by David Crowe
‘Scott Morrison is now running around trying to put a ticket between himself and Peter Dutton together to try to challenge Malcolm Turnbull,’ Hadley said, reading out the text message.5 ‘He’s told those he’s lobbying he won’t serve as my — as the deputy to Peter Dutton. He won’t serve as his deputy. He wants to be the leader.’ The reference to ‘my’ deputy fuelled suspicions the radio host was passing on Dutton’s remarks to embarrass Morrison or force him to declare his hand. Hadley denied the theory and said he had stumbled over his words. ‘For the record, the contact I had within the Liberal Party was not Peter Dutton. Seems to be a storm in a teacup,’ he said.6 It was another moment of suspicion over who was being played and the way the media was being used. What mattered more than the source of the text was the way Dutton and Morrison were now circling each other as rivals, even if one of them was yet to declare his intentions.
Morrison insisted in public that Turnbull had his total support. ‘I want to put to rest any suggestion that I’ve made any approach, any approach has been made,’ he said when a television crew found him walking through Parliament House. ‘It’s all the usual nonsense. The Prime Minister knows exactly where I stand.’
In truth, everyone stood on a heaving deck.
Liberals were lurching from one theory to another in constant speculation over an imminent move from Dutton. The anxiety from the first spill led to a constant state of alarm over another confrontation, encouraged by conflicting media reports that were presented as breaking news in one moment and baseless rumour in the next. Stress and sleep deprivation did not help: many had talked late into the night and started early the next day; Dutton admitted he had slept for less than two hours.7 One cabinet minister believed the party had reached a point of no return: ‘It was basically open warfare.’ With Dutton out of cabinet and many Queensland MPs at his side, some ministers calculated that it was almost impossible to put the government back together. Liberals who had run for Parliament in front of posters that promised stable government now saw chaos taking hold.
One man had more power than most to calm the crowd. Cormann spoke to ministers and backbenchers all morning about the size of the movement for change and the prospects for asserting order when so many had given up on Turnbull. There was no science to this assessment because nobody could be certain of the numbers, but Cormann told people it was becoming more difficult to hold the centre and that two of his Western Australian colleagues, Slade Brockman and Ian Goodenough, seemed to be shifting to Dutton. Cormann began to suggest Turnbull would have to step aside.
Cormann was a rare figure in the government, a force for stability in a party room with too many members who could lose their heads when put to the test. His presence as Finance Minister, as leader of the government in the Senate, as one of eight members of the leadership group, as a leader for the conservative side of the party, all gave the government the ballast it needed to ride out a storm. This was true whether the storm was a clash in the Senate or an attack from Abbott on the government’s direction. This sheer solidity led Turnbull to rely on Cormann more than most members of the cabinet, a point he made when they dined together sometimes at The Lodge. This trust was elemental to the government.
Sally Cray and David Bold implored Cormann to steady the ship. As two advisers who had worked for Turnbull for years, in government or not, in leadership or not, they were loyal to the man at every stage. This made them the trusted go-betweens in this emergency when Turnbull needed Cormann more than ever. Bold believed Liberal MPs would see off the leadership threat if the Finance Minister could calm their nerves, even if it meant Cormann would have to support Turnbull over his close conservative friend, Dutton. Other cabinet ministers could not wield this influence. Only Mathias really counts. Bold worried about one thing more than most. Would Cormann decide it was just too hard to go on when the party room was split, when Abbott would not stop and the conservative media commentators would keep baying for blood? In every other spill in recent times, not least when Abbott was removed, MPs had turned to someone who was more popular in the polls and therefore more electable. That was not the case here. Logic said the argument for change was weaker than in the past.
The signs that Morrison was on the move added urgency to these calculations. Cray sent a message to Cormann with a stronger argument against the idea that Turnbull should resign to allow an orderly transition. ‘You do know if MT resigns that ScoMo will win,’ she wrote at 10.56 a.m. The Prime Minister’s allies were checking on numbers and were confident he had enough support in the party room to see off a challenge. Craig Laundy, who had taken up residence in Turnbull’s office to do the numbers, was sure of this majority support. Cray and Bold went to Cormann’s office to urge him to be more sceptical of Dutton’s numbers.
Cormann offered a simple message as they stood in the office. I can’t hold back the tide. Cormann thought Turnbull was finished because the party was riven, because Dutton would not stop and because MPs were shifting from the old leader to a new one. Brockman and Goodenough, two of those who were drifting away from Turnbull, were close allies of Cormann and Cash and the conservatives in Western Australia. They were considered wholly owned subsidiaries of Cormann and Cash. If Cormann could not hold those two votes, who could he hold? Bold looked at the clock on the wall. It was 11.11 a.m. He had to return to Turnbull’s office with this hopeless assessment and tell his boss to prepare for Cormann to visit.
