Liberals’ Request to Extend Council Nomination Deadline Denied After Major Paperwork Fumble

The Liberals’ request for a one-week extension on local election nominations was denied on Aug. 17 by the New South Wales (NSW) electoral commissioner.
Following a failure to submit up to 151 nomination forms for local elections by the deadline, Liberal state president Don Harwin wrote to the NSW electoral commission requesting an extension until Aug. 21.
Eight local councils, including several strong Liberal areas, have no Liberal candidate and nine councils only have partial Liberal candidate coverage.
“There’s going to be a lot more councils where there’s just one party that runs the show, and generally that means a lot more decisions happen behind closed doors, in private, and I think you’ll see a bunch more of that,” Raue told Australian Associated Press.
“It’s not very common in the big partisan urban councils that one party gets a majority.”
Raue also said other conservative candidates would benefit in some councils, receiving more voter support.
“There’s a few ex-Liberal members or ’rebel Liberals’ in places like the Blue Mountains, Hornsby, and Lane Cove who will probably just get a much bigger vote than they would have gotten,” he said.
However, now Raue expects ex-liberal independent Jemma Tribe, leader of Team Tribe, or Patricia White, leader of Shoalhaven Independents to win office.
The party said that the mistake was not good enough and confirmed that endorsed candidates who had been affected would be reimbursed.
“To prevent this from ever happening again, we are reviewing our process to thoroughly investigate what went wrong,” the NSW Liberal Party said in the statement on Aug. 16.
“We are fully committed to implementing all necessary changes to strengthen our processes … while what happened is a setback, it will not define us.”