Venom

by David Crowe

  It was an extraordinary moment. Burke told the five ministers who had sworn their support for Turnbull the previous day that they should face Question Time to answer whether they had misled Parliament.

  Pyne had canvassed the option of an adjournment the previous night but decided to put the motion only after speaking to Dutton. It was an extreme measure to cope with an emergency. Turnbull said the adjournment had taken place at the challenger’s request, but Dutton was angry at being blamed for the move. He wanted a shorter break to hold a party room meeting on Thursday morning so that Question Time could be held as usual at two o’clock that afternoon. ‘I thought it was a ridiculous situation where the new leader wouldn’t front Question Time,’ Dutton said later.7 ‘That’s what I put. Pyne said the decision had already been taken, I presume with Malcolm earlier that day or the day before.’

  Five years after losing power, Labor enjoyed the reward for its policy decisions and aggressive tactics in opposition. It had applied pressure until the government snapped. The Labor deputy leader, Tanya Plibersek, said the crisis was a generational break in the Liberal Party because the conservatives would never let the moderates govern and the moderates would never let the conservatives govern. Shorten argued in the final minutes of proceedings that the Liberals were irreparably split. ‘I said on Tuesday that this is a government which had lost the will to live,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think even on Tuesday we could have seen the cannibalistic behaviour of a government that is eating itself alive.’

  Pyne had no time for a reply. He put the motion and saw it pass by 70 to 68 votes. The House adjourned and the Liberals scattered.

  Christian Porter tried to shut out the confusion of Parliament House as he worked in his office to prepare for a legal confrontation. The Attorney-General knew the weight Turnbull was placing on the advice to be drafted on Dutton’s eligibility. The Solicitor-General, Stephen Donaghue, had called Porter at 6.30 a.m. to say he had received multiple calls from Turnbull already that morning, although he had not responded to any of the calls. Porter saw this as a breach of his understanding with Turnbull from the previous day, which was meant to keep the Prime Minister out of the process. Porter drafted a letter to the Solicitor-General stipulating that he was to prepare his advice exclusively for the Attorney-General, something he felt he had a right to do under the law.

  Next, he met lawyers from the Australian Government Solicitor and the Attorney-General’s Department to discuss the factors the Governor-General should take into account in appointing the Prime Minister. This was separate advice from the request to the Solicitor-General about Dutton. Porter had to be ready for a clash over Sir Peter’s reserve powers. Porter walked to the Prime Minister’s suite at noon to discuss Turnbull’s view of this vital legal question. He learnt that Turnbull had spoken to the Governor-General and heard that Turnbull believed Sir Peter could not appoint Dutton as Prime Minister because of the concerns over his eligibility.

  ‘Are you saying you have provided this advice to the Governor-General or the Governor-General is already of that view?’ Porter asked. ‘Because in my view that is wrong in law and unconstitutional in fact.’

  Turnbull replied that he understood how the Governor-General thought on the question and he was sure he knew the correct view. It seemed a Delphic reply. Then Turnbull came to the point: he wanted Porter to agree it would be impossible for the Governor-General to appoint Dutton as Prime Minister with the Section 44(v) doubts hanging over him as a member of Parliament. This was an argument Porter could not endorse and a statement he would not issue, but he knew Turnbull intended to hold a press conference within the hour and that the question might come up.

  ‘If you say this at your press conference I will rebut it,’ Porter said.

  It was a powerful gambit. Turnbull risked an open breach on the law with the government’s first law officer. The question over Dutton’s eligibility was real and significant but had to be treated with caution when any discussion of the Governor-General could ignite an argument Turnbull might lose. When the time came for the press conference, Turnbull made no mention of the Governor-General. He underlined the need for anyone who aspired to be Prime Minister to be eligible to remain in Parliament under Section 44 of the constitution and left it at that.

  Turnbull was heated with Porter. He told the Attorney-General that he and Cormann, his fellow Western Australian, had been weak to allow the crisis to build to a point where it threw the government into disarray. Porter suggested that he could resign if the Prime Minister felt this way, but Turnbull turned down the offer. There was no common ground here. Porter told Turnbull he would not be ‘lectured to’ and departed.

