Another Liberal moderate to leave Dutton team

A second member of the shadow cabinet has announced he is quitting parliament, further depleting the moderates’ presence in the parliamentary Liberal party and boosting the chance of the teal candidate in the Sydney seat of Bradfield.

Paul Fletcher, 59, manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives, on Tuesday said he would not recontest at the coming election. After the redistribution Bradfield is on 2.5% on a two-candidate basis. Once Liberal heartland, teal candidate Nicolette Boele achieved a big swing against Fletcher in 2022.

At the end of the parliamentary session, the opposition leader in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, announced he was leaving parliament. He is taking up a job with the ANZ bank and will resign from the Senate early in the new year to start his new role in February. Fletcher will see out his term.

Opposition leader Peter Dutton is set to reshuffle his frontbench before Christmas. Filling Birmingham’s position of foreign affairs spokesperson is particularly challenging given the volatile international situation.

A former minister in the Coalition government, Fletcher is currently spokesman for government services and the digital economy, as well as spokesman on science and the arts.

The Liberals now have minimal moderate voices in the parliamentary party.

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley leans moderate but is not a factional leader or a forthright factional advocate. The remaining sparse moderate ranks include Andrew Bragg, Dave Sharma and Bridget Archer. Bragg is an assistant shadow minister, while the others are on the backbench. Archer is very outspoken and has often crossed the floor but is not seen as a factional leader.

Essentially the moderate faction has increasingly lost its voice in recent years, with the right dominant within the parliamentary party under Dutton. The teal wins in 2022 cut a swathe through the moderates.

The moderates are hoping the new candidate for Bradfield might be Gisele Kapterian. They say she ticks all the right boxes, as a moderate, and a professional woman. She was picked as the candidate for the adjacent seat of North Sydney, before that seat was scrapped in the redistribution.

A moderate woman would seem the best sort of candidate to maximise the Liberals’ chances of holding Bradfield against Boele, who has been actively campaigning throughout this parliamentary term.

Last week Fletcher launched a major attack on the teals, claiming they had duped Liberal voters. He said they were a “giant green left con job” and “are very much in the tradition of front groups established by left-wing political operatives, which are designed to lure votes away from the Liberal Party by tricking voters about their bona fides”.

He said in Tuesday’s statement that he had been in parliament for 15 years. “Renewal is healthy, for people and institutions, and now is the right time to hand over the baton.”

Fletcher said he expected some “outstanding people” to put themselves forward to be Liberal candidates.

Boele said in a statement: “For 75 years, one political party has held Bradfield. Now is the opportunity for an independent to make a difference.

"I’ve had thousands of conversations with members of our community this year who feel let down by the political parties.

"As I continue to meet people across Bradfield, they tell me they want a representative who is loyal to locals, not to Peter Dutton,” she said.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Tuesday visited the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne, as the government steps up its efforts to combat antisemitism.

Albanese, who was jostled as he made his way through a tightly-packed crowd of onlookers and media, said Friday’s attack had been “stoked by hatred”. He gave a commitment to “doing what we need to do to restore this synagogue”.

Meanwhile cabinet minister Ed Husic, a Muslim, asked whether the Coalition was suggesting a “blind eye” should be turned to Islamophobia.

“The Coalition has frontbenchers who have said Islamophobia is not a problem […] which is just ridiculous,” Husic said on Sky.

He pointed to an incident in New South Wales “where a bomb was placed on the car of a person who had displayed, outside their home, a Palestinian flag. […] Now that is equally bad, I would say.”

Amid partisan spats, Jewish Labor MP Josh Burns, whose electorate of Macnamara includes the synagogue, on Tuesday accused Peter Dutton of stopping Liberal frontbencher James Paterson reading out a statement on Burns’ behalf last Friday, when Burns and Paterson appeared at a news conference after the attack.

Burns told the ABC he’d lost his voice and Paterson had agreed to read out his statement. But “Peter Dutton intervened and told James that he wasn’t allowed to,” he said.

On Monday Dutton took a swipe at Burns saying, “Josh is a nice guy, but Josh lost his voice long before the weekend”.

In another exchange, minister Murray Watt on Monday accused former Liberal treasurer Josh Frydenberg of being partly motivated by politics in his criticism of the government’s performance on antisemitism. Frydenberg hit back at Watt, saying this was a “low blow”.