Woes of the Liberal party go all the way down to arcane NSW state politics – The Australian Financial Review

Tony Abbott, as a conservative, is the one figure who can shore up the party's base against the surge in support for Pauline Hanson's nativist One Nation Party, and the recent defection of South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi.

In Working Girl, a charming film made by Mike (The Graduate) Nicholls, a male character is caught by his girlfriend, played by Melanie Griffith, engaging in what H.G. Nelson calls "horizontal folk dancing" with another woman.

The male character, played by Alec (Saturday Night Live) Baldwin, blurts out: "This isn't what it seems."

Expressed in different ways, this has been pretty much the standard response of Liberal politicians to the all-but-declared warfare between former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and the man who blasted him out of the job, current Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

But even this flimsy verbal charade collapsed on Friday in a welter of bitter recriminations against Abbott by Malcolm Turnbull and cabinet ministers such as Mathias Cormann and Christopher Pyne.

These followed Tony Abbott's attack on his successor at a book launch, followed by an interview on TV, in Sydney on Thursday night, including the incendiary: "The risk is we will drift to defeat if we don't lift our game."

In response, Turnbull said his nemesis "knows exactly what he's doing and so do his colleagues" and that Turnbull's government had achieved more in the last six months than had been achieved in the previous three years, when Abbott was PM.

Finance Minister Cormann, who backed Abbott during that fateful meeting of Liberal MP's on September 14, 2015, branded the former PM's intervention "deliberately destructive". Pyne, a senior moderate in the government and minister for defence industry, slammed Abbott's proposals, including sharp cuts in government spending and a slowdown in the immigration rate, as either "catastrophic" or ones that had failed when he was in office.

This new, open war phase means there will be intense focus on the result of a looming NSW Liberal Party ballot. At one level it is just a state parliamentary preselection, one that routinely creates little interest outside the relevant political party and political commentators.

But at another level the preselection result for Manly, a Sydney harbour-side seat held by NSW Premier Mike Baird until he suddenly resigned last month could affect the future course of the Abbott-Turnbull warfare, on the careers of both, and even the Turnbull government's survival.

Manly lies inside the federal seat of Warringah, which has been held by Abbott since he won a byelection in 1994. The current Liberal Party preselection for the seat is being contested by six candidates. These include Walter Villatora, who was campaign manager for Mike Baird when he first won the seat in 2007, and is President of the Liberal Party's Federal Electorate Conference (FEC) in Abbott's seat of Warringah.

The close ties Abbott has with Villatora showed up again last year when he backed him in his unsuccessful bid to win Liberal Party's preselection for the adjacent seat of Mackellar, which had been held by former Speaker Bronwyn Bishop since she, too, won a byelection in 1994. The final winner was Jason Falinski.

Complicating matters another strong possible Liberal candidate for Manly who is also on the right in a highly factionalised NSW Liberal Party is John Hart, the chief executive of Restaurant & Catering Australia. Hart lost his bid to succeed former federal treasurer Joe Hockey in the nearby federal seat of North Sydney in late 2015 to Trent Zimmerman.

He is well-liked in the Liberal Party, although he attracted some controversy as the head of Joe Hockey's now mothballed electorate fundraising arm, the North Sydney Forum.

But in what is shaping up as a close contest, both Villatora and Hart are facing a strong challenge from James Griffin, who, at 34, is already a director in the risk consulting practice of KPMG in Sydney.

In preselection manoeuvring, Griffin, a moderate, is being framed by the right as the candidate of the NSW Liberal Party's dominant moderate faction, but he is in fact non-aligned and has deep roots in the area as a former local councillor.

So far, Baird, who resigned as premier to spend more time with his family and sick parents, has studiously kept his distance from the preselection process. However, it would not surprise close observers of the Liberal Party if Baird swung his support behind Griffin, touted as a possible future minister, in the final stages of a preselection which is likely to occur in mid-March.

Whatever the outcome, attention will inevitably shift to Abbott's parliamentary future. His Liberal Party opponents will argue that Abbott cannot remain as an MP when he is openly undermining Malcolm Turnbull, and even publicly casting doubt on the ability of a Turnbull-led Liberal Party to win the next federal election.

But the Abbott argument for remaining as the Liberal member for Warringah assuming he wants to stay in that role was already being put by his close Liberal Party supporters in private conversations by the end of the week. The nub of it is that Tony Abbott, as a conservative, is the one figure who can shore up the party's base against the surge in support for Pauline Hanson's nativist One Nation Party, and the recent defection of South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi.

One of those who may be attracted to such an argument is Walter Villatora. As a seasoned Liberal Party figure, he also knows that even prior to last July's federal election, there were stirrings in Abbott's own electorate of Warringah.

At a tense four-hour meeting at the Warringah Golf Club last April, Abbott fought off an attempt to curb his control of the Warringah electorate by former Liberal Party Treasurer Philip Higginson, a one-time friend and now a fierce Liberal Party foe.

Higginson was defeated in his attempt to replace Villatora as President of the Liberal Party's Warringah Federal Electorate Conference, which selects the party's candidate for the seat. Villatora defeated Higginson 57-41.

The position of FEC President is honorary. It is also sensitive, and the tension at that closed meeting may be just a mild foretaste of what is to come.

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Woes of the Liberal party go all the way down to arcane NSW state politics - The Australian Financial Review