Currumbin2Cook

Liberals start to implode

The Sicilian faction in the Queensland Liberal Party is already looking to position itself post the election and post Bruce Flegg.

According to this article in The Australian by Matthew Franklin:

Liberal sources told The Australian yesterday the decision to replace former party leader Bob Quinn with Dr Flegg a fortnight ago had been a serious error.

And they blamed the so-called western suburbs faction, which controls the parliamentary partyroom but not the wider party.

Not hard to work out who the "sources" are, or at least what faction they come from. Matt's always been closer to Santoro than anyone else. What's more, the story doesn't make a lot of sense except as a post hoc re-writing of history.

Inasmuch as there are factions rather than social alliances in the Queensland Liberal Party, the Tucker faction has two definite parliamentary members - Quinn and Flegg. The Sicilian faction also has two bona fide members - Langbroek and Caltabiano. Stuckey is definitely non-aligned, Rogers was regarded as Sicilian, but may have shifted and McArdle is probably a corresponding member of the Western Suburbs group but I'm not sure. I should add here that, while I haven't played a part in Liberal Party politics for some years, I would have been regarded as a member of the Western Suburbs faction, although it isn't much more than a geographically pejorative phrase coined by others.

That being the disposition of parliamentarians, as near as I can tell it, can anyone explain to me how, if this was a factional stitch-up, the decision to dump Quinn was unanimous, with one abstention, when the party room was fairly evenly split?

It should be noted that the abstention was Michael Caltabiano.

According to businessman David Kemp, Caltabiano was approached by Kemp to be part of a coup about a week earlier, but said as a former party president he couldn't be involved. Kemp, who is not a member of the WS group, claimed this in an interview with Steve Austin on ABC Radio, and I have not seen it rebutted. At the time of the challenge Caltabiano was at a doctor's appointment.

Caltabiano's reasoning for not wanting to know, and his absence, seem just a little disingenuous as he has been urging Flegg to roll Quinn since at least the beginning of the year.

Still, Caltabiano did well out of this factional stitch-up that he had nothing to do with - he ended up as Shadow Treasurer.

What actually appears to have happened is that the Parliamentarians thought they were heading for a train-wreck with Quinn at the wheel and decided to roll Quinn for Flegg in the hope that Flegg could save a couple of them. My enquiries suggest that factional friends were caught by surprise by the move, almost as much as Quinn was. I initially thought that Caltabiano had also been caught by surprise, but this news story suggests that he was actually out buying insurance at the time!