As controversy swirls around the Liberal party’s controversial candidate in the seat of Warringah, Katherine Deves, local party officials insist they are witnessing an influx of support from donors and volunteers.
“This has been a godsend,” one Warringah branch official tells the Guardian.
Deves’ candidacy has prompted a firestorm of criticism from LGBTQ+ groups, caused infighting within the Liberal party, and led to calls for her to be disendorsed by senior Coalition figures after an avalanche of press about transphobic tweets which surfaced after her nomination.
Deves has gone to ground since the tweets emerged, yet in interviews with more than a dozen local party members, officials and state executive representatives, it is clear many in the party see an opportunity in the negative coverage.
“Once this pile-on with the trans stuff reached hurricane proportions and you had a number of people on our own side coming out and saying ‘this is terrible’, we had a bunch more people coming out wanting to volunteer and donate,” a branch official says.
“The influx of people wanting to contribute financially has been incredible. We would have had to spend a quarter of a million dollars to get name recognition like this.”
Another senior party member in Warringah agrees, telling the Guardian members had been attracted to Deves after Scott Morrison defended her through the week.
“People don’t like the woke ‘cancel culture’ stuff and this has played into that,” he says.
While it is not possible to verify claims about campaign contributions, even moderate Liberals who have stayed away from Deves’ campaign concede there is anecdotal evidence to suggest some of the party faithful have been attracted to the campaign.
One senior party member volunteering in the neighbouring seat of North Sydney says that campaign has lost supporters, who have decided to give their time to Warringah.
“I haven’t seen their finances, but it would not surprise me in the slightest [if support had increased],” the official says.
Though anecdotal, the accounts from party members – who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity because of party rules banning officials from speaking on the record – suggest that, at least for some, the Coalition’s attempt to pivot away from discussion about Deves’ transphobic comments by making it a debate about “cancel culture” have been effective.
And there is no denying Deves is enjoying a level of publicity most candidates can only dream of. Media monitoring data compiled for the Guardian shows that between 10 and 21 April, Deves had more mentions across metro and regional print and online news than any Liberal frontbencher, bar Morrison.
During that 11-day period, Deves was mentioned in 1,126 different articles, a figure that removes examples of syndication. The most commonly mentioned Coalition minister after Morrison was the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, with 1,044.
For mentions in the first 100 words of an article, the divide was more pronounced.
Deves was mentioned in the first 100 words of 641 separate articles, while the next closest frontbencher was the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, with 360.
It’s a remarkable statistic. It was only months ago that Deves was unknown – not only to the general public but also within the party she is now representing in what was a blue-ribbon Liberal seat, until independent Zali Steggall’s victory over Tony Abbott in 2019.
Though she had previously been a member, Deves rejoined the Liberal party months before nominating to stand in the seat, and had to receive special dispensation from the New South Wales state executive to run. None of the Warringah party members interviewed for this piece had met her before about February, when she began attending branch meetings.
That Deves benefited from the calamitous preselection process in NSW in the build up to the election is unquestioned. Amid an intractable factional stoush, head office scrambled to find a star candidate who might unseat Steggall, including the former NSW premiers Gladys Berejiklian and Mike Baird.
When that didn’t work, both the moderates and the right wing of the party threw their support behind the disability advocate David Brady and defence analyst Lincoln Parker, respectively.
Though Deves had no formal factional backing, the Guardian understands members of the centre right began gravitating to her as a potential “circuit breaker” candidate. One senior Warringah source says Morrison – also a member of the centre right – “picked up the vibe”.
“Neither Lincoln nor Dave Brady were the kind of candidate we really needed here, and then here comes this woman who’s smart, articulate, not at all a ‘politician’, and she looks like a movie star,” the source said.
“She was the perfect candidate.”
While Deves has been promoted as an advocate for women’s sport, it’s unclear whether, due to her hurried nomination, senior figures in the Liberal party – including Morrison – were aware of the extent of her transphobic comments.
She has previously described Wear it Purple Day – which celebrates gender diversity – as a “grooming tactic”, described trans children as “surgically mutilated and sterilised”, and claimed as recently as January this year that there is “no such thing as a ‘trans female’” only “males with trans identities”.
Deves was forced to issue two separate apologies over the “language and the hurt that I have caused” in some of the comments that have appeared in the media.
She also routinely misgendered trans athletes, including Laurel Hubbard and Hannah Mouncey.
And she has also criticised the federal and state Coalition governments. She regularly criticised the NSW Coalition for its “draconian” Covid-19 policies, called for the prime minister to “sort out the vaccine rollout”, and also criticised incoming health minister Anne Rushton (whom she mistakenly called Jane) over an answer to a question about women’s safety.
Though the Guardian understands some vetting was conducted by a third-party firm, the tweets were not raised because Deves had already deleted her accounts on both Twitter and Facebook.
Indeed, there is almost no online record of Deves prior to October 2020, when her Save Women’s Sport Australasia group was established. She previously worked in marketing, reportedly for Treasury Wine Estates, and qualified as a practising lawyer last year.
One Coalition MP who was certainly familiar with Deves was the Tasmanian senator Claire Chandler.
This week the Guardian revealed Deves claimed a key role in developing legislation to exclude trans women from women’s sport slammed by equality advocates as “divisive and unnecessary”.
The two women have regularly appeared at events and on Sky News together, while Deves has referred to her glowingly as “the one politician brave enough to speak publicly” about the “destruction of women’s rights”.
While Morrison – and other senior frontbenchers including Angus Taylor – continue to support Deves, whether voters in Warringah and other moderate seats such as North Sydney and Wentworth will punish the Coalition is another question. Comment was sought from Deves.
