A second member of the shadow cabinet has announced he is quitting parliament, further depleting the moderates’ presence in the parliamentary Liberal party and boosting the chance of a Teal candidate in the Sydney seat of Bradfield.

Paul Fletcher, 59, manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives, on Tuesday said he would not re-contest his seat at the coming election.

After the redistribution Bradfield is held on 2.5 per cent on a two-candidate basis. Once Liberal heartland, teal candidate Nicolette Boele achieved a big swing against Fletcher in 2022.

At the end of the parliamentary session, the opposition leader in the Senate, Simon Birmingham, announced he was leaving parliament.

Birmingham is taking up a job with the ANZ bank and will resign from the Senate early in the new year to start his new role in February. Fletcher will see out his term.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton is set to reshuffle his frontbench before Christmas. Filling Birmingham’s position of foreign affairs spokesperson is particularly challenging given the volatile international situation.

A former minister in the Coalition government, Fletcher is spokesman for government services and the digital economy, as well as spokesman on science and the arts.

The Liberals now have minimal moderate voices in the parliamentary party.

Deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley leans moderate but is not a factional leader or a forthright factional advocate.

The remaining sparse moderate ranks include Andrew Bragg, Dave Sharma and Bridget Archer.

Bragg is an assistant shadow minister, while the others are on the backbench.

Archer is very outspoken and has often crossed the floor but is not seen as a factional leader.

Essentially the moderate faction has increasingly lost its voice in recent years, with the right dominant within the parliamentary party under Dutton. The teal wins in 2022 cut a swathe through the moderates.

The moderates are hoping the new candidate for Bradfield might be Gisele Kapterian. They say she ticks all the right boxes, as a moderate, and a professional woman.

Kapterian was picked as the candidate for the adjacent seat of North Sydney, before that seat was scrapped in the redistribution.

A moderate woman would seem the best sort of candidate to maximise the Liberals’ chances of holding Bradfield against Boele, who has been actively campaigning throughout this parliamentary term.

Last week Fletcher launched a major attack on the teals, claiming they had duped Liberal voters. He said they were a “giant green left con job” and “are very much in the tradition of front groups established by left-wing political operatives, which are designed to lure votes away from the Liberal Party by tricking voters about their bona fides”.

He said in Tuesday’s statement that he had been in Parliament for 15 years. “Renewal is healthy, for people and institutions, and now is the right time to hand over the baton.”

Fletcher said he expected some “outstanding people” to put themselves forward to be Liberal candidates.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.