Disappointed New South Wales Liberal councillors are not ruling out taking legal action against the party, and others are demanding their money back after an administrative disaster that will prevent them from running in upcoming elections.
Councillors said they were “shocked” to learn through the media that the Liberal party had missed the noon Wednesday deadline to lodge the necessary paperwork to nominate 136 candidates for the 14 September local government elections.
The mistake means the party will miss out on 50 seats they could have otherwise won, according to election analyst Ben Raue, who anticipated 38 sitting councillors would be affected.
There will be no Liberal candidates in eight councils, including Blue Mountains and Northern Beaches, Raue said, and only some of the party’s intended candidates in another nine councils, including Canterbury-Bankstown and Penrith.
Campbelltown will lose all four of its Liberal councillors, including Riley Munro, who said on Thursday afternoon that party HQ had still not formally contacted him nearly 24 hours after he read about the administrative blunder in the media.
Munro said he met his three council colleagues on Wednesday night, and they would wait to hear from head office before deciding whether or not to pursue legal action.
“Any reasonable person would consider all options, but at the moment, it’s not an option because we don’t know what’s happened,” he said.
Georgia Ryburn, the Northern Beaches deputy mayor and one of six Liberals on the council, said she was “completely shocked and gutted”.
“At the moment, I’m not sure what [the] next steps are,” she said.
“We’re looking at options. I think today is all about rallying around the Liberal team and supporting them and their families.”
The NSW Liberal leader, Mark Speakman, said he doubted any affected councillors or candidates would take legal action, but he couldn’t be sure.
Speakman blamed the party’s state director, Richard Shields, for the “monumental debacle”, as he called on him to “fall on his sword” and resign immediately.
While Speakman would not blame the Liberals’ NSW president, Don Harwin, the fiasco has caused a meltdown within the state executive, the party’s governing body.
Hunter-based Liberal Blake Keating sent out a memo – seen by Guardian Australia – in which he said both Harwin and Shields should resign over the “unmitigated disaster”.
“The fact that the administration of our Party and the leadership of the State Executive is so poor that we would fail to submit nomination forms for an election we knew was occurring three years in advance is a testament to just how deep the crisis of leadership has gotten in the NSW Division,” Keating wrote.
Two other senior state executive representatives, Peter O’Hanlon and Geoff Pearson, echoed Keating’s calls for Harwin and Shields to resign over the “massive failure”.
“The rather torturous system that was developed and undertaken to select and endorse candidates has most certainly been a contributing factor,” they wrote in a memo seen by Guardian Australia.
In a statement, Shields said his focus had been on the upcoming federal election, and Harwin had volunteered to run the local government election process.
“I had full trust that this would be delivered successfully,” Shields said.
“Calls for my resignation are premature as there must be a proper review of the nomination process to establish the full facts.”
Shields had apologised on Wednesday and blamed resourcing problems for the failure to lodge all the nominations.
Harwin said he called for a meeting with Shields and the rest of the state executive on Thursday night to “review the situation”.
“It’s crucial we understand what occurred and take decisive action to maintain the trust of our members and the public as we prepare for the future,” Harwin said.
Cessnock councillor Paul Dunn, who is also president of the Liberals’ Hunter branch, said he and his council colleagues had already spent $15,000 on their re-election campaigns, and he was focused on getting their money back.
Dunn said they had been concerned for weeks that their nominations had not been processed, but the party’s head office had not been forthcoming with information.
“The closer it got [to the cut-off] the less communication we got. No one was answering phones,” he said.
Blue Mountains Liberal councillor Roza Sage, a former state MP, said she could not remember the party making a bigger mistake of this nature.
“This has come quite as a shock,” she said. “We are disappointed because we love our community and want to represent our communities.”
