Outgoing North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman has admitted that nationals played a role in losing the Liberals’ seats in the city center in the recent federal election.
The moderate Liberal, who lost his seat to independent Kylea Tink a fortnight ago, answers questions from Radio National presenter Patricia Karvelas.
Kylea Tink, independent of Teal and the liberal Trent Zimmerman. Credits: Getty, Kate Geraghty
The first question was what role the leader of the nationals, Barnaby Joyce, should play in the loss of the Coalition government.
This is what Zimmerman said:
Oh look, I think there’s a whole bunch of reasons why we’ve lost a sea of seats like mine. And it is clear that climate change was one of the key issues.
I think the fact that the leadership of the National Party and the individual members of the National Party as the senator [Matt] It turned out that Canavan was not genuinely enthusiastic about our zero net commitment and what we had to do to get there certainly had an impact on the government’s perception of seriousness about climate change. And especially during the campaign, I thought about Matt Canavan’s speech [that net zero was ‘dead’] it was one of those killer moments for us.
Although the [then] the prime minister stated government policy, there was only one underlying suspicion that. after all, people like Canavan and the hesitation that Barnaby Joyce has had throughout the process would somehow prevail if we were re-elected.