by Laura Tingle
The Decay of Westminster
Malcolm Turnbull strode into the Senate Courtyard of Parliament House in Canberra at 4 p.m. on 14 September 2015 and announced he had challenged Tony Abbott for the Liberal Party leadership and, therefore, the prime ministership. “It is clear enough that the Government is not successful in providing the economic leadership that we need,” he said. “It is not the fault of individual ministers. Ultimately the Prime Minister has not been capable of providing the economic leadership our nation needs; he has not been capable of providing the economic confidence that business needs.”
Turnbull’s move was immediately portrayed by the media in the language of the coup against Kevin Rudd. Yet unlike in 2010, a challenge to Tony Abbott’s leadership had been a clear prospect for months, as the government languished in the polls and went from political disaster to political disaster. Turnbull had emerged as the only real alternative candidate. The sole surprise was in the timing of the challenge: before the Canning by-election, not after it. Abbott had, after all, been mortally wounded in a political sense in February, and been unable to recover the government’s fortunes. Unlike in 2010, the Turnbull challenge came about because Abbott’s most senior front-bench colleagues moved against him, having concluded that the government simply could not continue. It was not a political assassination by a bunch of nonentities recently arrived in parliament and more accustomed to playing factional politics in the Labor movement. The only true similarity was in the bringing down of a first-term prime minister. None of this stopped Tony Abbott and his supporters from trying in every way they could to paint the change to Turnbull as a re-run of 2010. They used the same language about assassins in the night and, rather overlooking the realities of our electoral system, argued that it was for voters, not MPs, to elect a prime minister.
This dressing up of the Turnbull challenge as the Gillard coup was an attempt to de-legitimise it; to load all the sorry history of the Labor years onto current events in the minds of both the waverers in Coalition ranks and the electorate.
Whatever the mechanics of the drama, yet one more thing that was utterly different was that Turnbull, unlike Julia Gillard, was able to say why he was challenging. It wasn’t just about the polls, no matter how much they helped to focus the minds of his colleagues. It was about the way government and politics were working. It was an exciting time to be alive, Turnbull told voters, in clear contrast to the fearful messages of Abbott. The country faced challenges and opportunities:
We need a style of leadership that explains those challenges and opportunities; explains the challenges and how to seize the opportunities. A style of leadership that respects the peoples’ intelligence, that explains these complex issues, and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take, and makes a case for it. We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people …
We also need a new style of leadership in the way we deal with others, whether it is our fellow Members of Parliament, whether it is the Australian people. We need to restore traditional Cabinet Government. There must be an end to policy on the run and captain’s calls. We need to be truly consultative with colleagues, Members of Parliament, Senators and the wider public. We need an open Government … that recognises that there is an enormous sum of wisdom both within our colleagues in this building and of course further afield.
To outsiders, talk of new styles of leadership and the restoration of cabinet government didn’t mean much. International coverage of the change marvelled at how Australia had managed to have five prime ministers in five years. The Economist was typical when it asked whether Australia’s economy could be “fixed by a system that produces so many political assassinations.” Malcolm Turnbull’s ascension restarted the clock on the question of whether there is something inherently wrong with the way politics works in Australia, or whether we have merely seen a freak series of events.
The fall of Abbott, and the return of Turnbull, provoked much discussion of the role of prime minister’s offices. Equally, there was plenty of speculation about whether Turnbull would repeat his mistakes as Opposition leader in the way he dealt with people. But there was not quite so much about the more fundamental question of whether the revolving door of the prime ministership has much deeper causes than the personalities in Parliament House.
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There is a quote from the American gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson stuck up on a piece of yellowing paper above my desk in the Parliament House press gallery:
Most nights are slow in the politics business, but every once and a while you get a fast one, a blast of wild treachery and weirdness that not even the hard boys can handle.
I first came across the quote in the Hawke era. It encapsulated a particularly wild ride during the months in 1991 when Paul Keating resigned as treasurer and stalked Bob Hawke, apparently prepared to bring down the government in the quest to replace him as leader.
There have been plenty of occasions on which to recall Thompson’s words since then, of course. It feels as though the fast and wild nights in politics have become more frequent. Yet there had been almost a decade of leadership coups and counter-coups in the Liberal Party by the time Labor’s leadership drama came to a head in 1991. Granted, these were about the Opposition leadership, not the leadership of the government. That was what made the Hawke–Keating tussle – along with the sheer size of the personalities of the two men – so extraordinary when it finally came to a head.
Seen from today’s perspective, though, the notable thing about the wild nights on both sides of politics until 2010 was that they would quickly settle down again into some form of normality and sense of order. Of course there were wounds to be licked and resentments that would never quite go away. But government – and even Opposition – would quickly refocus on the task at hand. The wild nights were a bizarre aberration. It was almost as if the blast of treachery had all been part of the plan for orderly government, rather than something that fundamentally threatened it. And in general, we, the voters, were not worse off as a result of that wild treachery.
