Venom

by David Crowe

  Dutton’s supporters were deflated and full of recriminations. One argument among them was that Cormann had been too slow to issue a public demand for a spill and that a statement one day earlier would have brought on a faster ballot to their advantage. Another was to blame Turnbull for flouting party conventions and using dirty tactics to delay the meeting and help Morrison. A third theory was that Morrison’s supporters had voted for Dutton on Tuesday to inflate his numbers and accelerate a leadership change. But if Dutton’s 35 votes on Tuesday included cuckoos’ eggs laid by Morrison, his support was too soft all along. All these arguments became excuses for failure.

  There was no time for speeches until the deputy’s position was decided. Three candidates stood: Josh Frydenberg, Greg Hunt and Steve Ciobo. One was untainted by the instability of the week while the others were part of the push that had split the government. The defeat of Dutton added some uncertainty to the outcome. ‘Now I don’t have to vote the ticket,’ one Liberal muttered under his breath. The alliance between Queenslanders and Victorians, intended to secure the leadership for Dutton and the deputy’s position for Hunt, was defunct. Frydenberg gained 46 votes, Ciobo 20 and Hunt 16. There were three informal votes. The contest needed no second round given the winner had an absolute majority. Frydenberg had entered Parliament in 2010, nine years later than Hunt and Ciobo, and had risen to the deputy’s position without having to plot against a leader or tear down an incumbent, and his winning margin was greater than any candidate in the room. It was a significant leap for someone who had been spoken of as a potential Liberal leader for years.

  Morrison made a short speech in which he spoke of Liberal history and values and glanced at the portraits of former leaders on the walls of the party room.

  ‘There’ll be a woman there one day,’ he said.

  ‘In which century?’ muttered Bishop, loudly enough for others to hear.

  The Liberals walked from their party room in a state of exhaustion, some of them gutted by the infighting and others relieved at the rise of their new leader. Dutton and Cormann were stony-faced as they left the room. Laundy felt physically wrecked from the strain of the week. Friendships had been fractured, hatreds inflamed and suspicions deepened among Liberals who were supposed to present a united face to Australian voters at an election due within nine months. The fury at the events would not subside easily. Turnbull would be blamed for inviting a challenge, Dutton blamed for launching one and Morrison accused of exploiting the chaos to engineer his own rise to power.

  Morrison was soon dubbed the ‘accidental prime minister’ for his unexpected success but the catchy phrase was careless for the way it glossed over the plots required to make sure he prevailed. Some of his supporters had voted for Dutton on Tuesday. They had magnified the challenge, weakened the Prime Minister and helped create the conditions for a second ballot. Some of his supporters had signed the petition. They had waited until the time was right for their preferred leader before adding their names to the paperwork and bringing on the meeting. As soon as the first ballot was over and the Prime Minister was gasping for air, the small band of Morrison supporters began working to help their leader and leave Turnbull to his fate. They did this at the very time Morrison put his arm around Turnbull in the Prime Minister’s courtyard. This is my leader and I’m ambitious for him! The pledge lasted only as long as Turnbull kept his head above water.

  Morrison’s enemies saw the tactics of the past repeated to destroy another Prime Minister. While Morrison had voted for Abbott in 2015, his followers sided with Turnbull. While Morrison voted for Turnbull in 2018, his followers prepared for a spill. Some of them gave up on the Prime Minister, watched the pressure for a second ballot, mobilised to lobby for votes and secured victory for their patron and themselves. Even so, Morrison only emerged as an open candidate when he had Turnbull’s blessing. The turning point in this debilitating challenge came when Turnbull chose to anoint Morrison and Bishop as worthy successors in the belief that this was the only way to defeat Dutton. The destruction wrought by the Dutton campaign forced Turnbull to make this choice. ‘They had so damaged him there was no coming back,’ said one of Morrison’s lieutenants.

