by David Crowe
Like a goat track to a summit, the path was so difficult it could only be traversed in the best weather. The Coalition would need to win at least two seats from Labor: Lindsay in western Sydney and Herbert in Queensland. It would need to stem its losses in Melbourne, where a redistribution meant some of its seats were likely to fall to Labor, and it would have to hold ground in Western Australia. It would try to pick up two or three seats in Tasmania and recover the regional electorate of Indi in northern Victoria. All this seemed unlikely, even outlandish, when the research was so dire, but there was only one way forward. And so the climb began.
Morrison admitted the failures of the party as soon as he had to explain the destruction of the Turnbull government. ‘The circumstances of a few weeks ago, I know they appalled all Australians,’ he said. ‘The Parliament looked like The Muppet Show and people should feel rightly angered about that.’ The comparison with an American children’s comedy series, with its monsters and puppets, was a gift for television producers who could run clips of the show’s resident rock band, Dr Teeth and The Electric Mayhem, and its wild drummer, Animal. It was a gift, too, for Shorten, who could ridicule the government with its own words.
What Morrison did not do, however, was condemn the Turnbull or Abbott eras by exaggerating his intention to set a new direction. He promised continuity in government rather than a departure in policy or even a difference in style. Julia Gillard had found a way to explain her removal of Kevin Rudd in June 2010. ‘A good government had lost its way,’ she said. Morrison avoided any similar formulation. This gave him the capacity to claim some of the record of the previous governments, not least economic growth and job creation, when the election came. Morrison maddened his interviewers by avoiding any criticism of the previous two leaders and shedding no light on how he had risen to the top. Why, exactly, had the government just decapitated another prime minister? Morrison would not say. He lived Benjamin Disraeli’s maxim. Never complain; never explain.
Changes were made without fanfare. Morrison confirmed the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) would only serve as a reliability benchmark and would not be revived in any form to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The NEG was dead, again. He dropped another change the government had pursued for years: an increase in the age at which Australians would qualify for the Age Pension. Labor had increased this from 65 to 67 when in government; the Coalition had proposed an increase to 70 but had never been able to legislate the change. Morrison hammered another nail in the coffin of the hated federal budget of May 2014, a blueprint that had caused so much damage to Abbott and his government.
Josh Frydenberg chose the treasury portfolio as deputy leader and tried to calm a rattled party room. He invited Morrison and his wife, Jenny, to dinner at his Melbourne home with his wife, Amie. Even small things like a home-cooked meal meant something after the hostilities of August. Political leaders and their deputies are not always close, but the two new leaders worked at this, to the point that Morrison asked Frydenberg to stay in a spare room in Kirribilli House when in Sydney for work. The new ministry was an exercise in conciliation, reward and judicious punishment. Peter Dutton stayed in home affairs and Greg Hunt stayed in health, but others who plotted for change were demoted: Steve Ciobo to defence industry, Michael Keenan out of cabinet. Michael Sukkar was dropped from the ministry, but Angus Taylor gained the energy portfolio and moved in to cabinet.
The gaping absence in the new ministry was Julie Bishop, whose friends said she could not see herself continuing as Foreign Minister with Morrison. With an eye for symbolism, she wore red high heels to the press conference to announce her decision, as if she would like to click the ruby slippers and escape the madness.
‘Can you see a point where the Liberal Party will bring itself to elect a popular female leader?’ asked Seven News political editor Mark Riley.
‘When we find one, I’m sure we will,’ she replied, in an icy judgement on the party room.
The Morrison allies who outsmarted the Dutton camp now assumed positions of influence. Alex Hawke became Special Minister of State, Stuart Robert became Assistant Treasurer and Steve Irons was named an assistant minister. Melissa Price, one of those who had helped Frydenberg become deputy leader, entered cabinet as Environment Minister. There were smiles at Government House as the new ministers were sworn in on 28 August, but the months ahead showed the Coalition still had its talent for damaging itself.
