Venom

by David Crowe

  The Turnbull office, a place with no shortage of former journalists who understood the workings of the media, expected News Corp editors and the evening Sky hosts to inflame the leadership story until there was panic in the party room. The critics would not rest until someone dragged Turnbull to the bonfire.

  New squalls and whirlwinds could come at any time in a government easily exposed to division. One arrived on Wednesday when the Senate voted on a bill proposed by the Liberal Democratic Party’s David Leyonhjelm to remove a federal ban on the power of the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory to legalise euthanasia. Turnbull had taken the matter to cabinet, as he had promised Leyonhjelm, but the outcome depended on a conscience vote in the upper house. While opinion polls showed majority public support for voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill, the Coalition’s conservatives were anxious to stop the bill. The risk of recriminations, and the prospect of conservatives blaming Turnbull if they did not get their way, meant that unity took priority. Turnbull’s chief adviser on Senate negotiations, David Bold, worked closely with Cormann to prevent any discord. The bill was defeated by 36 to 34 votes. It was a conscience vote, but carefully managed.

  ‘I love this job, I love the fact that we are such a good team,’ Cormann said to Bold in a message after the vote. It seemed proof Turnbull could rely on Cormann to keep the party room together, whatever the doubts over the government’s fortunes.

  Yet the pressure for a spill never stopped. The Liberals had fractured into groups that could no longer agree on what they stood for or who should lead them. No philosophy was strong enough to unite them if Dutton and his followers were intent on change. Assistant ministers like Zed Seselja and Michael Sukkar could aspire to promotion under a new regime, while ministers like Angus Taylor and Alan Tudge were hungry to be in cabinet. Turmoil brought reward, an incentive no agitator could admit but no observer could ignore. And turmoil was incredibly easy to arrange. A quiet word to a journalist, reported with anonymity and impunity, was enough to create headlines about another policy division or leadership test. The accelerated news cycle, marked by the rising influence of social media, could maximise the damage from the slightest leak. Turnbull and his supporters could not quell a leadership rumour once the agitators for change were on the move and the jealousies of the party room were aroused. Starting a panic was a pushover. Keeping the peace was a constant trial.

  Dutton did another interview with Hadley in which he was told that supporting Turnbull was a sign of weakness.

  ‘Now, there comes a time in history where you’ve got to have the bottle and, you know, another part of your anatomy, to stand up for yourself mate,’ said Hadley on Thursday.17 ‘And this might be the time. I don’t know whether you wish to take it or not.’

  ‘Well Ray, I stand up for myself pretty regularly, mate, and I’m happy to continue to do that,’ Dutton said. ‘I want energy prices to be reduced. I’ve said that before. I’m a member of the cabinet and I was loyal to Tony Abbott. I’m loyal to the Prime Minister.’

  ‘Are you blindly loyal to him?’

  ‘No, I’m not blindly loyal.’

  It was a reply guaranteed to fuel more leadership talk. Hadley pressed Dutton to stop the National Energy Guarantee, but Dutton said he would deliver his advice in private to his cabinet colleagues.

  ‘Now, if my position changes — that is, it gets to a point where I can’t accept what the government’s proposing or I don’t agree — then the Westminster system is very clear: you resign your commission, you don’t serve in that cabinet and you make that very clear in a respectful way,’ Dutton said.

  He was setting the ground rules for his resignation. What would follow if not a challenge? Hadley encouraged the ambition by suggesting Turnbull was finished.

  ‘You’ve lost the battle mate. If we’re to have any hope against the Labor Party in the forthcoming federal election, we need to change the order,’ Hadley said.

  ‘Ray,’ Dutton began, before Hadley stopped him. The strong man of the government had to fall silent when the radio host was speaking.

  ‘And if someone were to do that, maybe, just maybe Peter, you might win that election. Just maybe.’

  ‘Well Ray, I can promise you mate, I have no intention and I never have and I never will of giving up. Now, I’m going to do the best I can to turn these polls around. I do the best that I can in my portfolio.’

  He did not reject Hadley’s idea. You might win that election. Dutton left his options open.

