A schism within the NSW Greens may end up in court, with two members preparing to launch legal action in a last-minute attempt to change the party’s upper house ticket just weeks before the state election.
A former City of Sydney lord mayoral candidate, Lindsay Johnston, and former councillor Chris Harris plan to file legal action in the NSW supreme court as early as Tuesday afternoon to get an official recount of the members’ preselection ballots.
At issue is the crucial second spot on the party’s legislative council ballot – with only the first and second positions likely to be winnable for the party at the 23 March state election.
Long-simmering tensions between key figures in the party exploded last year following the ousting of MLC Jeremy Buckingham from the upper-house ticket.
Buckingham was formally asked to step aside from the ticket in December, following accusations of sexual misconduct from a former Greens staffer, which Buckingham strenuously denied. He has since quit the party and is running as an independent.
MLCs Cate Faerhmann and Justin Field, factional allies of Buckingham, warned an “irrevocable split” was imminent in December unless there was a recount of the ballots for the upper-house preselection. Another ally, MLC Dawn Walker, also requested a formal recount, arguing in December that people who had voted for Buckingham risked being “disenfranchised”.
The preselection was decided by a members’ vote earlier last year, in which the incumbent MLC David Shoebridge, from the party’s left, received the most first preference votes (1,161), followed by Buckingham (780).
Due to the party’s affirmative action rules, two men cannot occupy the first and second spots, so Abigail Boyd was placed second on the ballot after the distribution of preferences, Buckingham was placed third and Walker fourth. Buckingham was later removed from the ballot.
Walker and her supporters hope a recount could bump her into the second position in place of Boyd.
“If Jeremy was excluded from the count and his 780 first-preference votes were distributed prior to the first count, the order of the ballot may have been different and would have directly elected a woman into the second position, as per the Greens NSW constitution,” Walker wrote in December.
Earlier demands for a recount have failed – the deadline for parties to lodge their tickets is 6 March.
Harris told Guardian Australia he and Johnston believed moving candidates up the order of the ballot, rather than carrying out a recount, ran contrary to the Greens’ principle of grassroots democracy.
“We’re taking this action because 780 members voted in the preselection, that’s 30% of the voters, and their votes have been put aside by using this practice, which some inside the Greens say is the usual practice. We disagree with that.”
The matter was due to be addressed at a meeting of the state delegates council at the weekend, but a spokesman for the NSW party said a proposal for the recount was withdrawn.
“The upper-house candidates remain David Shoebridge, Abigail Boyd and Dawn Walker – in that order,” he said.
The allegations against Buckingham, which were detailed in an investigation on the ABC’s 7.30 program in August and were also the subject of a speech under parliamentary privilege by the Greens MP Jenny Leong, were investigated by an external company, Workdynamic.
The full report has never been made public but the party confirmed the investigation found Workdynamic was “not satisfied that there is sufficient evidence on the balance of probabilities that an incident of sexual harassment as defined by the legislation occurred”.
