Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like my colleague the member for Ballarat in last night’s adjournment, I have noted the Prime Minister’s comments about behaviour on Channel 10’s Big Brother program. I too watched the Lateline program. I have noted the deafening silence from the Prime Minister on claims of serious misconduct inside the New South Wales Division of the Liberal Party. I very much empathised with Betty Mihic and her family, who ran the Petersham-Lewisham branch. It reminded me of the late Mrs Luke. For years the late Mrs Luke and I were at the Mount Druitt primary school manning the booths from eight o’clock in the morning to eight o’clock at night. She was a stalwart of the Liberal Party and a true believer. I much admired her although I disagreed with her politics.

The misconduct I referred to was highlighted over the winter recess by party insider John Hyde Page. He has written a book with a rather gentle title—The Education of a Young Liberalbut there is nothing gentle about its content, for it exposes the rotten heart of the New South Wales Liberals. It is a story of ethnic branch stacking, fraud, violence, deception and intimidation. Hyde Page describes factional slush funds that pay multiple memberships, payments to induce stacked members to attend branch meetings, recruitment of members under false pretences, and impersonation of branch members to cast fraudulent votes.

In an unfortunate echo of some of the Liberal Party student activity my colleague described last night, Hyde Page also reveals latent racism in sections of the New South Wales branch. He describes an activity known as a ‘run’ which involves Young Liberals from the right-wing faction charging up and down streets affixing racist stickers to the hoods of cars. Hyde Page describes violence as a feature of everyday life in the Young Liberal Movement. He says:

I counted two instances of assault at a Young Liberal Council, one of them involving a young woman who was pregnant ...

And he attributes to the right wing ‘the deliberate use of physical violence and intimidation as political tactics’. Hyde Page describes the relationship between the dominant groups in the New South Wales Liberal Party like this:

Both factions did undertake covert surveillance of each other. There were factional slush funds—MPs and ministers aligned with each faction would raise funds, the proceeds of which went to pay for the hundreds of stacks that had to be signed each year.

A number of members of this House feature in the book, including the members for Warringah, Mackellar, North Sydney and Wentworth. But it is the member for Wentworth that has the starring role. Hyde Page provides an eye-watering account of the branch stacking that preceded the 2004 Liberal preselection in Wentworth. He describes the member for Wentworth’s victory over the hapless Peter King as ‘a textbook example of the ugly way in which money and power can be used to crush a weaker opponent’. It is an analysis borne out by the author’s detailed account of the contest.

It is clear that the internal struggle inside the New South Wales Division of the Liberal Party has nothing to do with the contest of ideas. It is about the pursuit of power at all costs. Even now, the right wing is dominant, but that is not enough. According to Hyde Page, the right-wing faction wants to ‘wipe out everything else’. As the right wing has tightened its grip on the New South Wales branch, basic standards of behaviour have fallen by the wayside. Hyde Page says that violence is part of everyday life. He has provided evidence of fraud and deception.

It is clear that ordinary members are being driven out of the party by factional power plays. I guess that includes Mrs Mihic and her sister. Yet the Prime Minister has remained mute on the right-wing takeover, content to benefit from the rise of the faction while distancing himself from its excesses. It is well past time that the Prime Minister turned his mind from moralising about Big Brother and reality television to the task of cleaning up his own party and his own New South Wales branch.