  Dutton created the conditions for Morrison’s victory. The new Prime Minister only triumphed with the unwitting help of Dutton and the explicit approval of Turnbull. The search for villains after the fact naturally led some of those in the Dutton camp to suspect they had been played all along by Morrison and his helpers, yet the key decisions in the challenge were those made by the challenger himself. Dutton withdrew support from Turnbull at the height of the energy debate. Dutton chose to stand and seek the leadership rather than wait two weeks. Dutton did this knowing Morrison would be a likely rival. The ultimate foolishness of the challengers was their need to blame Morrison for their own mistakes.

  Who, outside the angry factions of the media, forced them on this path? The Dutton lieutenants charged ahead with their petition in the hope they could force a second ballot before Morrison was ready, yet their tactics proved their own inadequacies as politicians. Andrew Hastie, Tony Pasin, Zed Seselja and Michael Sukkar had been in Parliament no longer than five years and aspired to be future leaders. All claimed to stand for conservative values. All assisted a convulsion that brought the government to a halt without achieving any policy shift that could claim to restore a conservative philosophy in grave danger from the previous administration. Their high purpose was no greater than a personal preference for one man over another, to the disregard of stability or continuity, two values to which the conservatives were meant to aspire.

  Turnbull returned to his office on this Friday afternoon and retreated to his private suite with Lucy and their daughter, Daisy Turnbull Brown. He had a final speech to prepare. Within minutes he had his first visitors when Morrison arrived with his ally, Scott Briggs, the former party official who had helped Turnbull enter Parliament fourteen years earlier. They spoke privately for a short time, but Turnbull’s family had no patience with this interruption. Turnbull Brown hurried them out of the room. ‘Dad needs to work on his speech now,’ she told the new leader of the Liberal Party. Morrison stopped at the door to keep talking, but Turnbull Brown insisted he leave: ‘Come on, come on, we’ve got to go.’ She was protecting her father from the men who might have protected him more than they did.

  Turnbull had looked increasingly drained to his colleagues as the week drew on but now put a tight smile on his face as he walked to his final press conference as Prime Minister. He emphasised a phrase his opponents would abhor — that he led a ‘progressive’ Liberal government — and named the passage of marriage equality law as proof that he led a reforming administration. His list of achievements included jobs growth, 3.1 per cent economic growth, personal income tax cuts, business tax cuts, the start of the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project, the beginning of construction of the Western Sydney Airport, the approval for the Inland Rail line, the announcement of a rail line from Melbourne’s city to the Tullamarine airport, the creation of the national redress scheme for victims of child sexual abuse and investments in naval shipbuilding. On international affairs, he named the approval of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, signed by eleven countries despite the rejection of the deal by US President Donald Trump. He also mentioned the resettlement deal with the United States for refugees on Manus and Nauru — a ‘challenging exercise’ to hold Trump to the deal agreed with Obama.

  Turnbull displayed no anxiety at the way Morrison had risen to the leadership. There was instead a condemnation of Dutton and his supporters inside and outside the Parliament.

  ‘Look, I think you all know what’s happened,’ Turnbull said. ‘There was a determined insurgency from a number of people, both in the party room and backed by voices — powerful voices — in the media, really, to if not bring down the government, certainly bring down my prime ministership. It was extraordinary. It was described as madness by many and I think it’s difficult to describe it in any other way.’

>   These words defined the week for Turnbull and his supporters. Madness. He found it inconceivable that the party would topple a leader who was more popular than his replacement. He had applied logic to every potential scenario and concluded he was safe, but he had fumbled the equation when putting a value on revenge and blind ambition.

  Nobody could offer a better explanation for this wreckage. Within hours of the ballot, Cormann was on Sky News explaining that the Tuesday ballot had taken the party by surprise and led cabinet ministers and others to come to him that same day to tell him they had changed their minds about their votes.

