Scott Morrison's intervention into NSW Liberals betrays Robert Menzies' party ideals

This intervention has meant that the federal executive of the Liberal Party has temporarily suspended the NSW Liberal Party executive, so sitting Liberal members and other specially selected candidates can get endorsed. This denies local branch members a say in the selection process.

The first principle betrayed by this federal intervention is the complete supplanting of local state party branches and membership in their key role in the selection and endorsement of Liberal Party candidates by faction leaders and federal central office.

Menzies was adamant when he formed the Liberal Party that unlike its predecessor, the United Australia Party, it should have a real branch structure with local members participating in key decisions like candidate selection. Only if there was a "constant political organisation in electorates" with such branches exercising these roles could the party's parliamentary members truly reflect its membership and values and connect with local issues. Only then would branch members be motivated to support Liberal candidates at election time.

And unless branches have this vital role in selecting candidates they would become mere phantoms, existing only on paper, irrelevant to their communities and without the vital capacity to act as two-way conduits between the parliamentary wing and the public.

The second principle Menzies stipulated was that although the Liberal party was to be a national organisation under the umbrella of an agreed set of principles, it was to be federal in both structure and operationally. Each state branch of the Liberal Party would have its own constitution and rules, decide its state and federal candidates, Senate tickets and, where pertinent, the relationship with its coalition partner, the Country party, now National Party. The logic was clear - each state organisation knew best its own political environment, the local issues and its own people.

Menzies, as in government, eschewed the top-down, heavy-handed centralist approach that had been displayed from time to time by the Labor Party in relation its federal executive interventions and, in effect, takeover of local state branches. Menzies as prime minister certainly faced problems from time to time from the state Liberal organisations over joint Senate tickets and three corner contests with the Nationals, candidate selections and even attacks on his government from some state branches when in office. Nevertheless, Menzies never wavered from his core principle that the federal structure of the Liberal Party worked best and must be adhered to regardless.

We should not forget how the Labor Party's national executive interventions into its state branches, either to overrule their policy decisions or to initiate a complete takeover, triggered political disruptions and sometimes major splits that kept Labor out of office for years. Indeed, at this very moment Labor's national executive has suspended the Victorian branch and has taken over the preselection of all federal candidates and other matters.

It seems not only is the Liberal Party under Morrison more and more like the Labor Party in terms of policy and being socially progressive, but also, as this latest intervention demonstrates, is increasingly like them organisationally - being driven by factions, involving federal intervention, and seemingly manipulated by powerbrokers at the expense of rank and file members.

Morrison may be a Liberal prime minister who served as state director of the NSW Liberal Party, but he seems by these actions to have no real understanding of the character of the party he leads or the principles upon which it was founded as laid down by Menzies and served the party so well.