The Victorian Liberal Party will dump Jeremy Hearn as its candidate for the seat of Isaacs, after a conspiracy-laden anti-Muslim rant he posted online last year.
In a statement, a spokesman for the party said the administrative committee was moving to cancel Mr Hearn’s endorsement this morning.
The Liberal hopeful’s comments included several suggestions Muslim Australians were hiding their true intentions, which he said were to overthrow the Australian Government and introduce Sharia law.
Victorian Liberal leader Michael O’Brien described the comments as “appalling”.
“I reject them entirely. I reject them absolutely. In my mind those views have no place in the Liberal Party at all,” he said.
Mr Hearn has apologised for the comments.
Liberal Minister Alan Tudge described Mr Hearn’s comments as offensive and said they were not shared within the Liberal Party.
“He will be disendorsed this morning. His views have no place within the Liberal Party,” he told Sky News.
Labor had called for Mr Hearn to be sacked after his comments were made public by the Herald Sun newspaper.
Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, who has held Isaacs since 2007, welcomed the dumping.
But he said it was indicative of broader problems in the Liberal Party’s vetting of candidates.
“This man should never have been preselected by a mainstream political party in Australia in the first place,” he said. “It thought that it was OK to preselect someone who had expressed these abhorrent, Islamophobic views.”abc