The mere act of visiting the Prime Minister’s Office was now enough to start a rumour. Journalists stood outside the ministerial wing to watch the corridor between Turnbull’s suite and the cabinet room, the usual entrance to his office. They could also see the corridor running perpendicular to this and leading to Cormann’s office on the Senate side of the ministerial wing. Guards monitored the media to ensure they did not break the arcane rules of the Parliament by loitering in the corridors, but they could not stop journalists spending hours of the day watching the traffic until they were relieved by other journalists assigned to do the same. Cormann’s walk to Turnbull at 11.45 a.m. was seen immediately and posted on social media. What it meant could only be guessed. Only in retrospect did its meaning become clear. This was the conversation that doomed Turnbull.
Cormann told Turnbull that he no longer had a majority of the party room and should consider resigning to make the transition to Dutton as smooth as possible. He said four cabinet ministers who backed Turnbull the previous day had come to him on Wednesday morning to tell him they no longer backed the Prime Minister. Cormann was still frustrated at the way Turnbull had launched the spill on Tuesday and saw the surprise as disrespectful to the party room and, in a way, a vote of no confidence in himself as a member of the leadership group. He believed the 35 votes meant Turnbull could not go on as leader. Backbenchers were telling him they had switched to Dutton over the past 24 hours. ‘People formed a judgement, I believe, that, based on what had happened, that Malcolm would not be able to sufficiently unite the team moving forward,’ Cormann said later.8
Cormann also wanted to be transparent with Turnbull about his own position. He would vote for Dutton in a party room ballot. He offered his resignation.
Turnbull refused to accept this judgement or resignation and told Cormann to defend the government rather than blow it up. This is crazy. Your job is to keep the government together. He was not about to resign when he had won the ballot in the party room just one day earlier. The parliamentary party had confirmed his leadership. On any assessment, the success of the Turnbull government was vital to Cormann and others, so it made no sense to allow this collapse. Turnbull had placed enormous trust in Cormann — and told him so. They had talked about life after politics and going into business one day. Cormann had told senior Liberals in Western Australia months earlier that he would not change leader. And here he was doing exactly that.
‘Mathias, they are terrorists,’ Turnbull said. ‘We can’t give in to terrorists.’
The meeting ended with the tw
o men in direct conflict, their relationship on a precipice with no agreement on the way out of a disaster. Laundy made another attempt to change Cormann’s mind soon afterwards, with a text at 12.20 p.m. telling him the numbers were with Turnbull and he could go through the list of names to prove the point. Laundy had another task: he visited cabinet ministers to check the claim they were giving up on Turnbull. The answer from Dan Tehan was that he would not vote against the Prime Minister.
There was a fine point of difference in some of these positions. A cabinet minister might say privately that Turnbull’s leadership was in question and needed to be resolved, while also saying he or she would not vote against the leader. Not for the first time, some politicians wanted to walk both sides of the street. Some of them avoided too many public appearances and made sure they made no public commitments. They wanted Cormann to manage the situation for them.
That Wednesday in Parliament became a pantomime for the Australian public with a performance that would fool only the youngest child. The government acted as if the business of the day continued when everyone could hear the brawl backstage. Within an hour of their talk about leadership change, Turnbull and Cormann joined Morrison at a press conference in the Prime Minister’s courtyard to claim success for their economic plan. They did so while finally succumbing to the reality of a hostile Senate, which had vetoed the second phase of the company tax cuts at 10.40 a.m. that day. The policy, which had caused Turnbull so much political pain and which he had wanted to cancel in June until Cormann convinced him otherwise, was now dead. In its place was a stop-gap policy to announce a different tax cut at some point in an uncertain future. The failure was a blow to government policy but a small affair next to the threat to the government itself.
Turnbull argued in public what he said in private, that the ‘iron laws of arithmetic’ had just confirmed his leadership, but the attention in the press conference was on those who were meant to support him.
‘Treasurer, can you rule out having any leadership ambitions?’ a journalist asked.
‘Me?’ Morrison feigned surprise. ‘This is my leader and I’m ambitious for him!’ He put his arm around the Prime Minister.
‘Good on you, thanks ScoMo,’ Turnbull said with a smile.
It was almost as if the threat had eased, until Cormann was asked if he could rule out shifting his support to Dutton.
‘You’re asking me a hypothetical. I support Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister,’ he said.
‘It’s not a hypothetical,’ the journalist said. ‘There was a leadership ballot yesterday. Are you going to rule out shifting your support?’
‘I was very grateful when Malcolm invited me to serve in his cabinet in September 2015,’ Cormann replied. ‘I have served Malcolm loyally ever since. I will continue to serve him loyally into the future.’
Turnbull ended the press conference without the slightest twitch to show what he thought of that loyalty.
Only one event could interrupt the leadership talks consuming the Liberals now that Dutton was on the march. Question Time offered a respite for some backbenchers because it gave them an hour or more to avoid the escalating pressure from Dutton’s allies to support a new challenge. It also gave Labor an opportunity to highlight the worthless assurances being offered by the ministers who had voted against Turnbull but negotiated with him later to keep their jobs. Labor reminded ministers of the principle of cabinet solidarity and then asked: ‘Does the minister retain enough confidence in the Prime Minister, his government and its policies to remain minister?’ Five ministers had to ease their way carefully around the principle in the Westminster system that ministers should not mislead Parliament.
