For commonsense conservative Australians living in New South Wales, the anger is palpable. Yet again, the woke factional warriors of the Liberal party are doing, it would seem, their utmost to destroy any chance of a federal Coalition government being elected next year. People vote for political leaders and representatives, but the reality in a modern election campaign is that victory or defeat often comes down to the superiority of the electoral machine behind the candidates. Winning a seat, in our cumbersome preferential system, may come down to the organisation of candidates, corflutes and cups of coffee for weary volunteers. In such a system, it is unforgivable that our major centre-right party in our most important state is clearly incapable of organising the proverbial nocturnal session in a brewery, let alone a vast election campaign.

It was bad enough during the abysmal 2022 election that the NSW Liberal party were running around like headless chooks pre-selecting candidates right up until the very last moment. Now, as the next federal election looms ever closer, we had to endure, last week, the ridiculous scenario whereby 140 local council candidates, including 48 sitting councillors, were left off ballots for September’s local government elections. This Monty Pythonesque debacle was then compounded with a failed legal attempt to move the deadline, later dropped.

Sitting atop this putrid mess is NSW Liberal president Don Harwin, a former long-time member of the NSW state parliament whose primary achievement was to get caught brazenly ignoring his government’s own idiotic social distancing restrictions and scarpering off to his Central Coast holiday home during Covid. Mr Harwin, who only won the presidential slot by one vote, does not inspire confidence. With infuriated Liberals calling for heads to roll, his is the one they are referring to.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott – who arguably lost the 2010 federal election because of similar NSW party incompetence – didn’t mince his words. ‘When there’s been a big organisational failure, the person at the top can’t wash his hands of it. The president can’t realistically say it was all the state director’s fault when he was apparently up to his ears in the whole mess. I think his position is now untenable,’ said Mr Abbott of Mr Harwin, adding that, ‘Something is badly wrong when the party has fewer than 10,000 members in a state of eight million people.’ Indeed.

Liberal party insiders believe that the reason for the bungle was less incompetence and more likely a dirty tricks campaign gone awry. According to one such insider, ‘The Libs’ council candidate nomination fiasco was the result of an often-used underhanded strategy by the NSW Liberal party state executive council to delay nominations until the last minute, then place their own left-wing candidates under the urgency provision in Section 21.6.3 of their constitution.’ To test this theory, it would be interesting to compare the factional affiliations of those who did make pre-selection with those who did not. If you do, please let us know what you find.

If there is any validity to this theory then it may well be that the NSW Liberal party organisation gave us not only the appalling Gillard-Greens government of 2010 but also gifted Australia the even worse Albanese government in 2022. Nice work, chaps.

Former prime minister John Howard has suggested that maybe the Liberal party machine should not be involved at all in local elections and should instead concentrate solely on federal and state campaigns. John Ruddick, now a Libertarian member of the NSW parliament, spent many years attempting to reform the Liberal party machine from within but gave up in despair. One of the reasons many Liberals joined Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives party in 2017 and 2018 was due to intense dissatisfaction with the NSW Liberal party factional warlords.

On a more depressing note, it is these same grubby games that gave us the likes of Matt Kean, the ghastly former NSW Liberal treasurer and climate cultist who destroyed the premiership of Dominic Perrottet and who now works for the Albanese Labor government. They also gave NSW Mark Speakman. (Who? Precisely.)

What an unmitigated tragedy for this nation if the woke warlords of the NSW Liberal party yet again deny Australians a common sense conservative federal government.

We urge Peter Dutton to act swiftly and decisively to sort out this mess.