Venom

by David Crowe

  The cabinet rooms in Parliament House were opened to the government backbench that Monday night in a symbolic inversion of power. The Coalition’s backbench committee on energy, chaired by Craig Kelly, entered the room for a special briefing with Turnbull, Frydenberg and officials including the Australian Energy Market Commission chairman John Pierce, there to field detailed questions on the National Energy Guarantee. Abbott walked into the cabinet room in a rare return after being expelled from power almost three years earlier. He had become a full member of the backbench committee, confirmed only hours earlier whether Turnbull liked it or not, and could exercise a formal vote on whether the policy would proceed. He had a natural ally in Kelly but not in the secretary of the committee, Trent Zimmerman, a senior figure in the moderate wing of the Liberal Party and one of the strongest voices in favour of the guarantee. Abbott interjected so often during Turnbull’s remarks, questioning the energy plan and climate targets, that Turnbull asked him for the ‘courtesy’ of allowing him to finish a sentence.

  ‘I would if you allowed me the courtesy of finishing my term,’ Abbott replied.8

  The old hatreds scorched every aspect of the debate and made a consensus inconceivable. The meeting ran for two hours and included 30 ministers and backbenchers. Abbott spoke several times to dismiss the business community’s support for the National Energy Guarantee and call for a retreat on the Paris targets, while Joyce warned that the policy would mean higher electricity bills just before the election. Christensen argued for more investment in coal power, while Tony Pasin said renewables were too expensive. Zimmerman said Australia could not breach faith by walking away from the Paris agreement, a move that would damage the Liberals in the eyes of voters in his own seat of North Sydney and Abbott’s seat of Warringah.

  The outcome was left to ten voting members. Abbott surprised nobody by declaring himself against the proposed bill to reduce emissions. Another two members, Craig Kelly and Queensland MP Ken O’Dowd, expressed their reservations and voted to keep discussing the policy, but they were defeated by seven members who voted in favour. The seven supporters were Trevor Evans, Steve Irons, Ted O’Brien, James Paterson, Rowan Ramsey, Tim Wilson and Trent Zimmerman.

  This was official approval to take the plan to the full Coalition party room the next morning. As the backbenchers dispersed and Turnbull and Frydenberg proceeded to the formal cabinet meeting that night, the Prime Minister and Energy Minister were confident they had cleared another political barrier while demonstrating that Abbott was in the minority again. But Abbott was not done. In a rare venture after years of limiting his appearances to the welcoming studios of Sky News and 2GB, he agreed to an interview with Leigh Sales on the ABC’s 7.30 program to project his message further.9

  ‘Could you look Malcolm Turnbull in the eye and say that you’ve not been a sniper or a wrecker?’ asked Sales.

  ‘Oh, look, there has been no leaking, there has been no briefing against the government,’ Abbott said, after a small smile.

  ‘Sniping, wrecking?’

  ‘There’s been none of that.’ He was suddenly serious. He argued he had confined his interventions to policy, but he dodged Sales’ last question.

  ‘Is it fair to say you are the country’s most effective Opposition Leader?’

  He was, of course, but did not need to say it.

  The meeting of the full party room the next morning brought the debate Abbott wanted so much. He fulminated against the National Energy Guarantee and he was not alone: Kelly warned the penalties on companies that breached the guarantee and its emissions targets were too high, Andrew Hastie spoke against it and Pasin left his options open to cross the floor. Those who spoke in favour, some of them with acknowledegments about flaws in the policy, included Jim Molan, Rowan Ramsey, Warren Entsch, Ted O’Brien, Ann Sudmalis and Chris Crewther.

  An entirely separate idea helped convince reluctant MPs to back the policy. The meeting heard from the chairman of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, who told MPs of the regulator’s proposal for a government program to ‘underwrite’ new investment, a recommendation in its investigation into the electricity grid in July. This encouraged some of the party room members, such as Molan, to believe it was better to unify behind the guarantee than continue to splinter on climate change policy and the Australian commitment to the Paris agreement. Sims cautioned the room that the underwriting scheme was neutral on the source of power and not about picking winners, but this did not stop the Nationals and some of the Liberals seeing it as a way to authorise government financial aid for coal power over renewables.

