A Liberal candidate in Melbourne’s northern suburbs has finally been dumped after new posts emerged where he dismissed a woman’s rape allegations, while Clive Palmer has jettisoned a United Australia party (UAP) hopeful who peddled conspiracy theories about the September 11 terrorist attacks.
The two candidates, the Liberals’ Gurpal Singh in the safe Labor seat of Scullin and Tony Pecora of the UAP, who was standing in the Greens’ seat of Melbourne, became the latest in a long line of fallen candidates this election when both were disendorsed late on Thursday night.
“Based on new information that has come to light, Mr Gurpal Singh has been asked to resign as the candidate for Scullin,” a Victorian Liberal party spokesman said.
“Mr Singh sincerely apologises for his previous comments and has tendered his resignation.”
The Liberals had already been under pressure to dump Singh over homophobic remarks he made in a 2017 SBS interview linking same-sex marriage to paedophilia.
Singh apologised for the remarks, but Scott Morrison faced questions on the campaign trail about why the party had failed to disendorse its Scullin candidate while calling for Labor to dump its now-axed candidate in Melbourne, Luke Creasey, who had made rape jokes on social media.
On Thursday, Facebook posts from Singh in which he dismissed a woman’s allegation of rape, abuse and violence by her former husband emerged. In the posts, Singh said the husband was the “real victim”.
Also on Thursday, Pecora was disendorsed after it was reported he had claimed the 2001 terror attacks, which killed almost 3,000 people, were the work of “globalist forces” and suggested “the whole story doesn’t make sense”.
After being confronted with his comments by the Age newspaper on Thursday evening, a spokesman for Palmer confirmed the candidate had been disendorsed.
In an interview with the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald, Pecora also said the US government was responsible for the death of President John F Kennedy, and accused the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank of pushing the idea of climate change as a means of “centralising financial power”. He also opposed mandatory vaccinations, which he called “a policy that we have to inject heavy metals and what are live diseases into the bloodstream of infants”.
At least 19 UAP candidates – including Pecora – had question marks over their eligibility to run for parliament because they submitted incomplete or inconsistent information about their dual citizenship status to the Australian Electoral Commission.
Guardian Australia also revealed earlier in the campaign that almost 40% of the party’s candidates do not live in the seat in which they are standing, and that candidates are required to return $400,000 in election support if they win their seat but subsequently leave the party.
