Which Liberal?

A good piece on ABC's Stateline last night about the battle for John Brogden's old seat of Pittwater. History dictates that this bluest of blue ribbon Liberal seats should go straight back to the Liberals on November 26th; the question is, which Liberal? Currently, the money is on Paul Nicolaou of `the Group', the moderate faction to which John Brogden was more closely aligned than the other main contender, businessman and hard-right winger Paul Ritchie. Given the claims of independent candidate and Pittwater mayor Alex McTaggart that the massive margin on which the Liberals currently sit could be cut by local anger over Brogden's treatment by the party machine, I'd say they'll try and keep Ritchie out of the picture if they possibly can, though the idea that he'll win on a tide of local anger is likely to be a pipe dream. His revelations that he was approached by the Liberal Right over pre-selection (the transcript should be on the Stateline website fairly soon) are interesting indeed.

But then again, the Liberal Right have other things on their plate at the moment.

A branch stacking scandal involving up to 70 members of the Liberal Party has been referred to NSW Police for possible fraud, according to a newspaper report.

The paper says the Liberal Party's NSW branch has confirmed investigating 74 instances where a small group of members had used their own credit cards to sign up other members to branches without their knowledge.

It is believed the breaches of the party's constitution involved four senior members of the party attempting to renew other members' lapsed memberships to stack branches across Sydney.

But let's play another game of `Which Liberal?':

State director Graham Jaeschke said four party members were disciplined after a meeting of the state executive last week.

Mr Jaeschke refused to name the four, but one was believed to be a member of the Right faction who was involved in a brawl at a party meeting earlier this year.

Geez, Jaeschke - throw us a frickin' bone! That could be ANYBODY !!!