promoting hormonal and surgical gender transition”. The comments were made on now-deleted online posts.
Remember this is Morrison’s own pick for the seat after he deliberately allowed NSW preselections to be blocked.
Initially Morrison thought Deves’ views on trans people in sport could be exploited for culture war purposes. “She’s standing up for things that she believes in, and I share her views on those topics,” Morrison said. “This is just about, you know, common sense and what’s right. And I think Katherine’s right on the money there.”
By yesterday Deves was toxic enough for Morrison to no longer “share her views on these topics”. “They’re not views that I was aware of,” he said about her deleted claims. Steggall and others are calling for Deves’ disendorsement.
Warringah is no Oxley, and the Liberals are even less likely to regain it, but it reflects on the mess that Morrison created. Checking on Deves’ record of public comments was basic due diligence, which apparently wasn’t done — or if it was done Morrison’s team was so desperate to find someone with a pulse to stand that they ignored it.
The circumstances of another last-minute nomination also came back to bite Morrison yesterday, with questions about the Rheem factory he’d visited on Tuesday to launch the campaign of Parramatta candidate Maria Kovacic, which The Canberra Times revealed was sacking workers and offshoring production. Morrison’s campaign team should have avoided it like the plague.
So far the focus has all been on Labor’s stumbles, but Morrison — who is offering nothing by way of new policy — has had his own problems. If Labor was running a tighter ship, the scrutiny would be a lot more uncomfortable for the prime minister.
And what else is yet to come to light from Deves?
Editor’s note: Deves penned a column about trans athletes at the Olympics for Crikey last year. Here is a link.
