Lyle Shelton
Lyle Shelton (Image: AAP/Regi Varghese)

One of the loudest voices in the “no” campaign against marriage equality in Australia, Lyle Shelton, will run as an independent in the NSW upper house.

The conservative lobbyist was nominated last year as the successor of Reverend Fred Nile, the upper house’s longest-serving member and an ultra-conservative Christian, but was disendorsed by Nile within months. 

Tuesday’s announcement means Shelton will effectively run against Nile’s wife, Silvana Nile, who will seek to replace her husband when he retires at the election next year. 

Shelton told Crikey on Tuesday he wasn’t worried about splitting the conservative vote. 

“I wish her well, but I’ll stay focused on the campaign I’m running,” he said. “Of course, there are some other players in this field, and that’s fine, it’s a democracy.”

He believed there was an appetite among voters for a candidate who would “stand up for their family against the threat of radical political correctness”. 

“They want to be free to express their points of view … whether it’s on the gender ideology, whether it’s climate catastrophism that’s causing our coal-fired power stations to be closed down prematurely,” he said. 

“There’s a huge number of people out there who are deeply uncomfortable with the anti-life agenda that we’re seeing with abortion … and now euthanasia, all facilitated by a Liberal government that has abandoned social conservatives and mainstream people.”

Shelton said NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet — despite being a conservative who opposed marriage equality and the decriminalisation of abortion — had failed the voters Shelton was seeking to court. 

“Sadly, like Scott Morrison, he has caved into the woke elites. He’s caved into the Matt Keans of his party, who believe the same things as the Greens, Labor and the teals,” Shelton said. “People are looking for something different in politics.” 

Despite the dismal result achieved by Liberal Warringah candidate Katherine Deves at the federal election, he believed her kind of politics could be a vote-winner in the state. 

“I think there’s a huge number of people, particularly in the western suburbs, but also in the regional areas, and thinking people in the eastern parts of Sydney … who are really worried about what their children are being taught at school,” he said.

Asked why he cares so much about the lives of LGBTIQA+ Australians, he said: “That’s not my concern. It’s a free society. I think most mainstream parents are very concerned, not about what people do in their bedrooms, they’re concerned what the ideologues are teaching their children in their schools.”

A previous version of this article mistakenly said Fred Nile was a Catholic. In fact, Nile is an ordained evangelical Congregational minister. The story has been updated to reflect this.