RENEE Heath, the Upper House candidate that Liberal leader Matthew Guy says will not be sitting in the Liberal Party room if elected on Saturday, is no stranger to the Hastings electorate.
Liberal candidate for Hastings Briony Hutton has posted photos online of herself and Heath campaigning in the electorate.
“Thanks to Renee Heath and David Burgess, the two Upper House candidates for this region, for their help today,” was posted by Hutton on 23 September after campaigning in Langwarrin.
The Liberal Party has said Heath would not be sitting in the Liberal Party room if elected because she had withheld information about her dealings with ISAAC (International Strategic Alliance of Apostolic Churches) Network.
Hutton, who regularly attends and sings on stage at the gateway Church, Seaford, told The News to contact Liberal headquarters when asked on Monday about her reaction to the exclusion of Heath from the party room.
Hutton has not responded – despite several requests to both her and her campaign manager Simone Celcie – to emails from The News seeking her reaction to a news article in a daily newspaper linking her to candidates with church links and her views on abortion and assisted dying.
Named with Hutton were Upper House candidates Heath (City Builders Church), Moira Deeming and Anne-Marie Hermans and Lower House candidates Nicole Werner (Box Hill) and Cynthia Watson (Ringwood).
Guy said Heath’s expulsion from the Party Room was related to trips to Malaysia and ISAAC and not her views on gay conversion therapy.
Hutton is seeking to replace Liberal MP for Hastings Neale Burgess, who has yet to publicly respond to reports that he was suspended from state parliament and then banned from attending party events or involving himself in Liberal affairs following allegations of inappropriate behaviour towards parliamentary staff (“MP banned from duties” The News 18/7/22).
First elected in 2006, Burgess announced his retirement on 11 November 2021, saying he had decided not standing at this year’s state election was “the right time for me and it’s the right time for my party”.
Kate Smith, of Somerville, said Hutton “comes off as a very sweet person”.
“However, she refuses to answer simple questions in relation to her views on dying with dignity, marriage equality and reproductive health for women,” Smith told The News.
“It’s time to stop the Pentecostal takeover of our great democracy.”
In neighbouring Mornington, accusations of a takeover by “the Mornington faction of the religious far right” earlier this year split sections of the Liberal Party on the peninsula (“‘Turf war’ splits peninsula Liberals” The News 22/8/22).
The scheduled annual general meeting of the party’s Dunkley Federal Electoral Conference ended within 10 minutes of Its start on Wednesday 27 July, and was rescheduled.
The former chair of the conference, Mornington Peninsula Shire councillor (now mayor) and Liberal Party member for 10 years, Steve Holland, refused to attend because “the behaviour was so poor the first time around that I didn’t want to witness that again…”
First published in the Western Port News – 23 November 2022