The priority was to keep control of Parliament. With only 76 seats in the House of Representatives, the new government was vulnerable from the start. Turnbull resigned from Parliament one week after the spill, just as he had warned. Morrison was careful to praise his predecessor and recall how often he had talked about love. ‘Well, mate, love’s coming right back at you, Malcolm,’ he said.1 The problem was in having that love returned.
Turnbull’s friends, tormented by memories of the spill, studied every minute leading up to the ballots in August. They remembered their tally of the MPs they believed had voted for Turnbull on the Tuesday, they checked the names on the petition calling for a second spill and looked again at the narrow ballot that brought down a Prime Minister on the Friday. The numbers told the story: some of Morrison’s supporters had voted for Dutton in the first vote and therefore weakened Turnbull before the second. Morrison insisted he was loyal and refused to say more.
‘Malcolm always knew that I would never be standing against him,’ Morrison said in an interview in early September.2 ‘Just like Tony Abbott knew I was never going to be standing against him as the Prime Minister. That’s exactly what happened.’ Morrison wanted everyone to stop thinking about the past. ‘We leave the bitterness of the decade behind us. The mantle of leadership has passed to a new generation and let’s not carry that stuff forward — let’s leave it back there.’
Turnbull was a brooding presence long after he had left the party room. He said little in public and flew to New York with Lucy ten days after being deposed, but he could inject himself into Australian politics at any moment with a message or a tweet. The Australian media was interested in his every move, to the point that photographers tracked the couple as they walked with their groceries to their apartment on the Upper West Side.
The task of replacing Turnbull in Wentworth was so difficult that Morrison took the wrong side in the local Liberal contest, anointing local councillor Katherine O’Regan. The party instead chose Dave Sharma, a former Australian ambassador to Israel who had left diplomacy to go into business. Turnbull congratulated Sharma on his victory in the preselection but was reluctant to do more to help. The two spoke by phone, with Turnbull offering advice from New York on every aspect of an electorate he had held for fifteen years, but the assistance was tentative. Liberals were incensed at Turnbull’s refusal to do more to hold the seat. Late in the campaign, Morrison and others sought Turnbull’s help with a letter to voters endorsing Sharma. Turnbull turned down the request. How could he write such a letter without reflecting on the way the party room had thrown his government into chaos?
A new pattern emerged. Turnbull would speak up on policies where he disagreed with the government, not least climate change, while another member of his family began to intervene with vigour. Turnbull’s son, Alex, stepped into politics one day after his father’s formal resignation from Parliament. On 1 September Alex called for donations to support the Labor candidate in Wentworth, Tim Murray, a friend from the world of investment banking, and within weeks he was helping an independent candidate for the seat, Kerryn Phelps, a local doctor and former deputy mayor of Sydney. This was the first step in what became a guerrilla campaign to raise money for independent candidates who would challenge the Liberals over the collapse of their climate change policy.
The younger Turnbull, like his father, would tackle an opponent with no mind to the bruises on either side of the bout. This was personal. Early in the Turnbull government, stories had begun appearing about Alex, his family and his career as an investment banker in Singapore
. He blamed his father’s enemies for breaking one of the rules of engagement in politics — going after families. In their private conversations, Alex had urged his father onwards on energy policy and offered detailed modelling on the cost of renewables to push back against the conservatives. Now he felt no need to stay silent. Alex opposed the Liberals’ stance on climate change, thought the party was captured by donors in the coal industry and believed the party’s conservative wing had to be confronted.
‘I think there is an aspect of the hard right of the party where they thought they could engage in a form of activity that some described as terrorism — that they had a monopoly on power,’ he said later.3 ‘But you cannot assume it won’t cost you in the end. You can’t assume you won’t get a grass roots campaign against you.’ Helping Phelps in Wentworth was only the start. Abbott would be the next target. Alex told his father that Abbott and others should feel the consequences of their actions. I feel I need to square off with these guys. He felt he had been targeted as a member of the Turnbull family and was within his rights to respond aggressively to the conservatives and their allies in the media. ‘I was hoping it might be seen as an example — that there’s not a lot to gain by going after people’s families because you don’t know enough about your opponent to know what will happen next.’