  ‘I was approached by four cabinet ministers in the morning and further cabinet ministers later that day who told me that they had supported Malcolm in the leadership ballot on Tuesday but that they had changed their position,’ Cormann said, without naming the ministers.6 Cash and Fifield were among them. So too was Porter, yet there must have been more if Cormann was being honest. His remarks included a curious change in his language. On Thursday he had said ‘five cabinet ministers’ approached him, but on Friday he suggested a bigger number: four at first, followed by others. Who were they? There were only a few candidates for this list.

  Morrison, who was never close to Cormann, was unlikely to share his intentions with the man who walked up Red Hill each morning with Dutton. Another four cabinet ministers had voted for Dutton from the start, while several others had remained with Turnbull to the end.7 Cormann’s silence long after the spill meant the names of those who came to him would remain a matter of conjecture or dispute for some time to come. And how reliable were his words? There was no guarantee the ministers he had in mind would agree with the way he had characterised their private conversations.

  Every moment of this drama was soaked in duplicity. Cormann’s account revealed the deceptions: either he had exaggerated the shift in position by fellow cabinet ministers, or those cabinet ministers had admitted their shift to him and lied to others. Cormann struggled to explain how this had led to the sudden removal of a leader.

  ‘You’ve dumped a first-term Prime Minister and you can’t sit here and tell us why?’ asked Sky News host Laura Jayes.

  ‘Well, I haven’t dumped a sitting Prime Minister,’ Cormann replied. Even now, he spoke as if others had made the decision for him. He argued the leadership was now ‘settled more comprehensively’ than it had been earlier in the week. He assumed Australians would accept a leap of logic: that the leadership was thrown into doubt by a vote of 48 to 35 but settled when the numbers were 45 to 40. It was sophistry.

  The survivors of this shattering week fled Parliament House for the highway to Sydney or the Qantas Club at Canberra Airport, where Liberal MPs gathered awkwardly in groups, reluctant to strike up a conversation with colleagues whose decisions on the leadership they could not comprehend. Pyne cried on the way home to Adelaide. Sinodinos, still recovering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, returned to Sydney with an unsentimental view of the outcome, even though the sheer turmoil had surprised him. ‘Once it had happened, I guess my attitude was: the party room proposes and the party room disposes, and it has ever been thus. I didn’t dwell on it because, frankly, I had to get back to my daily routine.’ A cancer diagnosis kept even this leadership spill in perspective.8

  Shorten, watching from Sydney, did not see any logic to the way the Liberal Party shunned Bishop. Nor did he see any sense in the way it cast out Turnbull.

  ‘While I knew his own party owed him nothing, or they felt they owed him nothing, I still think he was their best salesman,’ Shorten recalled. ‘I just didn’t think they’d cut down their best salesman — after they’d done it once and nearly lost the election, after they’d seen the mess Labor had gotten into for doing it. I just didn’t think their panic would overcome their rationality. But it did. And I never picked Peter Dutton to be the arch-conspirator.’9

  Australian politics had witnessed a great reversal in fortune for the two major parties. Labor had feared the rise of Turnbull three years earlier but was now unafraid of his successor. The Liberals, meanwhile, had cheered the fall of Abbott in the certainty their new leader would pulverise the enemy, but were now anxious about the government’s prospects as they prepared for another election. The only joy in this takedown was for those who took pleasure in revenge.

  Dutton maintained that he had no choice but to stand for the leadership and force a decision on the government’s future.

  ‘It had to be resolved that week in my mind,’ he said later.10 ‘Because I genuinely thought, and very strongly hold the belief to this day, that he would have gone to an election off the back of that. With the numbers, the 48 and 35, he was dead from that point, right, so it had to be resolved.’

  Abbott had no regrets about doing everything he could to stop the National Energy Guarantee. He left Canberra that week satisfied the party would be better off without Turnbull as leader.

