The Liberal Party's former candidate for Fremantle Sherry Sufi is angry about the way he has lost his job and labelled the people who leaked negative stories about him to the media as cowards.
The 33-year-old Pakistani-born Sufi stepped down on Friday, ostensibly because of a report in the Fremantle Herald about him being caught on tape in 2013 using crude sexual language while mocking his former boss, WA MP Michael Sutherland.
He was quickly replaced on Saturday by a staffer for Liberal Senator Chris Back, former teacher and diplomat Pierrette Kelly.
The events came after Labor dumped its candidate for the seat, union official Chris Brown over a 30-year-old spent criminal conviction last week.
Mr Sufi said he was young and naive and had apologised in relation to the recording of him mocking the South African accent of Mr Sutherland, the WA lower house speaker, and talking about his sex life, which cost him his job at the time.
He pointed out he had held other jobs with the Liberals since, including chair of the WA Liberal Party's Policy Committee that he also resigned from on Friday.
There were also reports he embellished his work history before preselection, which both he and Liberal state director Andrew Cox denied.
And Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull didn't invite him along when he visited the shipyards in the Fremantle electorate last week.
Mr Sufi told AAP the real issues that led to his demise were past articles he had written expressing conservative views opposing same-sex marriage, indigenous recognition and parts of the racial discrimination act.
"It is a fatal blow to democracy that cowards who disagree with your views would rather stoop to the level of playing Frank Underwood style House of Cards politics and leak dirt to the press instead of debating you," he said.
"Now just because somebody doesn't support the idea of same-sex marriage doesn't mean you are unsympathetic to homosexuality or that you are unsympathetic to the same-sex community."
Mr Sufi has plenty of conservative supporters, including former WA Liberal leader Bill Hassell, who said this week the party's philosophy encouraged a freedom of views, his opinions were not uncommon and were Liberal policy.
The view of some political analysts is that he was pushed out because he had been a negative distraction when the prime minister had wanted to talk about shipbuilding in Fremantle.
The seat has been held by Labor for 80 years but the Liberals and Greens candidate Kate Davis are considered slight chances of winning it.
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