Dennis Jensen has ruled out running in his Western Australian seat of Tangney as an independent after comprehensively losing preselection for the Liberal party, saying his reputation has been besmirched in a dirty smear campaign.
In an awkward interview aired on Sky News on Monday, Jensen outlined the timeline of his divorce and subsequent romantic relationship.
He angrily lashed out at inferences made in the Australian newspaper that he was a philanderer.
The accusations have dashed hopes of running in the conservative, largely Christian seat, he said.
“You don’t have to be a Christian not to like a person running off from their family to be with a new girlfriend,” Jensen said.
He confirmed that the decision not to run as an independent marks the end of his 12 year career in politics.
According to reports, Jensen will launch defamation proceedings against the Australian newspaper and a journalist who published excerpts of the novel which involves graphic sex scenes and a fictional war between Australia and an Indonesia-China coalition.
On Monday Jensen lost the preselection vote for his seat of Tangney 57 to 7 to former West Australian Liberal party director Ben Morton.
The preselection loss followed revelations he pitched the novel several years ago to a publisher using his parliamentary letterhead.
On ABC TV on Monday Jensen said he was the victim of a “clearly orchestrated and very well-organised” campaign against him.
“The fact that the only thing that they had on me was a book that was 15 years old and the fact that might have tried to sort of sell it nine years ago, is not a whole lot of negative stuff. They’ve obviously been digging pretty damn deep to go back to something like that,” he said.
“It says how clean I am in effect and it says how deep they’ve gone to try and get smut on me or something negative. They haven’t managed so they’ve fabricated something.
“My margin speaks for itself. I’ve been the most popular member for Tangney that there’s ever been, and they stabbed me in the back for that.”
According to the West Australian newspaper, Jensen’s lawyer Martin Bennett said he believed the release of the excerpt was calculated to cause a loss of support at the preselection vote.
“The most perfunctory search of the parliamentary register would have shown that the so-called new information was more than a year and a half old,” he said.
When asked about the alleged dirty tricks campaign, Morton told Guardian Australia party rules do not allow him to comment on the preselection, as he has not yet been formally endorsed.
According to the ABC, after the preselection vote Morton said “because the Liberal party today has made a decision about its future, it doesn’t mean at the same time we can’t thank Dennis Jensen for his contribution to the Liberal party and the people of Tangney since 2004”.
The Liberal party’s state director, Andrew Cox, said that despite Jensen’s allegations of a smear campaign, he had confidence in the preselection process: “I think it was conducted fairly”.
Morton’s preselection is likely to be ratified by state council on Saturday.
