Brad Hazzard has held the seat of Wakehurst on Sydney’s Northern Beaches for more than 30 years.
So on announcing he was retiring from the role in 2022 in the lead-up to this year’s NSW state election, you’d think it might be time for a refreshing change. Possibly even for a woman to hold the seat, for the first time in history.
But instead, Liberal pre-selectors opted for the standard CV of experience in picking their candidate: a political staffer. In this case, one of Hazzard’s own, Toby Williams, who works as a Senior Electorate Officer with Hazzard, and has also previously spent time as secretary of the Liberal Electoral Council of Wakehurst, which governs preselection for the seat.
If you’re wondering how the Liberal party of NSW could preselect men to 10 of the 11 seats across Sydney’s North Shore, as the Sydney Morning Herald revealed today, this preselection race tells some of the story.
Williams overwhelmingly won preselection for the seat in a race against local businesswoman Wendy Finianos, 70 votes to 49. He had strong local support, presumably including from Hazzard. Finianos had support from other senior Liberals, including Treasurer Matt Kean, who said he was “backing” her all the way in Wakehurst and that she was a strong “community candidate”.
Finianos is well known in the local area for her local fundraising efforts, particularly on domestic and family violence. She speaks three languages, has worked across banking and insurance and runs a local business. She is involved in a number of different Liberal groups also, including as chair of Liberal Friends of Lebanon and NSW Liberal Women.
But she doesn’t have “political staffer” on the CV, nor a strong connection with the retiring MP, in this case senior minister.
And she’s not the first female candidate to lose out to a political staffer in the pre-selection process – and is unlikely to be the last, with the NSW Liberals still yet to preselect candidates to another 20 seats before the election in March.
Late last year, one of the party’s most prominent women, Natalie Ward, failed in her preselection bit for the seat of Davidson in Northern Sydney, losing out to Matt Cross, an ex-staffer to former premier Mike Baird. Ward had also been supported by Matt Kean, who said on learning she’d lost the race that he was “devastated” by the results. “I thought that a smart, talented senior female minister would trump a former junior staffer every day of the week,” he said.
The results of these pre-selection races are astonishing, given the party – at least at its leadership lesson – claims to be actively seeking more women. Also astonishing is that premier Dominic Perrottet believes that the party has achieved “diversity” and that “we’ve done well in our preselections and attracting talent.”
The male domination across this area of Sydney is also curious, given it crosses areas where independent Teal candidates (all female), swept sitting Liberal members (all male), from office at the 2022 federal election – and an area that has strong independent, community campaigns in full swing for this state election.
The one woman pre-selected for one of those eleven seats on Sydney’s North Shore, current sitting MP Felicity Wilson, is set for a difficult race – and could very well lose, with Helen Conway AO running as an independent, supported by the same “teal” group that backed Kylea Tink’s successful run at the Federal seat of North Sydney.
Still, late on Sunday, Stephani Di Pasqua won the race for Liberal preselection decisively, for the seat of Drummoyne. She is Deputy Mayor of City of Canda Bay, and looks set to provide some fresh new talent to the party. But she did have that all-important “staffer” experience also, having previously worked on John Sidoti’s team — which in this case, may not be a beneficial experience for the upcoming fight against the Labor candidate, given Sidoti was suspended from the legislative assembly late last year.