The damage to the government was revealed on 20 October when it lost a seat that had been a Liberal stronghold since the formation of the party. Phelps edged ahead of Sharma by 1,850 votes with a campaign that promised more action on climate change, strong support for progressive social issues such as same sex marriage and more humane treatment of asylum seekers. The Liberal Party vote in two-party terms collapsed from 67.8 per cent at the 2016 election to 48.8 per cent at the by-election. Morrison seemed on his way to political oblivion.
The final weeks of the Wentworth campaign proved the government had not fixed its flaws. The Nationals engaged in another round of infighting when rumours spread that Joyce might try to regain the party leadership from McCormack. The bigger stumble was on foreign policy. One of Morrison’s decisions brought months of further damage. Influenced by Sharma’s advice, and aware of the strong Jewish population in the eastern Sydney electorate, Morrison spoke to select reporters on the Monday before the by-election to tell them he would consider recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, a departure from settled Australian foreign policy and a decision that could anger Arab and Muslim allies who took the Palestinian side in the dispute over the city’s status.4 While the proposal was only a review, not a final outcome, the reaction was ferocious when the news was revealed the next day.
The Indonesian Foreign Minister, Retno Marsudi, was hosting Palestinian Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Maliki, in Jakarta when Morrison announced his changes. While the Australian ambassador was in touch with Marsudi on the Monday night, Foreign Minister Marise Payne only spoke to her after the announcement the next day. Before they spoke, Marsudi told Payne by text that recognising Jerusalem would be a major blow that would ‘slap Indonesia’s face on the Palestine issue’ — a warning that was leaked to the Australian media.5 Defence officials admitted they were only notified of the review after the media was told, cementing the impression of a rushed change in policy to meet a domestic political objective.
The scale of the problem became clear after the Wentworth by-election when Morrison tried to advance a free trade agreement with Indonesia but found the timetable was suddenly at risk. Morrison needed a go-between to restore equilibrium with the Indonesian President, Joko Widodo, and called the obvious candidate, Turnbull, who had formed a friendship with Jokowi three years earlier. By 29 October the government had briefed Turnbull on its dilemma and arranged for him to meet the Indonesian leader at an Oceans Conference in Bali. Their 45-minute meeting proceeded smoothly, but Turnbull emerged to find a gathering of journalists waiting for his comments.
Turnbull revealed that he had considered the same issue when in office and rejected the option Morrison now pursued. ‘The conclusion that I took, and my government took, after very careful and considered advice was that a policy that is well over 40 years old, 50 years old, should remain exactly the same as it is,’ Turnbull said.6 The leader and his predecessor were now at odds on foreign policy. Morrison brushed aside the criticism, but the storm over his sudden decision continued for months. Only in December did he confirm the new Australian stance, which was to recognise West Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and to acknowledge the aspirations of Palestinians to make East Jerusalem their capital in a two-state solution, while the Australian embassy would remain in Tel Aviv. Only in March did Indonesia sign the free trade agreement.
Morrison was not displaying the sure touch his downcast Liberals needed. And he was buffeted by shocks he could not foresee — such as the leak of a government review of religious freedom. The report by former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, a trusted Liberal with respect throughout the party, had been commissioned by Turnbull to satisfy conservatives at the height of the dispute over same sex marriage. It had never been released. Now it found its way into the media and reopened the argument about whether churches and religious institutions would lose their right to speak up for their faith when their faith was at odds with anti-discrimination laws.7 The leak was a hostile act when the government was fighting to save Wentworth, but the subject was supremely important for Morrison, who believed religious freedom had to be protected. ‘At the end of the day, if you’re not free to believe in your own faith, well, you’re not free,’ he said in one of his first interviews as Prime Minister.8 Yet he could not act on this wish when the opportunity arose.