  Turnbull emerged from the party room meeting so confident of success that he heralded the ‘overwhelming’ support for the guarantee and the emissions targets under the Paris agreement. He said the legislation would be introduced to Parliament within the fortnight and dismissed the Labor idea of adjusting the targets by regulation.

  ‘Now, we believe in democracy,’ Turnbull said. ‘We believe the Parliament should have a say in this.’ He said the target would have to be fixed by a vote in Parliament on legislation. Euphoric at this endorsement from the party room, he turned his sights on Shorten: it was now time for the Opposition Leader to tell Australians whether Labor would support the National Energy Guarantee or be blamed for higher electricity prices. Turnbull said he was ‘absolutely’ ready for a fight at the next election over the Coalition’s target of 26 per cent against the Labor target of 45 per cent. ‘Look, you know, we should legislate the 26 per cent target and then if Labor wants to go to the next election and argue for a higher target, they should do so. And we’ll gladly have that debate with them.’

  He spoke too soon. As Turnbull stood in the Prime Minister’s courtyard with Frydenberg at his side, Abbott was stewing in his office over his defeat that morning and the widespread briefing to the media about his loss. The numbers were undoubtedly with the National Energy Guarantee within the party room, but this would not stop Abbott driving the policy towards a new political cliff. There was always another crisis point. This time it was the prospect of Abbott and others crossing the floor in Parliament to vote against the government.

  Abbott moved while Turnbull was still speaking at his press conference. He issued a statement conceding there was party room support for the guarantee but said it was a ‘yes, but’ support for a flawed scheme regardless of what the ‘technocrats’ said. ‘Unfortunately, most explanations of how the NEG (as it stands without price targets) might theoretically get prices down sound like merchant bankers’ gobbledygook. I heard at least four lower house MPs formally reserve their position on the legislation and at least a dozen express serious concerns about the NEG or about turning the non-binding Paris targets into law with massive penalties attached.’ Abbott skewered the Turnbull leadership style — merchant bankers’ gobbledygook — but his real threat was in the numbers. Abbott and four others were prepared to vote against the government bill.

  The party room meeting, usually the forum to settle an argument, became the trigger to start a new one. Critics of the energy policy mobilised during the afternoon to repudiate the advice from officials and build the numbers against the bill to reduce emissions. Their conduit was Sky News, which produced a list of those who reserved their right to cross the floor. There were five Liberals: Abbott, Abetz, Hastie, Kelly and Pasin. Joining them were three Nationals: George Christensen, Andrew Gee and Barry O’Sullivan. Within hours another Liberal, Kevin Andrews, had joined the group to make nine.10 On Sky that night, Credlin talked of others endorsing this open defiance of government policy.

  Frydenberg needed to confirm support for the policy among the states and territories to show the plans were proceeding after formal confirmation that day. In a phone hook-up with state and territory energy ministers, he gained approval to take the National Energy Guarantee to the next stage by releasing draft laws to be passed by all jurisdictions to create the mechanism. Again, Victoria reserved judgement on the final scheme.
D’Ambrosio said she would study the legislation thoroughly to look for any concessions Turnbull had given the ‘climate sceptics’ in his party room. She had no reason to smooth the path for Turnbull when it was his task to gain the numbers in Canberra to pass the separate bill to set the emissions target — the responsibility of the Commonwealth alone. This was a perilous moment for Turnbull. The mere prospect of nine MPs crossing the floor in the House of Representatives was a denial of his authority; any step to act on the threat would emasculate him.

