It’s Friday morning in Sydney’s Forestville, and the late-winter sun is shining on a suburban shopping centre that feels a world away from the chaos on Macquarie Street.
The New South Wales Liberal party headquarters has been in disarray since news broke on 8 August that it had failed to nominate more than 130 of its candidates across 16 councils for the 14 September local government elections.
In Forestville, traditionally Liberal heartland, the Northern Beaches council mayor, Sue Heins, and councillor Michael Regan are out meeting voters.
Both are independents and many of the people they talk to don’t care much about the internal machinations of the Liberal party.
“Sir, do you know there’s a council election coming up?” Regan asks a man outside the supermarket, who ignores him and keeps walking.
The Liberals have been erased entirely from eight councils, including the Northern Beaches, where all six councillors will lose their seats.
Regan will retire from the council after being elected as the independent Wakehurst MP at last year’s state election. In Forestville on Friday, many people greet him warmly, and by name. Out on the hustings, he and Heins field questions and complaints from constituents. “The thing that really irks me is the state of the car park,” one woman tells them.
Regan and Heins are both part of the Your Northern Beaches Independent Team (YNBIT). They hope it can increase its representation from five councillors now that they won’t be competing with the Liberals.
One of their candidates is local businessman Nick Beaugeard, who grew up in the Channel Islands. “My mum was a politician,” he says. “Where I come from, all the politicians are independents.”
Beaugeard says he would be devastated if he was a Liberal councillor. “The sitting [Liberal] councillor in Curl Curl ward is David Walton,” he says. “Now he won’t have a seat. I really feel for him.”
With more than a third of the Liberals’ intended candidates unable to run, many other people who otherwise wouldn’t have a chance now have a real shot at becoming councillors.
In the northern beaches, retired builder Phil Walker hopes he can “pull off a Steven Bradbury” to win a seat.
“You never know with these elections which way people are thinking. It’s interesting, normally I don’t think I’d have much of a chance,” says Walker, who is running as the sole candidate for Friends of Mona Vale.
“It’s a very Liberal area. Normally they get 40 or 50% of the votes easily.”
Walker is a self-described longtime “council watcher” who says his main goal is to “keep the bastards honest”. He says it’s “nonsense” for YNBIT to say they are independents and not a political party, although Heins says they don’t vote as a bloc.
An avid user of NSW’s government information public access (Gipa) laws, Walker was banned in 2015 from making Gipa applications against the council he hopes to get elected to. “I was the first in NSW to be banned,” he says cheerfully. “I’ve got a big sunflower badge to prove it.”
In western Sydney’s Penrith, all five Labor councillors in one ward will be automatically elected because there is no competition.
So-called “stocking-filler” candidates are placed low on a party’s ticket to give them enough numbers to have a box “above the line” even though they have no real chance of winning. Now, they will get a seat on council.
This includes 19-year-old Labor staffer and university student Libby Austin, who will become one of the state’s youngest councillors. Austin says the news came as “quite a shock” but she is “eager and determined to show the community that I can listen, learn and fight for them”.
In Campbelltown, in the city’s south-west, the council will also lose all its Liberals and the result could be a mixed bag. Labor and the Greens are running candidates, along with a handful of independents and a few small parties including Community Voice of Australia, Community First Totally Independent party and Sustainable Australia.
In Shoalhaven, former Liberal turned independent Jemma Tribe and two other people running on her ticket could win seats.
In the northern beaches, Liberal voters in most wards will have to choose between the YNBIT, the Greens or Labor.
Local Ashley Cardiff, the former president of the Avalon Surf Club, says he has voted Liberal in the past and that he’ll make up his mind on the day of the election now that his preferred party is no longer an option. He believes the council should prioritise “roads, rates and rubbish, not putting sandstone blocks in every park”.
Kevin Holm, who is out shopping with his wife, Jan, doesn’t think the dearth of Liberal candidates will affect his vote too much. “We usually vote for whoever promises the best policies for the local area,” he says.
The Greens hope to double their representation on the council from two to four.
“We were both reasonably hopeful we’d be re-elected,” says councillor Kristyn Glanville. “Now it’s looking like we will get Ethan Hrnjak up in Frenchs Forest.”
Glanville says the contest in Manly ward is the one “most likely to come down to the wire”. Greens candidate Bonnie Harvey will be up against Good For Manly candidate Taylah Schrader.
Schrader is second on the ticket to Candy Bingham who founded Good for Manly and has been on the northern beaches council since 2012.
“It’s just an unknown. You really have to work hard, but … there’s no given with these elections,” Bingham says. “Of course, I’m hopeful.”
Bingham says the Liberal deputy mayor, Georgia Ryburn, will be a “major loss” to the community she has worked hard for. “We’re sorry to see her go,” she says. Last week, Ryburn told Guardian Australia she was “shocked and gutted” to be denied the opportunity to run in the upcoming elections due to her party’s nominations debacle.
There is one Liberal who has managed to get on the ballot paper in the northern beaches.
Mandeep “Sunny” Singh lodged his own nomination form, reportedly not realising party HQ was meant to do it. Singh did not respond by deadline to Guardian Australia’s request for an interview.
In its second week, the Liberals’ saga exposed major dysfunction within the party’s NSW division. After it threatened to take the electoral commission to court, then backed down from the challenge and descended into accusations of factional warfare.
The party is now facing its own potential litigation from candidates who missed out on nominations, while rusted-on Liberal voters in areas such as the northern beaches will have a difficult choice to make.