One year after same sex marriage had become law, questions about religious freedom returned to torment the Liberals and Nationals. Morrison promised changes to the law before the end of the year but could not end the disputes within the party room over the rights of a religious school to abide by its faith and the goal of protecting an individual from discrimination. On Wednesday, 5 December, in the final week of Parliament for the year, Morrison met backbench colleagues to raise the idea of a conscience vote on a private member’s bill to decide the matter within days.9 Even this would not work: it antagonised some of the more conservative MPs and was greeted with derision by Labor.
The ‘transaction cost’ of removing Turnbull seemed to grow at the end of 2018, long before Morrison’s election victory in May gave everyone the benefit of hindsight and led them to recalculate the risks and rewards of a leadership spill. At the end of November, three months after Turnbull had been removed, the Liberals received a thumping rejection from Victorian voters at a state election that saw the abrupt removal of state Liberals in safe seats. After four years in power, Labor Premier Daniel Andrews sought re-election against a Liberal opponent, Matthew Guy, who campaigned on crime prevention and economic management. The result was a 5.3 per cent swing to Labor, blamed by shocked Liberals on the damage to their party from the crisis in Canberra.
The blame was based on Labor tactics to use federal problems to cause state trouble. ‘Stop the Liberal cuts’, said the most prominent Labor advertisement against the Liberals. The words were matched with unflattering photographs of four Liberals, only one of whom was running in the state election. Next to Guy were images of Morrison, Dutton and Abbott.
Julia Banks chose the aftermath of the Victorian election to air a denunciation of the Liberals she had been contemplating for months. Banks had waited for signs that Morrison was acting on complaints about bullying and the lack of promotion for women, but she felt the government was engaging in empty talk. One of her friends, Ann Sudmalis, the member for Gilmore, had complained of bullying against her by a state colleague when she announced in Parliament in September that she would not contest the next election. Morrison had promised the organisational wing of the party would make sure more women were promoted, but Banks had given up waiting. At midday on 27 November, she told Parliament she was leaving the Liberal Party because of the ‘dark days’ of the spill.<
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‘Led by members of the reactionary right wing, the coup was aided by many MPs trading their vote for a leadership change in exchange for their individual promotion, preselection endorsements or silence,’ Banks said. While she pledged her support on confidence and supply, her decision meant Morrison’s hold on power was more precarious than ever. The Coalition now had only 74 out of 150 seats in the lower house, confirming its status as a minority government. Frydenberg raced to Banks’ office after her speech to confirm she would not bring down the government. While Banks offered this certainty, she made her view of Morrison clear when Frydenberg asked her to talk to the Prime Minister in his suite. ‘How about he rings me?’ she asked. He did so, but it made no difference.
Morrison had to make sure he would not lose any more of his backbenchers. Craig Kelly was the next problem. Kelly was one of Abbott’s allies in the energy debate and was under threat from moderates in the Liberal Party who blamed him for years of disruption. This was another grudge match. When Kelly threatened to move to the crossbench and Morrison intervened to save him, Turnbull called members of the party’s New South Wales state executive to urge them to cut Kelly loose. This skirmish between Turnbull and Morrison was over within days. The New South Wales division obeyed the Prime Minister.
A history of political assassination still dragged the Liberals down. Voters were giving up on the major political parties after a decade when leaders could be torn down overnight regardless of whether they had won an election. The Liberal Party’s focus group research revealed the scale of the problem. Asked for their thoughts on Morrison, voters doubted his ability to deliver whatever he promised. They’ll probably just roll him. The cynicism was now cemented into the political system. If I vote for him, who am I going to get? These sorts of responses showed the damage the parties had done to themselves.