  Porter spent the afternoon and evening preparing a brief to answer questions on Dutton’s eligibility if and when the party room met. He bore no ill-will towards Turnbull over their legal jousting, but he had to prepare for the prospect that the SolicitorGeneral’s advice would not be beyond doubt, just as his advice on other MPs and their Section 44 troubles had not been conclusive. Porter went to Cormann and told him of his conversation with Turnbull, then spoke to Dutton to explain the position he would take on the ballot. He had offered his resignation, he said, but believed the country needed an Attorney-General who would stay out of the leadership contest. He would not sign the petition.

  Turnbull set the rules for the contest at a press conference in the Prime Minister’s courtyard. He rebuffed questions about whether he was feeling betrayed or hurt — ‘I’ll leave the emotions, I’m going to be very hard-headed about this’ — and offered instead his analysis of the best way to conduct a ballot. The rules were his to decide and he issued them with a ruthless objective. First, there had to be 43 signatures on the request for a meeting to prove it had majority support. Second, the party room could only decide the leadership after seeing the legal advice from the Solicitor-General on Dutton’s eligibility, a document not expected until early the next day. Third, the meeting would begin with a motion to declare the leadership vacant. If this was carried, Turnbull would accept defeat and leave it to others to contest the leadership.

  Watching this press conference, some of them hearing these decisions for the first time, Turnbull’s supporters saw how the rules would slow the stampede. One of them felt Turnbull’s life as a merchant banker now shaped the way he set the terms of the ballot, as if he was negotiating the decision points in a corporate deal. What was the Dutton challenge if not a hostile takeover? Turnbull’s rules delayed the Dutton onslaught, gave rival candidates more time to ask for support and meant party room members could consider their decisions overnight. Turnbull also gave his colleagues another item to inform their decisions. When Phil Coorey, the political editor of the Australian Financial Review, asked if he would stay in Parliament until the election if he lost the leadership, Turnbull was direct. He would leave early and cause a by-election. ‘I’ve made it very clear that I believe that former prime ministers are best out of the Parliament,’ he said. ‘I don’t think there’s much evidence to suggest that that conclusion is not correct.’

  Turnbull spoke at times as if he would lose. ‘I think the public will be crying out for an election,’ he said, before adding that the spill motion might not be carried. He indicated support for Morrison but was not asked about other candidates. He chose this moment to define the revolt as political insanity, a lasting but contested judgement.

  ‘The reality is that a minority in the party room, supported by others outside the Parliament, have sought to bully, intimidate others into making this change of leadership that they’re seeking,’ he said. ‘It’s been described by many people, including those who feel they cannot resist it, as a form of madness.’

  ‘Who do you mean?’ asked Katharine Murphy, the political editor of Guardian Australia.

  ‘I think what we’re witnessing, what we have witnessed at the moment is a very deliberate effort to pull the Liberal Party further to the right,’ he said. ‘That’s been stated by a number of the peo
ple that have been involved in this. Look, I think I won’t get into the merits of that, but I just say that what began as a minority has, by a process of intimidation, you know, persuaded people that the only way to stop the insurgency is to give in to it. I do not believe in that. I have never done that. I have never given in to bullies. But you can imagine the pressure it’s put people under.’

  Bishop watched the press conference with Lucy in the Prime Minister’s office and contemplated this public statement about the rules for the ballot. She had known she could run for the leadership with Turnbull’s blessing but had not called her colleagues to ask for their votes. Lucy spoke as they sat together.

  ‘Julie, you mustn’t die wondering,’ she said. ‘Malcolm wants you to run. You’ve got to do it for the women of Australia.’

  Only at this point did Bishop begin her bid for the leadership. Turnbull’s press conference removed the last doubt over his intentions, leaving her with a short time to decide her next move. There was no time to talk to her family or her partner. When Turnbull stepped back into his office from the courtyard, she told him she would stand for leader. ‘Go for it,’ he said.

