NSW Liberals desperate to cut loose from Peter Dutton’s legacy

There’s not much NSW Liberals can agree on, but both conservatives and moderates claim they want the same thing: to make sure the party becomes electable again.

Moderates, backed by federal Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, believe they’ve taken an important step towards doing just that after dumping two Victorian Liberals from the NSW division’s federal takeover committee.

“This is about reclaiming the party and focusing on the main game, and that’s winning elections,” a moderate NSW Liberal source said about Tuesday’s appointment of a new committee.

The NSW division was overtaken by the federal executive last year after a fiasco involving the failure to nominate large numbers of candidates for council elections. On Tuesday, Victorians Alan Stockdale and Richard Alston were ousted from the committee, and the panel’s membership was increased from three to seven. The new committee will be chaired by ex-premier Nick Greiner and run until March 30 next year.

Sources told Crikey that Ley was a driving force behind the reboot, and that she did her legwork in the days and weeks ahead of the meeting by talking to influential party members and making sure the move had support. The new committee was voted in by 20 federal executive members against one.

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Ley hand-picked ex-state MP Peta Seaton (who was the third member of the original committee) as her representative, while NSW Opposition Leader Mark Speakman nominated barrister Jane Buncle as his.

Stockdale’s ousting came after a badly received attempt at a joke at a recent NSW Liberals Women’s Council meeting.

Conservatives took the exact opposite view on the makeup of the new panel, warning it may hurt the party’s chances of winning future elections.

“The country deserves a [Liberal] party that can contest elections and not be focused on factional interests,” leading NSW conservative Anthony Roberts told The Daily Telegraph. “While I find the makeup [of the new committee] fascinating, I would hope along with the rest of the party’s root and branch members that the people appointed realise they have a generational obligation to fix the Liberal Party, so it can win elections for the sake of NSW and the country.”

(The conservatives had their own ideas about who should be on the panel; Crikey understands some right-wingers tried and failed to get ex-prime minister Tony Abbott on the panel, a detail that the Telegraph reported as well.)

Regardless of faction, many Liberals appear to view the change in divisional leadership as a win for the moderates.

“Moderates are reasserting power now that [Peter] Dutton is gone,” one source told Crikey.

That faction appears to have an emerging leader in freshman Hornsby MP James Wallace, who was known as one of the faction’s “numbers men” before taking over his close ally Matt Kean’s former seat in 2024.

Asked who the moderates were who would be likely to celebrate the change in divisional leadership, one source pointed to a picture posted to Instagram by state MP Eleni Petinos earlier this month.

The snap, from a birthday celebration for North Shore MP Felicity Wilson (and hashtagged both “BirthdayBoss” and “CakeAndSlay”) features fellow Liberal state MPs Alister Henskens, Jordan Lane, Wilson, Wendy Tuckerman, Petinos, Jacqui Munro, Justin Clancy, Robert Dwyer and Wallace.

Another source said NSW Senator Maria Kovacic had also been involved in pushing for the change.

Tuesday’s federal executive meeting also appointed a pair of influential former Liberals to lead a review into why the party did so badly at the May federal election. Ex-NSW minister and sex discrimination commissioner Pru Goward and former federal minister Nick Minchin will conduct that work, which is a standard undertaking after an election loss.