The first real sign that those fast nights in politics were now in the hands of amateurs came in June 2010, when the Labor Caucus overthrew a first-term prime minister. Here was a coup that was ill-conceived, ill-constructed and catastrophic, one that showed us how such manoeuvring could have a material impact on the rest of us. For normal government didn’t resume the next day.
The shock to the system that night wasn’t just in the way it erupted, seemingly from nowhere. It was in what it told us – what it confirmed – about how the Labor Party had changed since Keating stalked Hawke in 1991. That earlier battle had been about an ageing government. It was between two figures broadly seen as joint authors of that government’s political and policy success. The case was for renewal and new ideas. There was no real suggestion in 2010 that policy principle might be at stake, or even policy or political competence. Julia Gillard told us that the government had lost its way. A Labor frontbencher famously summed up the depth of thought that went into it when he said to the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann on the afternoon of the coup, “So, do you think we can win with Julia?” Much later, she and many of her colleagues said it was because Kevin Rudd was out of control. It was about personal hatred and about the polls.
David Marr writes in his Quarterly Essay on Bill Shorten, Faction Man, about Labor’s powerful Victorian Right faction, and in doing so paints a picture of what has happened to the Labor Party in recent decades:
They do politics differently there. Wars are fought in the name of peace. Explosives are packed under the foundations of the Labor Party in the name of stability. They call the wreckage left after these brawls rejuvenation. The wonder is that Victoria delivers any Labor talent to Canberra and remains, decade after decade, a stronghold of the party.
Marr says the factions ceased fighting over policy decades ago. “All that was at stake in the conflicts that had shaken the party for ove
r a decade were places in parliament. In no other party and no other state has so much political blood been split for half a metre of leather.”
The Victorian Right was at the heart of the 2010 coup. It had brought the factional manouverings to Canberra in an unprecedented way: you executed the person in the same way as usual. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the fact he was prime minister made this different to an internal brawl.
Our perception of collective order and faith in “the system” was deeply undermined on that night in 2010, both by the coup itself, but more importantly by the failure to reestablish some sense of control and strategy in its wake. Many people believed that this was simply due to a Labor Party that had become deeply corrupted, leached of any real talent, and which was, as a result, imploding. But there were more shocks to come. Many believed that the confronting sense of loss of political order could be dealt with by changing the government, getting rid of the dysfunctional Labor Party and putting Tony Abbott and the Coalition into office. Voters were prepared to believe Tony Abbott when he said that he would bring back “adult government”; that he could call a halt to the chaos. Yet eighteen months later, the first and predominant words voters used in focus groups to describe the prime minister were “idiot” and “fool.”
Instead of a government that went about its business delivering sensible, articulated policy, voters got broken promises of a spectacular magnitude and a politics of three-word slogans which seemed perpetually stuck in the mode of opposition. Everything the government had to say, it seemed, was about the Labor Party.
This was a profound moment for Australian politics. It now seemed that all the uncertainty of the preceding years might not be due solely to the manoeuvrings of Labor’s faceless men – instead, both sides of politics were unable to run the country!
The tendency to ascribe all fault to individual personality or management style is understandable when leadership struggles are such human dramas. But it does not explain why a succession of prime ministers have succumbed to the preconditions – the series of political misjudgments that cause colleagues to lose faith in their leader – which ultimately led to their downfall. A run of bad opinion polls, or some final political debacle, might trigger the actual leadership challenge, but these things don’t explain what made those prime ministers so vulnerable in the first place.
Australians have long been rude about their politicians. But there has been an underlying faith in the governance of the place. Kevin Rudd enjoyed stratospheric popularity with the public, even if his colleagues loathed him, until just a couple of months before his fall in 2010. Julia Gillard struggled with minority government and internal dissension throughout her prime ministership. Tony Abbott had clearer air than either of them: a smashed Labor Party, a voting public that had been warned it would have to cop tough medicine and was desperate for stability, and complete internal party discipline through his first twelve months, even if voters were at best ambivalent about him.
Commentators have mused on whether voters have come to see politics as a reality television show and have the same tolerance – and appetite – for the weakest performer to be rapidly “voted off.” This might explain, the argument goes, voters’ rush to judgment on prime ministers of late.
But the attitude of voters doesn’t explain what has happened here: remember it was the political players in the Rudd coup who thought they were going to gain the approval of the mob for their actions, and it was the mob that reacted with horror.
The only constancies across these three prime ministerships are the stories of dysfunction within the cabinet and government, of too much unchallenged prime ministerial power, and of disastrous political judgments. So the bigger question is why politicians on both sides have not been able to govern competently but instead have compulsively repeated the political and policy mistakes of their predecessors. At the very least, it suggests the political and administrative mechanisms aren’t in place to save prime ministers from themselves and their brilliant, middle-of-the-night ideas.
