The growing Baulkham Hills Liberal Party corruption scandal is deepening divisions in the party.
The Mayor of Baulkham Hills has stepped down and the Liberal ticket there in the Council poll is now in disarray. The Liberal MP for Hawkesbury, Ray Williams (still a councillor there too till the new electoral law comes into force which bans MP’s from being councillors), set his son up for a seat on Baulkham Hills Council. The Liberal MP for Londonderry had set his son up for a seat on Hawkesbury Council.
But with these two MP’s connected to the infighting surrounding the corruption matters, the Libs are likely to revise their tickets and see some of their campaign and polling workers drift away.
Hawkesbury Australia First candidate Tony Pettitt said today:
“the crisis in establishment politics is seeing people rejecting the Labor Party, but observing that the Liberals in this State are not only riven with corruption and nepotism (that is running the family for office and benefitting from office), but also pursuing the same anti people agendas – more development, more immigration-based housing, more ripping up of heritage.”
It is a truism of politics that a crisis in the establishment parties and their abilities to deceive the people that they ‘represent’ them can open support-gaps that, if filled quickly by a different political force, can permit that force to become a ‘fixed feature’ of the scene.
Penrith Australia First candidate Maurice Girotto added:
“In Hawkesbury and in Penrith, people have seen the Liberals at their worst, little people fighting over the spoils of office, development-mad and so on. It is up to Australia First Party to ground itself in the Greater West of Sydney.”
Liberal Hills Shire Mayor Greg Burnett steps down