Frydenberg ally Blackwell elected to key Liberal Party post
Read into that what you will – or let us do that for you.
Jacquie Blackwell was elected chair at the weekend by a handsome margin from the 101 members who voted on the 12 positions. She defeated Yvonne Gu in the vote and replaces Marg Hawker, who has been chair for the past two years and was identified by some as aligned with polarising state president Philip Davis.
Party members were delighted.
'She's hard at the ball; she just wants to win,' a Liberal statesman told CBD in some sort of sporting analogy we don't fully understand but are printing anyway.
Blackwell, who has known Frydenberg for 25 years, has had a winning couple of months.
In July, she was voted in as chair of Victoria's largest federal electorate conference (FEC) when the FEC of the defunct Higgins electorate merged with that of Kooyong.
Frydenberg, who lost his seat Kooyong in the 2022 election to teal independent Monique Ryan, himself turned up to the FEC event, the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window reported, forecasting slightly tongue in cheek that the local chair of Goldman Sachs' glorious return to lead the Liberal Party was now somewhat inevitable.
Blackwell declined to comment on her latest win on the women's council, but is understood to be squarely focused on rebuilding the role of Liberal women in the state.
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