The fall of Tony Abbott provoked a renewed focus on prime ministerial offices and government processes, particularly around his controversial chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Those with longer memories note two particular features of the offices of Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Most notably, none of them opted for chiefs of staff with long bureaucratic experience. The point is not that public servants are the fount of all wisdom: it is that they know how the public service works and what it can, and can’t, do for you. Having a public servant running your office also implies a degree of respect for the institution of the public service, rather than the hostility that Tony Abbott and his office exuded, or even the unreasonable expectations put on it by Kevin Rudd; it suggests that you understand government is something a lot larger than politicians alone. The most successful periods of the most successful, and lengthy, prime ministerships of recent times – those of Bob Hawke and John Howard – saw the prime minister’s office run by people with public service backgrounds, or on secondment from the public service.
The second noteworthy thing about the offices of successful and unsuccessful recent prime ministers is that the successful ones clearly delineated the roles of a chief of staff who ran the government and a political adviser who contemplated the politics. With these two streams of advice distinguished, prime ministers could consider both the political and policy aspects of any decision. This also allowed a further distinction: between past and present. Both the political present and a policy framework that had continuity with all that had gone before could be clearly considered on their own merits.
In Abbott’s case, adopting such an approach may have also helped break up the “institutional” structures that had been so successful in Opposition, but which proved disastrous in government. As Opposition leader, Abbott worked with an immensely tight, immensely successful, immensely small group of staffers and political colleagues. Opposition leaders are given vast latitude by their colleagues to make “captain’s calls” on policy in the interests of political expediency.
Abbott was one of our longest-serving Opposition leaders in recent times. Breaking out of the habits of several years of working with just this group and seeing the need to transform modus operandi when it came to running a cabinet government was always going to be difficult. The mistrust of outsiders in the Abbott office, however, meant that, if anything, even more people were frozen out once the Coalition won government.
In 2014 Rod Rhodes and Anne Tiernan published The Gatekeepers: Lessons from Prime Ministers’ Chiefs of Staff, which documents conversations with prime ministerial chiefs of staff going back to the Fraser years. The book notes that bureaucratic secondments to ministerial offices had dropped sharply from the days of Hawke and Keating, when up to 70 per cent of staffers were seconded from the public service. The growing tendency for politicians to target or label public servants politically means time in a ministerial office – once seen as an invaluable experience for public servants – is now seen as a career negative. The benefit of the old crossover between public service and ministerial offices, Rhodes and Tiernan argue, was that “public servants understood the pressures and contingencies of ministerial life. Ministers understood how the public service could help them.” They conclude: “Both politicians and public servants [now have] less knowledge of how government works and the amount and quality of expert advice was reduced.”
This lack of institutional memory affects everything about the way our politics plays out. For a start, bureaucrats who stay on while the political players change might recognise old ideas. Former Labor ministers were genuinely surprised after the 2014 budget that the new government had simply picked up the same raw policy proposals the public service had been serving up for years and included them in the budget. Their argument was that these were not things rejected by Labor on ideological grounds, or because they were too hard politically, but because they required significant work to turn them from public policy
goals into part of a coherent budget strategy, part of a political sales job, one which had some chance of getting through the Senate. This highlights how successful outcomes have tended to be a joint production of good policy-makers and savvy politicians who know how to shape a policy into something they can sell. Their conclusion was that, whatever else you said about such policies, it seemed no one in the new government (which ended up racing to put its budget together) recognised these as coming from the bureaucracy’s bottom drawer. Similarly, a Coalition MP remarked to a Labor MP when Labor was in government that he couldn’t believe Labor had been dumb enough to take up public service proposals to change employee share-ownership schemes that the Howard government had rejected as politically unworkable. These changes went on to cause all sorts of problems not just for the Rudd and Gillard governments but also for entrepreneurs seeking to finance their start-up companies.
In fact, the lack of policy memory in ministers’ offices has on occasion led them to rely too much on the bureaucracy. A case in point was the incoming Rudd government. It commissioned the Henry Review to produce a “cutting-edge” paper on tax reform, not just for the next election but looking ahead to the next couple of decades. And that’s what it got. Measures like the mining super-profits tax were still at a theoretical stage. No one involved in their development anticipated that they would be adopted as they were. The experience of Ken Henry and others in the Treasury over twenty years had been to have their ideas mashed up, stomped on and reworked into something political.
Michael Thawley, former head of PM&C, was one very senior bureaucrat who did move from the public service into a prime ministerial office, when he became John Howard’s international adviser in 1996. At the 2015 conference of the ACT division of the Institute of Public Administration Australia, he told his audience that the best way they could contribute was to bring their expertise and their view from outside into the sanctums of executive government.