Mal Brough favours amalgamation of the Liberal and National Parties, but only on the right conditions. Speaking today at the Queensland Media Club lunch Brough stressed that an amalgamation should only happen after proper input from the membership and if it improved the chances of the current National and Liberal Parties winning state and federal elections. He expressed his concern that the proposed constitution did not allow for that.
He singled out the fact that under the proposed constitution members would not get to vote in a Senate preselection until 2020, nor in a preselection for lower house state and federal seats for 5 or so years as areas of concern.
The Liberal party plebiscite was another area of concern. He pointed out that while most in the room were in favour of a republic, the republican referendum failed because voters the principle isn’t enough, you have to have a specific model. He said that while a plebiscite might show the membership was in favour of an amalgamation it wouldn’t show what sort of amalgamation they favoured.
Brough also inadvertently revealed the corruption of the Liberal Party’s administration admitting he had been unable to write to delegates directly because the party secretariat will not make a delegate list available to him. This is unprecedented.
The speech was entitled “The Future of the Liberal Party and its importance to Queensland and Australia” and Brough is tipped by many to be the next Liberal Party president, but there were few Liberals in attendance. Federal Parliamentarians would have been in Canberra, but out of the 8 sitting state members, only 3 were present. Factional heavies were also thin on the ground, although Vice-President John Caris was in attendance.
Some of them may have been off planning for the State Council which is to be held tomorrow evening. I’m told that the reason for this is to set the amalgamation in its current form, in stone.
Brough didn’t rule out running for a seat in the future, but he said it would only happen if the Liberal Party could be fixed. Going on the support that he received today, and the behind the scenes machinations, that’s a task even more forbidding than the NT intervention.