The NSW Liberal Party’s preselection for the state seat of North Shore this week provides a disturbing insight into what drives the party’s dominant faction. It has laid bare that while Gladys Berejiklian very much wants to retain government she has one higher duty … preservation of the "moderates" control of the NSW party. This week the Premier chose to increase the chances of defeat at the 2019 state election in order to preserve the machine that has been her life since leaving school.

Liberal Party preselectors handed North Shore MP Felicity Wilson a razor tight victory of just one vote. Credit:James Alcock

The 2019 state election will be tight. No non-ALP government has had more than two consecutive terms in the past century bar Robert Askin (1965-1975). Berejiklian is politically smart enough to know that if the incumbent member for North Shore, Felicity Wilson, is the Liberal candidate at the next election the seat will quite likely vote for an independent. Is not just that Kerryn Phelps’ seat is in clear sight across the harbour and that the same seat has voted for an independent on three occasions in recent memory. This very seat almost voted for an independent just last year. In that byelection a cascade of negative stories broke about Wilson but only in the last few days before polling day. Many votes had already been cast and others didn’t catch the news in time to register dissatisfaction. Since Wilson’s narrow byelection win over the independent she has had one negative story after another from across the press gallery.

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So why did the Premier absolutely go all out to salvage Wilson’s preselection? It's not unusual for a parliamentary leader to write an endorsement for a sitting member under preselection challenge … but it is more than unusual for a premier to phone individual preselectors in the days leading into the preselection, begging them to vote for that member. We can safely assume those phone calls shifted some waverers. Wilson won by one … so the Premier’s intervention determined the result. It is a longstanding convention in the Liberal Party that candidate selection is the domain of the organisational wing and not the parliamentary wing. But this week Berejiklian threw that out the window.