‘Yes, I do,’ said Greg Hunt. ‘I do support the Prime Minister.’ Michael Keenan acted as if his reply should be obvious: ‘The answer, of course, is yes.’ Angus Taylor agreed. ‘The answer is yes, I do,’ he said. Alan Tudge went further. ‘I have given the Prime Minister my assurance that he has my support as leader. I’ve also given him my assurance that he has my support for keeping our borders secure,’ he said. The final target, Steve Ciobo, chose this moment to complain that he was not asked enough questions in Parliament, but he was brought to order. ‘Let me make it very clear: yes, of course there’s confidence,’ he eventually said. ‘How much clearer can I make it?’ Some of his colleagues thought a vote in a ballot would be a start.
All five ministers were misleading Parliament with the tenor of their statements if not the facts. In the usual casuistry of political argument, ministers might justify their remarks by suggesting they could support Turnbull at that instant and support Dutton within a day or two. The insincerity was overwhelming even if the lies were contested.
The black humour of the Question Time parade was a brief entertainment in a hollow spill that was bringing the party of government to a standstill without any purpose that mattered to the Australian public. Dutton promised a tax cut on electricity bills but at no point set out a higher cause, let alone a difference in philosophy or principle with Turnbull, to justify the extreme step of replacing a Prime Minister. The challenger offered no shift in policy on tax, national security, health, education or any other area that typically decided elections. He had signalled a change on immigration but the lower intake in permanent migration was already underway. He exploited the division on climate change without advocating a different policy inside or outside cabinet. Rather than identifying an intolerable flaw in the man he sought to replace, he praised him. If Dutton was promising a new direction for his party and his country, his map was invisible to Australian voters. As for political vision, his manifesto required only five words. I can beat Bill Shorten.
One question dogged the Dutton campaign even as its leader felt closer to victory. Was he eligible to sit in Parliament? The Ten Network’s report on Dutton’s financial affairs on Monday night exposed him to claims he should be referred to the High Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns, to decide whether he was eligible to sit in Parliament under Section 44(v) of the Constitution.
Turnbull was less than emphatic in his support for Dutton in Question Time when Labor asked about this legal doubt. The Shadow Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, asked when Turnbull had sought legal advice from the Solicitor-General on whether Dutton was eligible to sit in Parliament. Turnbull took that question on notice but had an answer within 15 minutes: ‘Advice has not been sought from the Solicitor-General.’ It was true at that moment but not for much longer.
Once Question Time was over, Turnbull dispatched an adviser to speak to the Attorney-General, Christian Porter, to consider what could be done to resolve the doubt over Dutton. The logical course of action was to seek legal advice from the Solicitor-General, but it would be best if this request did not come from Turnbull because of the perception of a conflict of interest. The Prime Minister should not be demanding the legal inquiry into his challenger. The Prime Minister’s Office had sought advice from the Australian Government Solicitor but wanted Porter to ask the Solicitor-General, Stephen Donaghue, for a separate opinion.
Porter, a man who had been the Western Australian Attorney-General and later Treasurer before moving to federal politics, sat for some time in his office to think this through. He had voted for Turnbull on Tuesday but could see there was considerable support for Dutton, a minister he worked with happily. He realised he would have to step back from any involvement in the leadership dispute to focus on a constitutional question that put him between the two rivals. Porter could see the grounds for referring Dutton to the High Court. Soon after four o’clock, he visited Dutton in his office to tell him so, and to ask for his cooperation in providing documents about his financial affairs. He said he could not get involved in the leadership contest.
Next, Porter went to see Turnbull in his office to set out the way he would handle both leader and challenger. Handling this brief like one lawyer with another, he did not shield Turnbull from one uncomfortable opinion: he thought Turnbull would lose the l
eadership. He added, however, that he would not vote against the Prime Minister or sign a petition to force a meeting. Porter told Turnbull it would be prudent and best if the Attorney-General acted alone in dealing with the Solicitor-General to request and manage the legal advice on Dutton, given it was meant to be his process. He did not want any outside interference.
What Porter did not say was that he had heard talk of Turnbull calling the Solicitor-General during the request for advice on Joyce and his citizenship questions the previous year. He feared the same strong opinion and action from Turnbull now, given the stakes were so high.
The first sign of friction came when Turnbull asked Porter to show him the instructions he would give Donaghue, the essential step in determining the scope of the advice being sought. Porter refused and Turnbull was displeased. Again, Porter said he had to ensure a fair process and this meant he alone would deal with the Solicitor-General. He took Turnbull’s silence as consent. Two hours later, Porter issued a press release at 7.09 p.m. to announce he had taken the matter to the Solicitor-General.
A brief moment arrived when Turnbull and Shorten had a common interest in damaging Dutton. After seeing Porter’s statement, Labor issued an 8.05 p.m. press release with advice from two barristers, Bret Walker SC and James Mack, who thought it was ‘clearly arguable’ Dutton had a pecuniary interest that breached the Constitution. The opinion was dated 18 April 2018, a sign of Labor’s ability to plan long in advance for its most potent political attacks. Shorten increased pressure on Dutton at the moment it would do the most damage to his claim on the leadership.