The new Liberal leadership team of Leanne Castley with her deputy Jeremy Hanson. Ms Castley says party members should not be fighting each other. Photo: Ian Bushnell.
New Canberra Liberals leader Leanne Castley has called for the party to retain its current management team, which faces re-election at next Monday’s annual general meeting.
A year on from the empty chair meeting, in which members refused to support longstanding Canberra Liberals president John Cziesla when challenger and now current president Nick Tyrrell had to withdraw due to a family emergency, the party has lost another election and there are concerns about recriminations.
Last year’s AGM saw the hard-right old guard linked to former senator Zed Seselja relinquish all but two positions in what was perceived as a victory for moderate Elizbeth Lee’s leadership and a shift to the centre.
With the party facing another term in opposition with the new leadership team of Ms Castley and the conservative Jeremy Hanson, there were stirrings that the old guard would regroup to take back the management committee.
But Ms Castley believes unity and stability are what is needed after the election loss, not a return to factional infighting.
“It is absolutely key we must maintain a unified team; as I’ve said to people at every meeting that I’ve been to, our fight is not amongst ourselves,” she said.
“We are all Liberals. We all have different ideas, of course, but at the end of the day our goal is to win government and beat the Labor Government.
“That’s my priority and we do that with a unified team.”
Ms Castley said she would work with everybody, but she said keeping the status quo was the best way forward for the party.
Party sources support the view that the key positions will remain mostly unchanged but there could be movement in the policy committees.
Some members believe that policies were not released soon enough for the community to absorb them.
Ms Castley promised a warts and all review of the election campaign.
“We have lost an election, another one, and we need to look at why,” she said.
“We’re certainly hearing all sorts of responses from our community and we need to look at the policies that were written and the way we approached the election and the entire term of government and nothing is off the table.”
That includes light rail, although Ms Castley was non-committal about whether the Liberals accepted that the people had spoken, again, about it.
She conceded that Canberra had not voted against light rail but the party was yet to make up its mind.
“We’ll talk about that more in the new year,” she said. “It’s no ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for you today.”
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