It’s one of the ongoing and baffling tactics in modern politics, the “captain’s pick” — candidates with the leadership’s backing being parachuted into candidacy for office, generally over the preferred choice of the local party membership. Bad optics, unpopular with locals and, as the events of the previous couple of weeks illustrate, it generally works out about as well as Edward Smith picking scheduling over safety.
Gwen Cherne
Crikey has been following with great interest the explosion at a dynamite factory that is the New South Wales Liberal Party preselection process — a calamitous process with locals furiously accusing Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Immigration Minister Alex Hawke of deliberately fomenting chaos and delay to give themselves an excuse to take over and appoint their favoured candidates. Local preselections were cancelled and the whole thing is before the courts. A synecdoche of the situation is in the seat of Hughes — where Morrison once intervened to save then-Liberal Party MP Craig Kelly (long-time Crikey readers will be well aware of how well that turned out).
Morrison’s pick — over local lawyer Jenny Ware and Holsworthy MP Melanie Gibbons — was apparently Ohio-born Gwen Cherne, not a Liberal Party member. And if you felt something you’d not sensed in a while at the mention of a politician’s non-Australian birthplace, your memory is good. Cherne, in an extremely 2017 move, turned out to be ineligible to run on account of her dual citizenship.
Andrew Charlton
Of course, the Liberals are far from the only ones. Labor is parachuting Accenture managing director and former Rudd adviser Andrew Charlton into the marginal federal seat of Parramatta, infuriating local branch members. As with anything in the Labor Party, it was influenced by factional ructions, and was a slap in the face of the party’s multicultural voters, pushing out, among others, local Tamil-Australian lawyer Durga Owen from contention in a multicultural seat.
Nova Peris
Nova Peris, the first Indigenous woman to win Olympic Gold, was a “captain’s pick” in the truest sense — a high-profile candidate with no party experience brought in ahead of several veterans in the race for the Labor Northern Territory Senate seat in 2013. She became the first Indigenous woman to be elected to federal Parliament. Alas it didn’t end brilliantly; during the 2016 election period it was revealed by Caroline Wilson that Peris was the frontrunner for a lucrative job with the AFL, and she announced her resignation from Parliament.
Warren Mundine
Man, Scott Morrison really loves meddling in preselections. In 2019 he installed former Labor Party president Warren Mundine in the seat of Gilmore after Ann Sudmalis had retired citing “bullying and backstabbing”. It made locals furious — particularly the actually preselected Liberal candidate Grant Schultz: “I cannot be a member of a party that does not support democracy or act with integrity. The prime minister has stated that he believes in a fair go. He has not given me that.” The Libs saw a huge swing away from them (a decent chunk of it going to Schultz, who ran as an independent) and Labor picked up the seat. Indeed, in the recent drama in NSW, Gilmore is being cited as the debacle the Liberals seem intent on failing to learn from.
Kristina Keneally
Charlton’s case is near enough a Cntrl C+Cntrl V of the earlier parachuting of Labor Senator Kristina Keneally into Fowler. Just like Charlton, she was a high-profile, white candidate picked in a multicultural seat ahead of several locals. And like Charlton, whether local voters will punish the party for this remains to be seen.