  Bishop returned to her office, gathered her closest advisers and made the first phone calls to her fellow MPs. Her message on that Thursday afternoon and evening was that she had the experience for the leadership as well as the best qualifications from her time as a cabinet minister in the governments of John Howard, Abbott and Turnbull. Only one other minister, Turnbull, had served in Howard’s cabinet. Bishop had been Liberal deputy for eleven years, Foreign Minister for five years and a frontbencher in government and opposition for sixteen years.

  Bishop’s private message in these phone calls matched the public polling on her standing with voters: unlike Morrison or Dutton, she could point to evidence that she was the preferred Prime Minister and could beat Shorten. She also had a message for women: she was the first woman to stand for the Liberal leadership and was giving the women of the party a chance to be heard. Women who received these calls remembered one of Bishop’s themes. She had said in her speech at the Enid Lyons commemoration on Tuesday night that women had to stand up. Now she was doing just that.

  Yet she was starting her race too late and the contrast with Morrison was telling. While Morrison’s helpers had been calling to advance his cause for more than 24 hours, Bishop had no inner circle of MPs to fan out through the Parliament to cajole their colleagues and plot for her elevation to the leadership. Perhaps she had been loyal to Turnbull too long while others manoeuvred to replace him. Now she chose to call every MP herself to ask for their vote, regardless of assumptions about their support or where they sat on the spectrum from moderate to conservative. One of her first calls was to Abbott. ‘I’m calling you out of courtesy,’ she began. Abbott almost yelled his reply. ‘Do me the courtesy?’ He was still bitter over the past.

  The boiling hatreds of the party room made a cool choice on the leadership difficult if not impossible. It had become customary among conservatives, especially those influenced by Abbott, to sneer at Bishop and dismiss her political skill and her record as the deputy leader. Her popularity with the public meant nothing compared to this dislike on one side of the party, which now weighed against her as a candidate. One of the biggest reasons for rejecting Bishop was that the conservatives bore so many grudges against her. Look what they had done to Turnbull. Why would they not do the same to Bishop?

  Fletcher met Zimmerman and Laundy in his office early in the afternoon to consider the likely result from a contest pitting Bishop, Dutton and Morrison against each other. Drawing on the numbers backing Turnbull and the way this group would split, they calculated that Morrison would be knocked out in the first round of voting and that this would lead to a second round in which Bishop lost to Dutton. As they talked, Laundy took a call from Bishop in which she asked for his vote. ‘I can’t,’ he said. Laundy told her he would vote for Morrison in the first round because he did not believe Bishop could beat Dutton in a final ballot. Soon afterwards the trio walked downstairs to Pyne’s office to put their conclusions to Pyne and Birmingham. The moderates assumed eight of those who would vote for Morrison in the first round would back Dutton in the second round, enough to make him Prime Minister. In this scenario, Bishop would lose to Dutton by 38 to 44 votes.8

  Cold logic decided how the moderates should vote. They would have to back Morrison in the first round and accept the elimination of Bishop to secure the defeat of Dutton. There was no justice in this choice when seen in light of the marriage equality debate the previous November, a cause dear to many of the moderates. Of all the contenders, Morrison displayed the weakest support for the change and had abstained from the final vote in the House of Representatives the previous December despite the results of the postal survey. Bishop and Dutton had voted for the bill to change the Marriage Act. Yet Dutton had no friends on the moderate side of the party after the disruption of the past week, while the suspicion that he was willing to appoint Abbott to a cabinet ministry also lost him votes.

  Bishop did not know of these calculations. Her only hint of the hurdle she faced with the moderates came when Pyne messaged her at 5 p.m. to make a suggestion.

  ‘If you run for deputy leader you will win,’ Pyne said. He calculated the Dutton camp could not install its preferred deputy, Hunt, if the party room had an alternative in Bishop, the incumbent. There was a brief prospect for a joint ticket, with Morrison as leader and Bishop as deputy, but it was too late. Bishop was already running for leader and had Turnbull’s blessing to do so. She was telling MPs that this was a crossroads: she would stand for the leadership and live with the result. She would not contest the deputy’s position if she lost.

