Hunter S Thompson was right in his excoriating obituary for Richard Nixon. Sometimes journalists need to get subjective to see public figures clearly.

It is said within the New South Wales Liberal party that there is one thing that unites Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Her name is Bronwyn Bishop. And with the close of NSW preselections on Friday, her time has come.



In a funny way, Bishop was largely responsible the factional system that could take her down. The factional system that is choking the NSW Liberal party.



Bishop has been kicking around the party since the early 1970s. According to many Liberal party sources and a book by journalist David Leser, her support base was the ultra-right wing of the party. Bishop denies the claim. She and her rightwing supporters became known as the “uglies” and the left organised under the name of the “moderates”. The rise of the moderates to control the NSW party began as a reaction against Bishop and the right.

Bishop was president of the NSW division from 1985-87, long enough to secure a Senate spot. There she specialised in dismembering public servants in Senate committees, including the then tax commissioner, Trevor Boucher. She pushed on to the lower house in 1994 in Mackellar, the same year a Newspoll recorded 56% support for a Coalition led by Bishop. It was on the back of a “Bronny for PM” campaign, aided by her spending just over $93,000 of taxpayers’ money on travel around the country in the year leading up to her lower house run.

From the safest of safe seats, Bishop’s near 30-year career in parliament has been a triumph of ambition over talent. Her underwhelming time as aged care minister was marked by the nursing home kerosene bath scandal. All up she spent five years in a junior ministry until she was dumped by John Howard. She languished on the backbench until elevated by Abbott to the speakership. Once in high office, rather than use her persona to be a kick-arse balanced Speaker, she merely used it for partisan rulings, party fundraisers and personal aggrandisement, such as sucking up to preselectors.

Bronwyn Bishop in November 2009. Photograph: Charlie Brewer

Her career was finally carried off on the blades of a helicopter. Then, in high dudgeon at being dumped as Speaker, she spat in the face of her protege, Abbott, by voting for Turnbull after Abbott carried her stinking political corpse for weeks. It killed both of them.



By 5pm on Friday the nominations close for the NSW Liberal party preselections and Bishop faces the first serious challenge to her preselection.

But if Bishop has a talent, it is for maintaining a North-Korean like grip on her branches. When she took over the seat in 1994, there were 1,700 Liberal party members in Mackellar. In 2016, it has 325. If it sounds counterintuitive to allow membership to drop, the answer lies in power. You need to keep branches small to ensure control and to determine which delegates get to Liberal state council. Council is where the power for preselection and policy resides.

(A number of Liberal members told me branch control measures, such as rejecting membership inquiries, have become common practice. Others dispute that.)



From the right, the company director and Liberal campaigner, Walter Villatora, will run in Mackellar. Villatora lives in Abbott’s seat of Warringah. From the moderates, a former Turnbull staffer, former Young Liberal president, sometime NSW transport minister adviser and managing director of Carewell, Jason Falinksi, joins the fray. Falinski grew up in the area. “Star candidate” is Wallaby player Bill Calcraft, who has received a blessing from broadcaster Alan Jones. They are not the only candidates and Mackellar is not the only seat in play.

In the past few months, Philip Ruddock’s Berowra electorate, Craig Kelly’s electorate of Hughes, Russell Matheson’s seat of Macarthur and Angus Taylor’s seat of Hume have been mentioned in dispatches. In the Senate, assistant minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells was looking shaky and senator Bill Heffernan has decided to retire of his own accord.

By elevating them in the reshuffle, Turnbull has made it clear Taylor and Fierravanti-Wells are off limits. Ruddock has anointed Julian Leeser in Berowra. Matheson, who was hoping to move to Taylor’s neighbouring seat, will have to settle for his existing seat. Turnbull has written a letter for Kelly and called his challenger Kent Johns this week to ask him to back off in Hughes.

But the general sentiment in the Liberal party remains that Bronny’s time is up. Abbott has backed Villatora. Turnbull has made no intervention for Bishop.