  9

  KNIVES OUT

  FRIDAY 17 TO MONDAY 20 AUGUST

  IN POLITICS, AS IN horror movies, a silence can be more menacing than a scream. The government emerged from four thundering days in Parliament to an awful stillness on Friday, 17 August, when all sides waited for one man’s words to end a mystery over their fate. The words never came. Dutton kept his colleagues in suspense at a point when the lights dimmed, the sound died away and Liberal MPs listened for the creak of a door on a rusty hinge. They knew they had a potential challenger in their midst. They could not be certain if, or when, he might strike.

  The spectre was impossible to ignore after the Daily Telegraph reported on Friday morning that MPs were urging Dutton to challenge Turnbull and remake the government with an energy policy that dropped the cut in carbon emissions and an immigration policy that scaled back the migrant intake. Abbott’s policy blueprint was now being named as the reason to make Dutton the Prime Minister. The report, by Sharri Markson, provoked instant conjecture about whether Dutton was encouraging the perception he was being drafted to the job. ‘There are only two good outcomes here — either the energy policy is dead and we can go to the election fighting Labor on it, or Malcolm goes,’ said an anonymous MP quoted in the story.1 The question to be asked that day was clear: if these unnamed Liberals wanted Dutton to lead, would he do so?

  Turnbull knew the story was coming. Cray had messaged Dutton the previous night and he had told her he had not spoken to Markson, but this did not make it any easier to manage. There was no doubt some MPs had given up on Turnbull and were willing to vote for a new leader, although the size of the group was uncertain. The question was whether a candidate was available. Cormann stepped in on Friday to act as an intermediary in an attempt to bridge the gulf between leader and rival. The Finance Minister denied Dutton was sending a ‘shot across the bow’ to the Prime Minister or that MPs were urging him to challenge.

  ‘I am not aware of any such talk. Nobody has raised that with me,’ Cormann told Sky News. The closeness between Cormann and Dutton added weight to his words; many knew the two men met at dawn when Parliament was sitting to walk up Red Hill, a climb of about 120 metres from the street below. It was natural to expect the two friends to talk of their careers. Would Dutton consider a challenge? ‘We are both very committed to the success of the Turnbull government and to winning the next election,’ Cormann replied, with the discipline that made him such a reliable minister. ‘I did have four walks with Peter this week at 5.30 in the morning up Red Hill. It was very hard after a six-week break to get up that hill because the fitness levels had dropped off a bit. We talk about a lot, but do not think that we just talk politics for an hour every day as we walk up that hill.’

  There was no guarantee in those words. Turnbull sent a message to Dutton to confront the obvious: at some point he would be asked whether he had Dutton’s support. Dutton responded with messages that played down the problem and suggested the report in the Daily Telegraph was a beat-up, creating an impression in Turnbull’s mind that the media speculation was out of control. Turnbull had a simple request. He wanted to say the two had spoken and he had Dutton’s support on energy and leadership.

  ‘Yes mate, those words are fine,’ Dutton replied by text at about 11.30 a.m. There was an assurance of loyalty, but it had only come after a delay that encouraged the doubts. To his colleagues, Dutton appeared to enjoy being the subject of intense speculation about his leadership potential w
ithout his usual rivals, Bishop and Morrison, being named as alternatives. Yet the idea being pursued in the media, that Dutton was thinking of resigning from the ministry because of disagreements over energy policy, was at odds with the reality in cabinet, where the Home Affairs Minister had made no such protest against the policy.

  Dutton later said he remained silent to prevent greater media coverage. ‘My view was that talking about it just kicked the story along, so there was no sense in fuelling it further,’ he recalled.2 Yet his decision not to repudiate the story in public was a message in itself.

  The uncertainty meant the government could not end the discord over its leadership and beliefs, no matter how many times ministers declared in public that Dutton was loyal. The grounds for a backbench rebellion grew when Labor revealed it had seen a copy of the draft legislation for the emission reductions before the document had gone to the Coalition party room. Christopher Pyne dismissed the ‘hyperventilating’ when asked on the Nine Network but was mocked by Labor infrastructure spokesman Anthony Albanese.

