Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

It is a matter of public record that the member for Ryan has been disendorsed by the Liberal Party. It is also a matter of public record that their candidate for Wright, Hajnal Ban, has recently been disendorsed. And of course there is speculation regarding the candidate for Forde, Bert van Manen—published in the Courier-Mail today. He is under threat of disendorsement with local party members moving a motion to disendorse him, and a senior Liberal National Party source was quoted as describing him as ‘safe for now’. We all know what ‘safe for now’ means. Clearly they are setting themselves up for another disendorsement. I note that the Gold Coast Bulletin indicates that the next candidate for preselection, the next cab off the rank, for the seat of Wright will be a certain Bob La Castra, a former scriptwriter for Bananas in Pyjamas. Given the opposition’s problems with policy development, I think that is an ideal candidate for the Liberal National Party. He could write some pretty good policies.

It is not only this side of the House that is concerned by those problems. The Courier-Mail in its editorial today has referred to a ‘crisis of faith’ in the Liberal National Party and described the party as a ‘rabble’. The Australian in its editorial has referred to ‘the forest of deadwood MPs and senators’, ‘a batch of dud candidates’, ‘a team of time-servers’ and ‘the amateurish, insular world of LNP politics’. Former member for Longman and former minister Mal Brough described the situation thus: ‘Queenslanders have a right to feel let down, disappointed and led up the garden path. There is no Liberal or National with a federal focus for them to support.’

It appears that there is more to come because the candidate for Longman for the Liberal National Party, one Wyatt Roy, appears also to be under threat of disendorsement. Recently in an interview on 4BC, within the one interview he managed to claim that both sides of politics supported the invasion of Iraq, which of course is not true. He then said that he did not know which year this invasion occurred. He then said that the Liberal National Party did not have a policy on child support. When asked for the party’s policy on asylum seekers he said, ‘Well as we have said, we will turn back the boats, we will … ah … go through the process of turning them into legitimate … ah … arrivals and we will begin to look at that … how we go about doing that.’

So they clearly have a state of extreme confusion. And the problem for Mr Wyatt Roy is that he has been effusively endorsed by the Leader of the Opposition. The reason that is a problem is because the member for Ryan was previously effusively endorsed by the Leader of the Opposition, and Hajnal Ban was also effusively endorsed by the Leader of the Opposition—shortly before being disendorsed. The Leader of the National Party has even described Mr Roy as a future prime minister. Those of us who know the Leader of the National Party can probably understand that because most of the people he encounters probably look like future prime ministers to him.

There is a very serious aspect to this. The Australian people deserve better than this rabble. They deserve better than the chaos that is occurring in the Liberal National Party in Queensland because people are entitled to understand who they are being asked to vote for, to become acquainted with them, to hear what they have got to say and to know what they are on about. They are being denied that opportunity in Queensland. The Liberal National Party in Queensland is demonstrating yet again the merit of Bob Hawke’s old saying, ‘If you cannot govern yourselves, you cannot govern the country.’

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