  Morrison had a powerful advantage over Bishop now that all three contenders for the leadership were out in the open. While she made all her phone calls herself, he had a close group of aides who had worked with him for years. As the afternoon wore on, with no certainty about when the ballot might come, the Morrison camp met again. Alex Hawke held a council in his office with Stuart Robert, Ben Morton, Steve Irons, Bert van Manen, and Lucy Wicks. What made this meeting significant at the time, and deeply contested afterwards, was that Morrison asked an outsider, Craig Laundy, for help. Morrison needed Laundy’s assistance with Turnbull’s core supporters so they could convince them all to side with Morrison. Laundy arrived at Hawke’s office to find the meeting was underway.

  Name by name, Hawke and Robert read out a list of MPs and discussed how they had voted on Tuesday and how they might vote in the next ballot. Laundy found himself disagreeing over the names they claimed had voted for Dutton but would switch to Morrison. He spoke up to tell the group that one MP they mentioned was ‘100 per cent’ with Turnbull on Tuesday. Robert disagreed with a smile. ‘You’ve now worked out we haven’t always been on the same team,’ he said, in Laundy’s account of this exchange. Laundy fell silent. He pondered how this group could be so sure they had a cohort of MPs who would vote for Dutton in one ballot and move to Morrison a few days later.

  ‘I felt sick in the guts,’ Laundy said later. ‘It would be fair to say I was in shock.’ He walked back to the Prime Minister’s section of the ministerial wing, entered Cray’s office, shut the door behind him and spoke. ‘We’ve been played.’

  Laundy believed the Morrison lieutenants were not just speculating on names but knew with precision that a group of MPs had backed Dutton when they were loyal to Morrison.9 This explained why the support for Turnbull was softer on Tuesday than Laundy had expected and why Dutton had gained 35 votes when his opponents thought he could not secure more than 30. From this sprang the suspicion that Morrison had given his supporters approval, either tacit or explicit, to abandon the Prime Minister.

  ‘I wasn’t shocked,’ said Cray of this moment. ‘It was just confirmation of something I already sensed.’ Bold, who was also in the office when Laundy returned from the meeting, had the same response. ‘It wasn’t like it came as a co
mplete surprise,’ he said later.10 They had seen Morrison profess loyalty to the leader in 2015 when his supporters voted for the challenger. Why would he not do it again?

  Robert acknowledged that Laundy was surprised by what he had heard in Hawke’s office. ‘It was clear to him that we had not been sitting idle,’ he said later.11 Robert denied trying to coordinate votes on Tuesday to build up Dutton’s numbers and make a second challenge inevitable. ‘The idea that you could inflate the numbers on a snap call is nuts. You can’t do anything in 30 seconds. It doesn’t work that way.’ Even so, Morrison’s lieutenants had been asking Liberals for their support while Turnbull was still leader. Robert saw this as seeking the best outcome for the party – Morrison as Prime Minister – rather than ‘rushing to failure’ by allowing Dutton to steamroll his way to victory.

  The suspicions over these tactics never eased. To his critics, Morrison aimed to profit from a turmoil he had helped to create.

  Another contender had the deputy’s position in his sights. Josh Frydenberg had pondered the advice from Dan Tehan and could see the opportunity to run for deputy at a time when the party room was splintering. He walked through the ministerial wing to see Hunt so he could tell his friend they would be competing in the ballot. Then he returned to his office to work with Tehan and others, including Scott Ryan and Melissa Price, to call MPs and ask for their votes. Ryan, whose work with a spreadsheet had helped Turnbull become leader three years earlier, brought the same skills to Frydenberg, who called almost every MP as the day went on. Frydenberg had an advantage over Hunt among party room members outside Queensland who recoiled from Dutton’s grab for power. Hunt, a Victorian, had tied himself to Dutton, a man with little evidence of popularity in the southern states. Some of Hunt’s colleagues were forever confounded by this judgement.