  ‘They don’t know what they are doing,’ said Albanese. ‘Peter Dutton went on radio yesterday and outlined the path that he is considering: resigning from cabinet to go to the backbench to challenge Malcolm Turnbull. That now has been laid bare for all to see. This is a government in absolute chaos and, of course, we know that Peter Dutton is just a glove puppet for Tony Abbott, who is back there on the backbench causing all of this chaos.’ The government plan for tougher energy price regulation, which promised to wield a ‘big stick’ against electricity retailers, drew an equal share of Albanese’s derision. ‘The problem with the big stick is that the Coalition party room have got it and they are belting themselves in the head.’

  Pyne did not dispute Abbott’s role in destabilising the government.

  ‘There’s a few people I think who are trying to put the band back together from the late 2000s,’ Pyne said. He was too discreet to name them. ‘I think we know who they are.’

  Alan Jones denounced the idea that a cabinet minister could take the leadership when Abbott was available. ‘Don’t tell me they are going to replace Turnbull with someone who for the last three years has been supporting every stupid policy move he has made,’ he tweeted. ‘Am I the only person who thinks that might create a credibility problem?’ But the moment for Abbott had passed. As the day went on, and Dutton refused to make any public comment of support for Turnbull, the barracking for the Home Affairs Minister grew louder. Hadley called in to 2GB shortly after 1 p.m. to say the challenge was on.

  ‘It’s happening for sure, and certain,’ Hadley told listeners. ‘One hundred per cent. I’ve been working the phones all morning. I can confirm that those ten backbenchers and a couple of people on the frontbench have grown considerably in the last 24 to 48 hours. I’m convinced, having spoken to people this morning since I’ve come off air, that it’s on, there will be a move.’ He suggested Dutton would not launch the challenge within days but would wait for September, when Parliament would return after a two-week break and MPs would consider the next Newspoll survey, expected on 27 August. But Hadley was blurring the numbers. The backbenchers unhappy with the National Energy Guarantee included four or five Nationals who had no say on the leadership of the Liberal Party: Barnaby Joyce, George Christensen, Andrew Gee, Barry O’Sullivan and Keith Pitt. While Gee and Pitt were driven by frustration at the policy, others had old scores to settle.

  Six months after Joyce was blamed for causing a ‘world of woe’ that hurt the government, he was in a position to inflict pain on the man he believed had driven him from office as Deputy Prime Minister, a belief founded on self-deception about his own mistakes. Joyce could torment Turnbull even if he could not vote to replace him.

  The Nationals assembled at the Hyatt Hotel in Canberra that Friday afternoon for their annual federal conference to find that questions of leadership overshadowed the formal business of the forum, where party presidents mixed with division members and parliamentarians. The grumbles over the Nationals leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, were nothing compared to the grievances over the way Turnbull was leading the government. Ministers witnessed Gary Spence, the powerful president of the Liberal National Party in Queensland, approaching MPs to urge them to help dump Turnbull. This was a meeting of the Nationals, with few Liberals in attendance, yet Spence encouraged Nationals MPs to do what they could to change the leader.

  Pitt knew that some of his Nationals colleagues were maximising the damage to Turnbull. An electrical engineer and a Bundaberg cane farmer before entering Parliament in 2013, he did not believe the National Energy Guarantee would achieve its promise of reducing prices and told Turnbull on Monday he would cross the floor on the federal bill, a decision that would force him to relinquish his position as an assistant minister. Pitt confided in his colleagues but did not tell the press and did not want his position to be made public, but he read it online two days later. ‘I didn’t want to be a cause of the downfall of the Prime Minister,’ he said later. He believed others used his words for their own ends.

