In Tasmania, the cities of Hobart and Launceston are a comfortable two-hour drive apart. However, Launcestonians are reluctant to drive to the ‘southern’ capital and Hobartians regard Launceston as a rather dull, ‘old money’, and provincial town with historical tickets on itself. The midpoint between the two, Campbelltown, is therefore a perfect meeting place. It is also where my twenty-year journey with the Liberal Party ended one bleak summer day in 2002.

On 3 February 2002, the Tasmanian Liberal Party met in Campbelltown to do something it had never done before – disendorse a candidate, in this case one who was running for the Hobart based-seat of Denison in that year's forthcoming state election. The candidate's ‘crime’ had been to speak out loudly and often against the federal Liberal Party government of John Howard for its policies and practices towards the asylum-seekers who populate our detention centres.

The Tasmanian Liberal Party voted twenty-eight to one, with one abstention, to disendorse the candidate. The candidate was me.

The Liberal Party effectively forced me into a club occupied, paradoxically, by only one other, the right-wing One Nation Party founder Pauline Hanson, who had formerly been the Liberal Party candidate for the Queensland seat of Oxley in the 1996 federal election.

While I was obviously upset at what happened to me, my experience brought into stark relief a broader and more important question facing not only the Liberal Party today, but also every other relevant political party in Australia.