  ‘We often appeared divided when Malcolm was the leader because Malcolm was a man of the left trying to lead a party of the right,’ Abbott said later.11 ‘I think the key ingredient was not the fact that there have always been more progressive and more conservative people in the Liberal Party — that’s always been the case and always will be the case. The key ingredient was a leader, a challenger-cum-leader, who was very, very progressive, especially by Liberal Party standards, and who wasn’t very respectful of the Liberal Party’s traditional centre-right centre of gravity.’

  Yet the Liberals often appeared divided when Abbott was leader, too. The party room fractured at regular intervals, whether on climate change or marriage, and every crisis deepened the enmities. Those who despised Turnbull were convinced he was the toxin that weakened their party. They ignored their own toxic hatreds, as if the disease was always someone else’s fault.

  The camouflage thrown over this long power struggle was the idea that Australia’s leaders were engaged in a philosophical contest of great consequence for the nation. Another idea, that a new leader was essential to rescue the Liberal Party, was a poor justification for this collapse. In truth, the government was broken by private feuds.

  ‘It was all personal,’ said Broadbent.12 ‘Malcolm made it personal because it was all about Malcolm, and Tony made it personal because he’d become the Prime Minister and was deposed — and he’d won an election, and he’d been very patient as Opposition Leader.’

  Broadbent, the man who had fought for a marginal seat at every election since 1990, watched Liberals join the leadership spill out of nothing more than a desire for personal advancement, at the very point when the government was catching up to Labor and had a chance, slim perhaps but real, to win the next election.

  ‘What the party didn’t understand was that Malcolm had just come to that place when the Australian people were accepting him as Prime Minister,’ Broadbent said. ‘He’d got to that point. You would have seen his net satisfaction rating beginning to improve. His enemies knew that and they had to bring him down before he became the accepted Prime Minister.’ The published polls before the turmoil, which had the Coalition behind Labor by 49 to 51 per cent in two-party terms in four consecutive surveys, signalled the improvement in the government’s fortunes. ‘Howard would have been absolutely rapt with those sorts of figures. It would have been a close election campaign.’

  The government would never see this future. The pursuit of the Prime Minister had gone on so long that the hunt became impossible to stop. The Turnbull government ended the moment the predators were joined by the panickers.

  PART THREE

  RESCUE

  ‘In politics, a dead man’s shoes are not a poignant reminder of a loved one who has passed on. They are receptacles that have to be filled.’

  Alan Reid, The Gorton Experiment, 1971

  14

  STEPS TO THE ABYSS

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 2018

  LATER, WHEN A TROUBLED government had won a miraculous victory, the aftermath of Scott Morrison’s ascent to power was some
times portrayed as the first stage in an astonishing political recovery. At the time, however, every new shock to the Liberals seemed to push their party room another step towards an abyss. Every one of the MPs understood the warning from John Howard in an earlier period of turmoil: disunity is death. Many of them expected destruction at the election due within nine months, and the immediate events following the 24 August leadership spill confirmed their fears when they witnessed a crash in the opinion polls, a defeat at a by-election, a defection, a plunge into minority government and resignations by the most senior ministers.

  The months after the spill felt like an interregnum while the Liberals and Nationals trudged towards their demise, only to be stunned later by their rescue. Disunity gave them a near-death experience.

  Morrison alone conveyed total confidence in his capacity to get the better of Shorten. This, after all, was his job. Four weeks after the spill, he presided over a meeting in his Parliament House office with his inner circle: chief of staff John Kunkel, who had worked for Howard and for mining company Rio Tinto; principal private secretary Yaron Finkelstein, who had been poached from polling and research firm Crosby Textor; communications director Andrew Carswell, a former News Corp journalist who had joined Morrison when he was Treasurer; and Andrew Hirst, the federal director of the Liberal Party. Voters had flayed the government in the published polls after the spill, suggesting an election defeat so devastating the Coalition could lose twenty seats. The Liberal Party research showed a similar slide in popular support, but it clarified the group’s thinking about the slim chance of success. This became known as the ‘narrow path’ to victory as Morrison and his advisers examined the strategy in dozens of meetings over the subsequent months.