Last month Tony Abbott was given a blunt warning, by phone, from a senior member of the Liberal Party. According to notes of the conversation taken by an exceptionally reliable member of the Abbott inner circle (which is not a euphemism for Abbott), this was the warning:
''If you insist on supporting these motions there will be World War III. We will blow the division up from underneath you. You will lose the [next] election.''
This was a reference to moves inside the NSW Liberal Party to democratise the party and curb the power exercised - and routinely abused - by the state executive of the NSW Liberal Party.
To stop his state party from fracturing, Abbott has duly supported the status quo.
The man throwing his weight around on the phone felt sufficiently powerful within the party, and sufficiently threatened by the prospect of reforms bubbling up from the grassroots, to threaten his own federal leader.
He would rather the Liberals lost the next federal election than he be allowed to lose his grip on power over the NSW government.
This is exactly why the NSW Liberal Party has become a party of black box politics, a party of questionable elections, rampant self-interest, personal fiefdoms and institutional duplicity.
Black box politics occurs when there is an accumulation of power by a small group of powerbrokers who run the party largely unencumbered by the restrictions imposed by governance, accountability or transparency.
Black box politics has been the province of the unions and the Labor Party, especially in NSW, which eventually led to the corrosion of public faith in the Labor brand and a succession of electoral disasters in the past three years.
Now the occupation of politics by a self-interested political class has spread to the NSW Liberal Party. The party has corrupted its own ideals.
During the past 12 months, the state executive has invoked ''emergency powers'' more than 100 times to impose its will on the party. It is constantly backdating elections, overriding local votes, striking out memberships, and voiding local branch elections, in the name of stability.
The NSW division of the Liberals thus operates under a state of perpetual emergency, like a government which suspends civil liberties at times of war.
Except there is no war, other than warring personalities. There have been no emergencies, let alone a hundred of them.
There is a block of 11 members of the state executive who support the use of emergency powers and black box politics.
Five of those 11 people are political lobbyists, or were until very recently working as lobbyists: Michael Photios, Joe Tannous, Hollie Hughes, Scott Farlow and Lucy Wicks.
It has become hard to tell where the Liberal Party ends and lobbying begins. Many former lobbyists are implanted within the ministerial staffs of the NSW government.
When one of these lobbyists, Lucy Wicks, was imposed on the local branches as a federal candidate, it proved to be a bridge too far. Wicks has been preselected for the central coast seat of Robertson at the next federal election.
Any leadership which incessantly invokes emergency powers and uses those powers to override grassroots democracy is asking for a revolt and that revolt duly arrived when a party member felt sufficiently aggrieved to take action after having his vote and his branch vote treated like garbage.
His name is Denis Pogson.
He is a rank-and-file party member in the Robertson electorate, a retiree who sees himself as a Menzies Liberal.
As a result of his legal action, the black box was opened for scrutiny by a Supreme Court judge.
Last week, Justice William Nicholas of the NSW Supreme Court was presented with an example of the inner workings of the NSW state executive of the Liberal Party. He did not like what he saw.
He saw the NSW Liberal Party seeking to quash a move to return power to the local branches by having preselection conducted via an open plebiscite.
This reform represents a mortal threat to black box politics. The state executive went to court to protect its prerogatives.
Not for the first time. It has spent several hundred thousand dollars in legal costs shoring up its perpetual emergency, actions which have drained the state branch's resources away from contesting the next federal election.
Justice Nicholas rejected the defence argument that the state executive could continue to act as the gatekeeper of the party's democratic process. He rejected the decision to quash the reform. He did not regard the undertakings made on behalf of the state executive as credible.
His decision is a comprehensive repudiation of the status quo.
It is a rejection of black box politics. It is a challenge to the person who has the most to lose, the person who called Tony Abbott and threatened to blow up the NSW division.
Don't be suckered into believing that what afflicts the NSW Liberals is a battle for power between liberal versus conservative, left versus right, secular versus religious.
The party's structural deformity stems from an alliance made by three men, each from different wings of the party, to introduce the special powers that have been so abused.
The three men are Michael Photios, a lobbyist, Alex Hawke, a federal MP, and David Clarke, a state MP. They have unleashed a process they can no longer control.
None of them has been asked to account for what they have done to the party. That process began in court on Friday.