  Shorten had more at stake than an imminent vote on the energy plan. Labor was yet to see the draft bill to cut emissions but had no reason to rush a decision on the government agenda when the open conflict in the Coalition party room made a crisis certain. The conventional wisdom had been that Labor would accept the National Energy Guarantee and the emissions target when Turnbull put it to a vote in Parliament, reasoning it was better to activate the scheme with Turnbull as Prime Minister and try to deepen the cuts to emissions if Shorten took his place. Labor could not afford to welcome the energy scheme too eagerly, given vehement criticism of it from Greenpeace, GetUp and environmentalists who wanted more support for solar and wind power and more ambition on the Paris targets. An attack from Greens leader Richard Di Natale was also certain if Labor endorsed the energy scheme in its current form and exposed itself to claims it was doing too little on climate change. The temptation for Labor to vote against the federal bill was significant when doing so might inflict so much damage on Turnbull.

  An imperial force in global media had also swept in to the Australian political crisis. Rupert Murdoch landed in Sydney in his Gulfstream jet and headed to his family sheep station, Cavan, on a horse-shoe bend in the Murrumbidgee River.11 He arrived on 10 August and spent the next days at the homestead, about one hour’s drive from Parliament House, while his newspapers and television channel intensified their coverage of a clash on energy and leadership. All media outlets, from the ABC to the commercial television networks, from The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald to the Australian Financial Review, from the West Australian to Guardian Australia, were reporting the discord on energy and the spectre of a vote in Parliament that would test Turnbull’s authority. Yet the arrival of Murdoch in Australia always heightened competition between his editors at The Australian, the Herald Sun, the Daily Telegraph, the Courier-Mail and the Adelaide Advertiser to find the sharpest new angle on a story and impress their visiting boss as he compared the morning coverage. It made their newsrooms an aggressive danger to Turnbull and his press secretaries as they tried to quell talk of a leadership challenge.

  The conservative slant in the Murdoch papers made them a comfortable platform for those who wanted to bring down Turnbull, with opinion pieces and letters pages full of criticism from the right. Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan, was a conservative voice as co-chairman of the global company and he had a strong interest in the Australian newspapers, where he had held his first major job, at age 22, as general manager of Queensland Press, the publisher of the Courier-Mail, before he rose to manage the New York Post. He backed the company’s influential commentators, such as Bolt and Credlin, and was friends with Abbott. When Abbott lost the leadership, Lachlan was one of twenty who attended a ‘wake’ for the fallen Prime Minister at The Australian Club in Sydney.12 As has been mentioned, early in 2017, when Abbott was intensifying his public criticisms of Turnbull, the younger Murdoch invited Abbott to an evening meal at Le Manoir, his Bellevue Hill estate.13 This closeness between Abbott and the Murdochs was a constant source of speculation and suspicion among Turnbull’s staff whenever they saw News Corp coverage that hurt their boss.

  This moment in Parliament showed the interplay between a frenetic media and an anxious backbench. The Newspoll released on 13 August showed the government had the same overall support for the fourth survey in a row, lagging Labor by 49 to 51 per cent in two-party terms, a closer gap over a longer period than the Liberals had seen since the election. Yet the emphasis was on Turnbull’s personal slide. ‘Malcolm Turnbull’s popularity has plunged,’ reported The Australian.14 Voter satisfaction with his performance, measured by subtracting the percentage of respondents who disapproved from the percentage who approved, fell from minus 6 to minus 24, the steepest decline since the election. Asked to choose their preferred Prime Minister, 44 per cent chose Turnbull and 32 per cent chose Shorten, a narrower gap than the result of 48 to 29 per cent two weeks earlier. It was the thirty-eighth successive Newspoll in which the Coalition trailed Labor, a period of 98 weeks. Abbott had been removed after 75 weeks of failing the same measure.

  Turnbull gathered the full ministry in the cabinet room in Parliament House that night to cool fears of a disaster and reveal Liberal Party research that showed some of the lessons from the Braddon and Longman by-elections, the twin results that were shaking the backbench. The Liberal Party’s federal director, Andrew Hirst, gave a PowerPoint presentation that analysed what Australians had told the party’s exit poll team after casting their ballots.

