Nick McBride didn’t hold back on the way out.
Within hours of sensationally leaving the South Australian Liberals, leaving the party in fresh turmoil, the MP lashed out at “dark forces” within the party.
“They’re capable of knifing, they’re capable of cutting you out without you even knowing,” Mr McBride said, in an attack on the factionalism of a party turfed out of office just over a year ago.
“It is dark because it’s not transparent.”
It’s not surprising Mr McBride would feel that way, given recent events in the Liberal branch in his south-eastern electorate of MacKillop — SA’s safest Liberal seat.
Less than two weeks ago the branch’s president and secretary were voted out, and replaced with local Pentecostal pastor Matthew Neumann as president and his wife, pastor Janine Neumann, as secretary.
Mr McBride’s wife, Katherine McBride, also recently failed in a bid to win pre-selection in the Federal seat of Barker from sitting MP Tony Pasin.
Party leader David Speirs admitted that if he stayed in the party, Mr McBride would have struggled to get preselected ahead of the next election.
Branch Pentecostal takeover part of a bigger picture
Despite his complaints about the lack of transparency, Mr McBride wouldn’t name who he thought was running the factions he blamed for his departure.
Others from across the aisle weren’t so reticent.
Experienced Labor operative Transport Minister Tom Koutsantonis, said no one would be surprised to see Mr McBride quit, naming two right-wing federal parliamentarians.
“Alex Antic and Tony Pasin are carving up the Liberal Party like their own personal plaything,” he said.
“Their far right-wing extreme views mean that centrists who are long term members of the Liberal Party, I mean Nick McBride’s great-grandfather was a co-signatory with Robert Menzies to establish the Liberal Party.
“If he can’t find a place in the Liberal Party, who can?”
The Liberal push to the right that’s ‘crossed the white line’
In Mr McBride’s defection he recalled the party he wanted to be a part of — one of John Howard, where leaders spoke of Menzies’s “broad church”.
He said the party needs to sit in the centre-right if it wants to return to power in South Australia, something he didn’t believe was happening.
“We do now know that there are dark forces, factional forces out there organising themselves to build the Liberal Party again and all I can say is I think it’s going to be counter-productive.”
A self-identified MacKillop branch member “Sam from Meningie” called into ABC Radio Adelaide, telling listeners he was only retaining his membership to make sure more moderate people were still represented.
“There was a feeling that the Liberals had gone too far to the left so to be fair, those who were pushing to go to the right might have a point,” he said.
“But it is like the learner driver type move that it went too far to the left and then swung violently to the right and crossed the white line and they’re having a head-on bloody accident rather than just manipulating back to the middle of the road again.”
It’s a struggle playing out across the party – both in South Australia and across the country.
Moderates, particularly those in seats that are haemorrhaging votes to independents and even the Greens, want to keep the party in the centre – but that push is being actively resisted by their more right-wing colleagues.
Is it dark forces, or has Nick McBride just failed as a Liberal MP?
While announcing his departure, Mr McBride pointed out the huge margin in his electorate, winning the last election with 62.3 per cent of the primary vote.
But Mr Speirs said that vote was largely for the party, not Mr McBride himself.
Mr Speirs said Mr McBride struggled to form alliances in the party, saying he was probably his closest friend.
“I would call him a friend but you’ve got to be able to call out your friends when they do the wrong thing,” he said.
“He didn’t build relationships across the parliamentary team or in his local branch.”
While Mr Speirs was keen to downplay the defection, arguing it left his team more united, some of the consequences will be hard for the Liberals to put a positive light on.
For one, Mr McBride’s departing criticism left internal Liberal fights playing out in public once again.
And the party’s record of winning back notionally conservative seats from independents in South Australia is far from convincing – a point Fraser Ellis, Troy Bell, Geoff Brock and Dan Cregan can all attest to.
But perhaps most importantly, a Liberal parliamentary team that suffered heavy losses in a brutal state election defeat barely a year ago has now shrunk even smaller.
