Teena McQueen ‘spits in the face’ of Liberals by hailing defeat of ‘lefties’, Tim Wilson says
Liberal moderates have turned on the party’s vice-president, Teena McQueen, with some insisting she resign after she said members should “rejoice” that “lefties” in the party had lost their seats at the last federal election.
The federal party’s leading moderate, Simon Birmingham, called on McQueen to step down.
“Members of the federal executive are rightly expected to support our MPs and candidates – if they can’t do that then they have no justifiable place being on the federal executive,” he told Guardian Australia.
Asked on Thursday if McQueen should resign, Birmingham replied: “Yes.”
“That would be a far better thing for her to do,” he told ABC radio.
“If she doesn’t want to support or endorse Liberal candidates or sitting Liberal MPs, then she shouldn’t be sitting around the federal executive table of the Liberal party. I certainly won’t be supporting her re-election if she contests her position again. Her position is untenable.”
McQueen told the CPAC Australia conference at the weekend that “the good thing about the last federal election is a lot of those lefties are gone – we should rejoice in that”.
“People I’ve been trying to get rid of for a decade have gone, we need to renew with good conservative candidates.”
Tim Wilson, who lost his seat of Goldstein at the May election, said McQueen was “not a Liberal” if she wanted the party’s candidates to lose.
“Celebrating the loss of Liberal candidates spits in the face of the thousands of party members and volunteers that give their time freely to get MPs elected so Australia could have good government,” he told Guardian Australia. “The only people I see celebrating the loss of Liberal MPs are from the Labor, Greens or Teal parties – anyone that celebrates with them should join them, because they’re not a Liberal.”
The former Wentworth MP Dave Sharma, who also lost his seat to a teal independent, said any Liberal celebrating the loss of Coalition seats “needs their head examined”.
“Ideological purification, internal purges and score-settling are not a pathway back to government — they are a recipe for an eternity in opposition,” he said.
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McQueen has been approached for comment.
At the weekend she called on CPAC attenders to rejoin the Liberal party when acknowledging the concerns of conservative critics.
“We’re listening to you. We hear you. We’re moving forward,” she told a panel featuring former Liberal senators Amanda Stoker and Nick Minchin.
McQueen did not single out any specific members. Moderate MPs including Sharma, Wilson, Trent Zimmerman, Jason Falinski and Josh Frydenberg – who had been criticised by some in the party for advocating less conservative positions on issues such as climate and LGBTQ+ rights – were among the high-profile casualties at the election.
A spokesperson for the Liberal party said it did not endorse McQueen’s comments.
“The Liberal party team, including thousands of volunteers, fought very hard to try and retain government and re-elect every Liberal member of parliament,” they said. “Ms McQueen’s comments are unfortunate and not shared by the Liberal party.”
Nelson Savanh is a federal vicepresident of the Young Liberals who sits on the Liberal party’s federal executive alongside McQueen. In a tweet on Sunday, he called McQueen’s comments “disgraceful and disloyal”.
“Ms McQueen celebrating Liberal candidates losing means she should be gone from federal executive. This group are out of touch. And this GOP/Farage homage at CPAC will only see us consigned to opposition for a generation,” he wrote.
The tweet was liked or retweeted by the federal and New South Wales branches of the Young Liberals, several Young Liberal members, staffers to federal Coalition MPs and Birmingham himself.
Birmingham, the shadow foreign minister and opposition Senate leader, said McQueen’s “celebration of the defeat of Liberal MPs is both offensive and disloyal”.
Savanh said many party members were angry at the comments.
“Loyal members are sick to death of people not having the party’s best interests at heart, and lecturing us what it means to be a true Liberal,” he told Guardian Australia.
“A lot of people are questioning why someone like that is still on our party’s federal board. If she wants to celebrate Liberals losing, lots of people think her position is pretty untenable.”
The shadow environment and science minister, Sam O’Connor, was one of those who liked Savanh’s tweet. The Queensland LNP MP said the party needed to talk more seriously about climate change to win back voters.
“Having someone in such a senior federal party position rejoice at us losing MPs is shameful. It’s an insult to the hundreds of volunteers who fought hard to hold those seats,” he said.
“Thinking that going further to the right is the solution to winning back seats we lost to the left defies all logic and reason.”
The federal opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has called for an end to infighting within the party. He told Sky News the Coalition had to appeal to “a broad section of the broader Australian community” rather than the fringes.
“Locking in 15 or 20% primary vote is a way to keep yourself in opposition forever,” he said on Tuesday.
“There are a lot of people who offer free advice at the moment … who have never formed government, have been members of parliament but have never been ministers in the government. A lot of people need to start turning their sights on the Labor party as opposed to fighting internally and I’m just not going to tolerate that.”