Louise Markus: ``I don't have access to the funds ..... they are the direct responsibility of the party organisation.''
IT’S the move that may have cost Tony Abbott’s Coalition the Federal Election. A member of the Liberal Party’s Greenway Federal Electorate Council has exclusively revealed to the Advocate that Liberal candidate for Greenway, Jaymes Diaz, was left high and dry with “less than $1000” in campaign spending money for the marginal electorate.
If more campaign money had been available to persuade about 700 of 93,828 enrolled voters in the seat to change their mind, the face of Australian politics today could have been radically different.
The member - who was involved in overseeing the allocation of campaign funds and did not wish to be named- said the reason Mr Diaz had next to no funds available to him was because the seat’s preceding occupant, Liberal MP Louise Markus, took nearly all of Greenway’s funds (close to $20,000) and injected them into her campaign for the seat of Macquarie. “People aren’t happy about this, it was really all about Louise ... it was an act of self-interest and it shows,” the member said.
“Louise was going around telling everyone Greenway couldn’t be won.”
The member said nine to 10 months ago Liberals “had written off Greenway” to Labor, making it easy for Ms Markus to convince the council to sign off on the reallocation.
But Greenway proved far from written off for the Liberals, with Australian Electoral Commission results revealing Mr Diaz lost to Labor’s Michelle Rowland by less than 1 per cent in first preference candidate votes and by less than 1402 votes under the two-candidate preferred vote system.
Asked if the extra funds could have been the difference in the Coalition winning Greenway and keeping Mr Abbott’s chances of winning the election alive - with this scenario creating a 75-75 deadlock-the member said: “Absolutely.
“That money could have been used to send a direct mail-out (which never happened) to 90,000 people in the electorate in the last week of campaigning. When we’re talking about 1000 votes, that could have been the difference.”
The member said Mr Diaz “ran the best campaign with what he had available to him”.
When questioned on her involvement in seeing the reallocation of funds, Ms Markus refused to admit or deny the accusation to the Advocate, instead saying: ``I don’t have access to the funds ..... they are the direct responsibility of the party organisation.’‘
But when Mr Diaz, who was preselected on the day Julia Gillard called the election, was pressed on the issue he admitted that was the case and he had to use between $15,000 and $20,000 from his own pocket to fund the campaign.
``My view is if being a candidate means having to sacrifice and put your own resources on the line if you believe in what your standing for, then so be it,’’ he said. ``I knew that we would have to self-fund the campaign because Greenway was seen as a safe (Labor) seat.’‘
This revelation comes just days after Mr Abbott took aim at NSW Liberals for his narrow loss. ``I think that if we pre-selected candidates a bit earlier in NSW we might have got an extra three seats,’’ he told a Melbourne radio station.
Greenway, which was only officially declared as won by Labor on September 16, is widely regarded to be one of the seat’s Mr Abbott is referring to.
Source: whereilive
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