Tony Abbott gives Bronwyn Bishop a kiss after a party room meeting to elect her replacement as Speaker in august 2015. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Behind the scenes, the factional players are making deals within deals. The preselection will be down to 48 local preselectors elected by local branches and 48 “central” preselectors who are chosen “randomly” from around the state. The favourite candidate changes depending on who you speak to.

In any party, preselection time is notorious for game playing. Witness the Labor party in the Eddie Obeid years or in Western Australia today. Speaking publicly about party matters in the Liberal party is grounds for expulsion so any information is provided via “party sources”. Without being named, party sources can get up to all sorts of tricks, sending messages via news stories to rivals. With appropriate leverage in the media, candidates are forced to bow to factional leaders. Preselections take on a special significance because everything happens behind the public view. Journalists – knowingly or not – can be players.

The predominant NSW faction is headed by Michael Photios, lobbyist and former NSW minister. The right is headed by the state finance minister, Dom Perrottet, and the resources minister, Anthony Roberts. The centre right’s most visible figure is the new federal assistant treasurer, Alex Hawke, who works closely with a factional colleague, Nick Campbell, whose day job is with Photios’s lobbying firm. Partly as a result of that arrangement, a deal of sorts has been done between the left and the centre right. This leaves the right isolated and calling for reform of the party rules.

While factionalism in the NSW Liberals is loosely centred on ideologies, the factions also coalesce around personalities, local issues, business interests and self interest. There are no hard and fast rules. Industry lobbyists have figured highly in the Liberal party machine as unions have in the Labor party. Although Abbott banned third party lobbyists on the state executive, in-house lobbyists are still allowed. If a faction controls the machine and the branches, they control who gets into parliament. In return, members are expected to pay homage. As a result, the public interest can come off second best to more powerful interests or paying clients.

Howard among others recommended a plebiscite system for choosing candidates so every member would get a vote, reducing the power of factions. The right love it and the moderates hate it. Abbott was a supporter of the reforms, although he didn’t get around to doing anything about it when he was in office.



Malcolm Turnbull running for the seat of Wentworth in September 2004. Photograph: Paul Miller/AAP

Some among the moderates have argued that left to their own devices, party members are far too conservative to be trusted. Take marriage equality. Most of the moderates would support it, as Malcolm Turnbull does and many in Liberal party rooms. But the Liberal grassroots membership, generally older and more conservative, would be unlikely to support marriage reform.

Another argument against plebiscites is that it makes it harder to find a place for “star candidates”. High profile business people, one senior Liberal told me, want a coronation. They don’t want their reputation damaged by preselection loss.

But perhaps the favourite argument against plebiscites is the capacity to stack branches. This was famously deployed in the high profile fight for the seat of Wentworth, a younger Turnbull decided to have a tilt against Peter King. New members joining Wentworth branches ahead of the cut off for preselection numbered in the thousands. The preselection rules for the Great Wentworth Stack, as it became known, had a higher component of local preselectors.

This week Abbott, as a longstanding enemy of the moderates, wrote a reference for Villatora, a campaigner for reform. Praising Villatora’s work, Abbott wrote: “One particular faction has so come to dominate state executive and state council that good people are discouraged from joining the party or becoming active in it.

“Like John Howard, Barry O’Farrell, Mike Baird and so many others, you have swiftly come to appreciate that the best way to combat the sway of factions – and to encourage good people to join our party – is to give all our members an equal say in the most important job our party does: that of selecting candidates.”

Turnbull famously disagreed that the party was run by factions in an address at the NSW state council soon after he won office.

“We are not run by factions, we are not run by [laughter] ... Well, you may dispute that, but I have to tell you, from experience, we are not run by factions, nor are we run by big business, or by deals in back rooms,” he said.

The NSW division has committed to run plebiscites and Turnbull has supported the trials. But the party has yet to nominate an electorate to trial the plebiscite.

In which case, perhaps the party should allow a freer membership model and move on policy to attract a different, younger demographic. As a business model, shrinking membership numbers, chopping or changing branches as a means of control and refusing to allow members to engage in picking candidates would seem pretty pointless for a party which hopes to win elections.