What on Earth is holding up Liberal Party preselections?

ALP preselections have been all but completed, with only the safest Liberal seats as yet unfilled. Union bigwigs in the safe seats and atop the Senate tickets, celebrity candidates in the marginal and not so marginal Liberal seats and high profile ALP movers and shakers left unallocated because of the sheer amount of talent wanting to join the Labor juggernaut. Frontbench material (Combet in Charlton and Shorten in Maribyrnong) has been parachuted into the blue collar seats and famous distractions (Bailey in North Sydney, McKew in Bennelong) dropped into the blue ribbon seats. Not that Bennelong is as blue ribbon as it used to be.

But there’s 63 seats up for grabs for the Coalition, and though they would be lucky to win any of them (save for the vacant and completely redistributed Calare), they have only endorsed 15 candidates in seats that they don’t already occupy. These positions belong to the ultra-marginal Labor seats, especially in Western Australia, where the Coalition is still ahead in the polls.

But nobody’s been endorsed in ALP frontbench seats like Griffith, Lalor and Lilley. It seems that the Coalition isn’t even going to try to distract the Rudd dream team from their nationwide duties.

Meanwhile, the Socialist Alliance has endorsed candidates for 25 seats across the country already. Sure, none of the candidates stand any chance at all, but if one of the smallest political parties in the country can preselect 25 candidates (not including their Senate hopefuls), then why can’t the biggest?

On a brief note, Socialist Alliance’s top-of-the-ticket Senate candidate Ray Hayes, who scored a total of 536 votes in 2004, looks nothing short of homeless in the photo on the party’s website.