The convenor of the No Land Tax party, Peter Jones, has made explosive claims that the group is backed by people linked with the Liberal party.
The party is still in the running for a contested seat in the New South Wales upper house following last month’s state election.
Jones, a former member of the Labor party and self-professed union whistleblower, told ABC radio on Thursday his party was financed by “people with political pedigrees” from “the Liberal side” of politics.
“Almost all of them are on the Liberal side of politics,” Jones said. “I was told that under no circumstances were we to preference the Labor party or the Greens, that we had to preference the Liberal party, and that’s precisely what we did.”
The party said it would pay people $330 for handing out how-to-vote cards on election day, and offered them a $200 bonus if candidates in individual seats received more than 10% of the vote.
Jones said the “system of bonuses” was “quite legitimate”. He said the party had employed 3,600 people for the task, but not all of them showed up on the day. The cost of the wages alone amounted to more than $1m.
Employees have yet to be paid for their work, with Jones claiming that payments were delayed because he had to deal with the fallout of a smear campaign undertaken by the NSW Liberal party.
Calls to the NSW branch of the Liberal party were not returned.
Jones would not be drawn on who was bankrolling the party, saying only that “there’s certainly some people with political pedigrees”. He said he did not think they were serving members of the Liberal party. It is not against NSW or federal electoral laws for people to be members of more than one political party.
In a heated exchange with 2GB host Ray Hadley last month in which Jones swore at broadcaster, he said party supporters were the main financiers.
“We have a lot of supporters. We have over 60,000 on our email list. We’re not short of the funds needed to run our campaign,” he said.
Jones is a former vice president of the NSW branch of the Communications Electrical Plumbing Union (CEPU). He had an acrimonious split with both the union and the Labor party.
The secretary of the CEPU, Jim Metcher, has recently applied for an apprehended violence order against Jones over allegedly threatening text messages sent after Metcher went on Hadley’s program and urged voters to steer clear of Jones and the No Land Tax party. The party won the coveted first spot on the NSW upper house ballot paper, giving it a boost from so-called donkey votes.
Despite have been registered for only 12 months, the party managed to run candidates in all 93 lower house seats and 16 candidates in the upper house.
Its key platform is the abolition of land tax, which applies only to owners of multiple properties which have a combined taxable value of more than $432,000.
The final composition of the NSW upper house will be declared within a fortnight.
Jones is convinced there will be a legal challenge to the result, after the Animal Justice party and Outdoor Recreation party were left off the above-the-line section of the electronic ballot in the first 36 hours of pre-polling. About 19,000 voters had cast their ballot in that time.
“I know we’ll be successful in overturning this one. It’s a dead-set certainty. The only way the election won’t be overturned is if the judge is ... on crystal meth,” Jones said.
But the NSW Electoral Commission told Guardian Australia the parties involved would have to prove they were disadvantaged by the glitch before they could bring a case to the NSW court of disputed returns.
“[The No Land Tax Party] were in no way disadvantaged. They have no case at all,” the commission’s Richard Carroll said.
“The result would have to be extremely close before it would worth anyone’s while,” Carroll said, adding that it was premature to speculate about lodging a complaint before the results were finalised.
