You have to hand it to our politicians – they sure know how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. You don’t have to look far beyond the twisted recriminations in the wake of the Wentworth byelection disaster to see how.
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As the blame game shifts into high gear, the electorate has been swamped with some spectacularly twisted logic, the dooziest of which is the notion that the hammering absorbed by the Liberal Party is somehow the fault of Malcolm Turnbull.
Knifed as PM in a party room coup just when he was closing the gap in the opinion polls, Mr Turnbull did the right thing and resigned. As history shows us, former leaders languishing on the back bench are a font of trouble – just ask Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce.
Yet, somehow, in the minds of those staring down the barrel of Coalition annihilation at next year’s federal election, Wentworth is all Malcolm’s fault. He shouldn’t have resigned, they say; he shouldn’t have dashed off to New York. This is Orwellian doublethink at its finest.
The fault rests squarely with the parliamentary Liberal Party, which staged the coup which saw off Mr Turnbull in the first place and then played crazy – and inept – politics in the days before the byelection. The It’s OK To Be White vote in the senate (oops, we made a mistake) and the Embassy In Jerusalem debacle (fancy a bit of foreign policy tomfoolery with our election pitch?) were spectacular in their incompetence. No doubt they swayed votes in Wentworth too.
And as the clock ticks down to the federal election in May, here in Gilmore we have further party disarray with no official Liberal Party candidate, despite the departure of Ann Sudmalis.
There is now only one nominee for the candidacy, Milton businessman Grant Schultz, who must be champing at the bit to hit the campaign trail.
Despite sentiment by some in the party, including former Gilmore MP Joanna Gash, who would like to see preselection nominations thrown open again, presumably so she can champion a nominee of her choice such as Jemma Tribe, this is unlikely to happen.
We are told the preselection process is most likely to be a set-piece endorsement of Mr Schultz but it won’t happen for at least another three weeks.
That’s another three weeks in which the main contender, Labor’s Fiona Phillips, is free to campaign without a rival.
