Five days after the federal election and Prime Minister-elect Abbott was seen to have lost control of the backroom boys in Queensland

First we find that Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott couldn’t keep his party members on message three days after the 7 September 2013 federal election and now we see that he perhaps never had any strong influence on the party machine in Queensland, which extraordinarily appears to have knowingly endorsed a man for a vacant Senate position who is in the midst of a very serious Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) inquiry into an allegation/s concerning electoral bribery.

The Australian 12 September 2013:

Campbell Newman has suspended the appointment of Barry O'Sullivan to fill the senate vacancy of Barnaby Joyce in the face of a Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation involving the former Liberal National Party official.

In an extraordinary move, the Queensland premier today refused to allow parliament to formally endorse Mr O'Sullivan's party pre-selection in May to fill the senate vacancy, created by Mr Joyce's move to the lower house.

Mr O'Sullivan is facing a long-running CMC probe over his involvement in an alleged attempt to induce former Liberal leader Bruce Flegg to resign from parliament, ahead of last year's state election, to make way for Mr Newman to stand in his seat.

While an initial CMC probe cleared Mr O'Sullivan, the emergence of recordings - made by Dr Flegg on his mobile phone - sparked a new investigation with evidence....

Tensions have long existed between the LNP parliamentary team and Mr O'Sullivan, the long serving treasurer and chair of the candidate vetting community.

UPDATE

Australian Financial Review 13 September 2013:

Abbott has been ambushed by a civil war that has simmered behind the scenes in Queensland’s Liberal National Party (LNP) since early 2011. He is now forced to contemplate whether he and Queensland Premier Campbell Newman chose to back the wrong side.

The internal hostilities came to a climax in November last year, when The Australian Financial Review’s Pamela Williams revealed that LNP party executives had forwarded to Queensland police a dossier about fund-raising activity by Liberal Party federal vice-president Santo Santoro.

The dossier was the product of a wider conflict between the Nationals and Liberals after they merged to form a single party, the LNP, in 2008. But what followed next was swift and brutal.

Santoro was not only exonerated, but by the end of the month the greatest critics of Santoro and Newman – backbenchers Ray Hopper, Alex Douglas and Carl Judge, together with the LNP’s largest individual backer, Clive Palmer, for various reasons were all out of the party.

Ten months later the protest movement that this triggered, which has embraced wider issues as it expands beyond Queensland, threatens to cripple Abbott’s government. Abbott must now negotiate with the man he spurned in an angry confrontation in a room at the Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne before the Liberals’ federal conference in June last year.