  Spence was a domineering figure in the state division and was known to call MPs into his Brisbane headquarters to assert party policy and dictate compliance, as he had done to Warren Entsch when the Queenslander was seeking a free vote in Parliament on same sex marriage the previous year. Conservative by nature, Spence berated state MPs who crossed the floor to decriminalise abortion. He stood by rather than intervene when one of the Liberal women in federal Parliament, Jane Prentice, the member for Ryan, lost her preselection despite her status as an assistant minister. The fact that Prentice supported Turnbull did not help her — and the fact that Entsch spoke up for her only earned him another reprimand from the president.

  The antagonism between Spence and Turnbull could be traced back to the 2016 election and the demand from the Queensland party for a bigger presence in the government and more positions in federal cabinet. Spence joined Joyce and other Nationals to urge Turnbull to promote more Queenslanders, only to hear the Prime Minister tell him to leave it to the elected party leaders. We’ll work this out as leaders. We’ll decide who goes into the ministry. It was a message to Spence to butt out. Now the Liberal National Party president oversaw a weakened division that had lost two state elections against Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and had been outplayed in the Longman campaign, giving him good reason to be anxious about the federal election to come. Spence held Turnbull responsible for the government’s troubles. He was ready to champion Dutton instead.

  Turnbull stayed in Canberra to find a way past the blockade of his energy policy by some of his own colleagues. He knew there was no way to mollify Abbott but thought there was a chance of a compromise with those who seemed motivated by frustration over the climate change target more than the leadership. One by one, Turnbull spoke to Liberals including Andrews, Hastie, Kelly and Pasin to go over the National Energy Guarantee and the 26 per cent cut to emissions. One question kept recurring: why legislate the reduction? The request from critics of the emissions target was that it should not be written into the law. The original plan, issued the previous October, had assumed the target without any mention that it would have to be made law before the election, but this had changed when Canberra needed support from the states and territories. Cabinet reluctantly chose to legislate the reduction, but Dutton and others expressed their concerns about this hurdle. ‘We were told it was the price we had to pay to get the states on board,’ said one cabinet minister.

  Frydenberg watched the ground shifting on this idea in a matter of weeks. He had insisted at the end of July that the targets should be cemented in law, only to see D’Ambrosio and her Victorian Labor colleagues raise the idea of using regulation instead so it could be easier for a future government to deepen the cuts to emissions. In an unlikely concordance, conservatives within the Liberal Party were now objecting to the legislation as well. Hastie said he did not want legislation.

  Turnbull be
gan working on an alternative approach to avoid a flashpoint in Parliament. There would be no bill, no chance for Abbott to cross the floor, no test in the House of Representatives on the government’s control of the chamber. The target would underpin the National Energy Guarantee without being legislated. Turnbull chose to retreat to keep the party room together and his authority alive. Word leaked on Friday afternoon and the backdown was revealed in online reports before 6 p.m.3 The rebels won the concession they sought, but those loyal to the original plan were taken by surprise.

  Trent Zimmerman, who had defended Turnbull and Frydenberg throughout the dispute with the conservatives, was stunned to read the news on his phone as he headed to a community theatre on Sydney’s north shore. Tim Wilson, another supporter of the energy policy, was furious. ‘It was like a nuclear warhead had gone off inside my brain, I was so angry,’ he said later.4 Wilson believed the Parliament had to have the final say over the target and had put this view directly to Turnbull in a message the previous day, describing any plan to use regulation instead as a ‘red line’ for him. Now he read an online news report saying this would be the new policy.

  Turnbull and Lucy joined the Nationals for a reception on Friday night at the party’s federal council at the Hyatt Hotel. The news of the retreat on the emissions bill was still being absorbed as the Prime Minister spoke to the crowd about the government’s ability to win the next election, but some of the Nationals were hardly supportive. When Joyce spoke to the ABC’s Radio National that evening and interviewer Patricia Karvelas asked if he believed Turnbull should consider his position as leader, Joyce replied only that Turnbull should wait a while. Pressed on when that should be, Joyce said: ‘Before the election.’ With the leadership threat and the energy backflip certain to dominate the Saturday papers, Andrews dismissed the new concession even though he had argued in the party room against the use of legislation. Abbott said the sudden change was no way to run a government. ‘It does look like policy on the run,’ he told The Weekend Australian.