The outgoing federal Liberal president, Alan Stockdale, has called on the party to consider allowing “corporate membership” and to overhaul its fundraising efforts.



Stockdale outlined the suggestions at a meeting of Liberal delegates in Melbourne as the new president, the former Howard government minister Richard Alston, vowed to ensure all divisions worked together cohesively because it was important to remember “who the real enemy is”.

The only other challenger for the role of federal president was a Liberal party reform advocate, John Ruddick, who spoke of the need to rejuvenate the party by empowering all members to have a say on Senate preselections.

The federal Liberal council elected Alston as president on Friday night. Delegates also passed policy motions supporting voter identification laws and calling for an end to tax deductibility for donations to environmental organisations active in political debates.

Stockdale, who did not recontest the presidency after six years in the role, said most Liberal divisions had introduced reforms in the past few years to improve members’ active involvement in politics, but the party needed to do more.

He called on the party to employ an “experienced, proven fundraiser as a deputy director” to head a “professionally-staffed fundraising unit” that would operate in a “genuinely federal structure” and “coordinate, but not control, fundraising on a party-wide basis”.

The suggestion follows a sustained focus by the Independent Commission Against Corruption on donations connected to the Liberal party’s New Sales Wales division.

Stockdale said he believed political party fundraising would “attract more and more regulation” and “become even more difficult” so the Liberals had no choice but to rely more on a large volume of smaller donations, as happened in many other western democracies.

He also called on party divisions to persuade more members to make additional, small monthly donations and warned the party of the need to attract more women as office bearers, candidates and MPs through mentoring, but not quotas.

“I also think that we should consider opening the federal organisation to corporate membership across the country, particularly as we’re facing a pattern of the banning of corporate donations,” Stockdale said.

A Greens senator, Lee Rhiannon, issued a statement demanding Alston rule out corporate membership fees, saying this would “defeat efforts to clean up politics”.



Alston said he was “open to all sensible suggestions” and he had not really thought about corporate membership until he heard Stockdale mention it but “it may be something that does deserve further consideration”.

Asked about increasing involvement of party members, Alston said: “I think we always aspire to do that but you’ve got to understand that some people don’t want to get further involved.”

He said the party could always do more to attract women but said they were not “actively discouraged”.

“I think you’ve got to make sure they understand what is involved; I mean people can often be put off by what they might see as being away from home all the time, or it not being very family friendly, and I think we have to make some allowances for those sorts of things,” Alston said.

“I don’t think quotas make any sense. It leaves a nasty taste in people’s mouths in some respects because you’re not there on your merits; you’re there because some arithmetical calculation said that it was your turn. That’s not our way.”

In his speech to delegates, Alston thanked his supporters, including the party’s leader and prime minister, Tony Abbott.

Alston said his goals were to maintain the party’s organisation on a sound financial footing, “fortify the federal structure” to encourage a national and united approach, and work to win the next round of state and territory and federal elections.

He said the Liberals were “the party of middle Australia” and had a philosophy far removed from the “tax and spend” approach of Labor, “who still don’t understand the truth of PJ O’Rourke’s maxim that if you think that healthcare is expensive now, just wait until it’s free”.

Ruddick, who has been active in pushing for party reforms, told the meeting he was running for federal president because he had heard of a “cross-factional interstate deal” for the role and he wanted to give the delegates “a little bit of a contest”.

Ruddick invited delegates to draw inspiration from the involvement of hundreds of thousands of people in the US Republican nominations for Oklahoma and Mississippi Senate candidates.

“For whatever reason, to become a senator under the Liberal party in some states as few as 40 delegates will decide who our candidates are going to be … for every 10,000 people in Mississippi or Oklahoma we have one delegate and I believe in the not-too-distant future people are going to be scratching their heads and thinking how could we have it that we had so few people [who] had such a say on such an important decision,” Ruddick said.

“I know that in some states up to 700 Liberals will have a vote on who our Senate candidates are going to be, but with those 700 people voting, it’s still be less than 10% of the entire membership of the state, which means that there’s still 90% of Liberal party members that we say, we want you to donate your money and we want you to donate your time but we’re not interested in your judgment about who are going to be our best senators.”

The pace of party reform was too slow, Ruddick said.

The Victorian premier, Denis Napthine, opened Friday’s meeting with a call on the “Liberal family across Australia” to work together to ensure the re-election of the coalition government in that state in November.

The Victorian coalition is behind Labor in the polls and its efforts to sell the state budget were complicated this week by a leaked recording in which the former premier, Ted Baillieu, criticised some colleagues.

Napthine said: “It will be a tough, hard-fought election. It will be a real test of our resolve and our commitment to work together as a team and make sure we sell our good budget and plans for the future of our great state.”