The crisis surrounding the Liberals’ Dunstan candidate Anna Finizio has dramatically escalated with revelations this morning that she recently applied for a job working with the then-Labor Opposition to help bring down the Marshall Liberal Government.
Just four years ago, Anna Finizio applied for a role with Labor’s shadow Attorney-General Kyam Maher, the Advertiser reports this morning.
Two years later she ran as the SA Liberal Party’s candidate in the western suburbs seat of Hindmarsh – and now she’s running again for the Liberals in the eastern suburbs seat of Dunstan.
Ms Finizio, it seems, can’t work out whether she is a western suburbs native or an inner-eastern local – and now it emerges she’s happy to work for either Labor or Liberal.
The latest disclosure comes on top of this week’s revelations that Finizio airbrushed from her public CV her years as a director of Formway Group, which folded shortly after her third and final stint owing more than $20 million to creditors, including the Tax Office and staff.
The Liberal Party has conceded it should have been told about her directorship of the failed company.
It is clear it should have been told that just four years ago she was seeking a role to actively work against the party.
As put by Tom Koutsantonis
This crisis has now gone beyond Ms Finizio – it is a question of David Speirs’ leadership.
I feel sorry for Mr Speirs in all this – he couldn’t possibly have been told that his star candidate for this high-profile by-election, who he actively and personally promoted, was recently an aspiring Labor staffer.
Did Ms Finizio tell Steven Marshall that she applied to work for the Malinauskas Labor Opposition when Mr Marshall was Premier and the Liberals were in Government? Surely Mr Marshall wouldn’t have endorsed her to succeed him in Dunstan and helped her campaign if he knew she wanted to work for his political opponents against his former government?
There’s no way a candidate could have been endorsed in these circumstances.
The clock is ticking – nominations for this seat close at midday today. David Speirs has just hours left to show leadership and sack Anna Finizio as his endorsed candidate.
We are now seeing a clear pattern emerging with Ms Finizio.
She touts her credentials as an accredited Company Director but hides that she was actually a company director – then says she was only a company director ‘on paper’ and claims she had nothing to do with the company!
She is an eastern suburbs candidate and local ‘on paper’ – but she ran in a western suburbs seat less than two years ago, touting her local credentials as being born and raised in the west.
And now Ms Finizio is a Liberal ‘on paper’ – but she applied to work with Labor to defeat the Steven Marshall Government just four years ago while Labor was in Opposition.
Once again, Ms Finizio’s actions raise serious questions about her authenticity.
Is she actually committed to the Liberal cause, or just her own?
Surely, if David Speirs and local Liberals in Dunstan knew about this, Ms Finizio would never have been endorsed as a candidate – let alone in an important by-election.
And surely now that they do know, her candidacy is untenable – if it wasn’t already.
Why is David Speirs always the last to know about what’s going on with his so-called ‘Liberal’ candidates?
Ms Finizio deserves to be dumped before nominations close at midday on Friday.
If she isn’t, it will show yet again that David Speirs’ Liberals stand for nothing – and simply cannot govern their own party, let alone the state.