  The power of the Labor campaign in Longman was impressive and frightening: 86 per cent of voters recalled the warning that the government was cutting funding to Caboolture Hospital, 70 per cent recalled that the government was giving a tax cut to the major banks and 66 per cent were aware the Liberal National Party candidate, Trevor Ruthenberg, had been caught out over his defence force medal. People remembered the Labor advertising better than the Coalition campaign whether it was on television, radio, billboards or phone. Labor and its supporters in the union movement overran the Coalition volunteers on the streets of Longman: only 4 per cent of voters recalled a knock on their door from the Liberal National Party compared to 15 per cent for Labor.15

  Hirst told the ministry the narrow loss in Braddon was ‘credible’ by historical standards and the Longman result was in line with the government’s polling in early May, even though the media raised expectations of an upset victory. One key message was to improve the ‘ground game’ in the general election campaign to come. Another was to get rid of the ‘policy barnacles’ troubling the government, a reminder to ministers that they were yet to end the long argument over the company tax cuts.

  One other feature stood out. The party research made no case for a big shift in government direction, least of all a leadership spill.

  Turnbull had reason to be more confident of his position than the public polling suggested. Hirst had privately relayed the Liberal Party’s monthly surveys of voters in 40 marginal electorates considered most likely to decide the election out of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The results in late June had been extraordinary: the government had a lead against Labor of 54 per cent to 46 per cent in this subset of seats. ‘The trend continues to move in the right direction — both on vote and positioning,’ said Hirst in a message. ‘The main take-out is that the budget messaging (our plan for a stronger economy) has worked and we should keep at it.’ Hirst cautioned that the result was unusually positive and the Coalition vote was soft compared to Labor. ‘So while all this positive movement to us is very welcome, we’ve not yet locked them in,’ he wrote. This surprising gain against Labor, so different in the marginal electorates compared to the public polls, eased one month later but still left the government ahead. The rolling track of 40 marginal seats at the end of July showed the government led by 52 per cent to 48 per cent in two-party terms.16

  Little of this polling was known to a group of critics who felt increasingly certain that Turnbull had to be deposed.

  Lachlan Murdoch gathered his most senior News Corp and Sky News staff at his home in the days after the Newspoll, with one inescapable subject. The demise of Turnbull was a matter of discussion for editors and commentators everywhere, but it was a more loaded subject at a company that offered a platform for the Prime Minister’s most trenchant media critics. The drinks at Le Manoir included Credlin and fellow Sky News hosts Paul Murray, Rowan Dean and Ross Cameron, as well as Ticky Fullerton from the Sky News
Business channel and 2GB radio host Ben Fordham, an occasional Sky guest. The managing director of the channel, Angelos Frangopoulos, was there alongside David Speers, Kieran Gilbert and Laura Jayes, the journalists who led Sky’s daytime news coverage, and political editor Sharri Markson of the Daily Telegraph. The group was small enough for everyone to join the conversation.

  Murdoch asked a key question about the timing for a move against Turnbull. One person at the drinks said the question was: ‘When’s the latest Turnbull can get rolled?’ To some it seemed a logical question about the timetable for a revolt before the election due the following May, but it also had the potential to send a signal. Speers responded with a careful analysis of the pressure points on Turnbull and the likelihood of heightened speculation at the end of the year, the usual ‘killing season’ for prime ministers, while Jayes said she could not see it happening while senior Liberals were telling Dutton not to proceed. Murdoch hosted separate drinks on another night the same week for the News Corp newspaper editors.

  It took only a few days for word of this exchange to reach the press secretaries in Turnbull’s office, where the remarks sounded like Lachlan had canvassed the Prime Minister’s removal and suggested it was only a matter of time. Cray sent a message to a News Corp executive to let him know Lachlan’s words were being heard beyond Bellevue Hill. Cray relayed what the office had been told, not least that Lachlan had made it clear to editors that he would like Turnbull to be removed, that journalists complained of their reporting being ‘hijacked’ and that they were being encouraged to portray Turnbull as a ‘dead man walking’.