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  DEDICATION

  TO BELLA, WITH THANKS FOR THE SASS

  CONTENTS

  DEDICATION

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE

  DECISION POINTS

  1. THE WOUNDED LEADER

  JANUARY TO SEPTEMBER 2015

  2. FALSE STARTS

  OCTOBER 2015 TO JUNE 2016

  3. THE PROMISE OF STABILITY

  THE JULY 2016 ELECTION

  4. ABBOTT AGGRIEVED

  JULY 2016 TO JULY 2017

  5. THE GULF ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY

  JUNE TO DECEMBER 2017

  6. NATIONAL SCANDAL

  DECEMBER 2017 TO FEBRUARY 2018

  7. CLIMATE CRISIS

  FEBRUARY TO JULY 2018

  PART TWO

  THE MADNESS OF MANY

  8. DUTTON RISING

  SATURDAY 28 JULY TO THURSDAY 16 AUGUST

  9. KNIVES OUT

  FRIDAY 17 TO MONDAY 20 AUGUST

  10. THE GAMBLE

  TUESDAY 21 AUGUST

  11. MALICE AND MAYHEM

  WEDNESDAY 22 AUGUST

  12. OVER THE PRECIPICE

  THURSDAY 23 AUGUST

  13. DOUBLE DEALING

  FRIDAY 24 AUGUST

  PART THREE

  RESCUE

  14. STEPS TO THE ABYSS

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER 2018

  15. MIRACLE MAN

  THE MAY 2019 ELECTION

  EPILOGUE

  PHOTO SECTION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ENDNOTES

  INDEX OF NAMES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  FOREWORD

  THE REBIRTH OF A government cannot hide the ruthless politics that led to its creation. When Scott Morrison won the election of May 2019, devastating his opponents and stunning some of his own supporters, he described the victory as a moment when his government would come together. What they were coming together from was left unsaid. The government felt its ugly arguments and brutal leadership contests were best forgotten. This was meant to be a unifying triumph for the Coalition, a time to bury the feuds of the recent past.

  But no election can wipe away history. The government held on to power but has to live with the jealousies, rivalries and outright hatreds that weakened it before and may do so again.

  This book is about something that defies rational explanation — the wrecking of a government by its own members, almost to the point of total destruction. The lesson is that demolition is easy — almost effortless, in fact, when it is done in stages until panic takes hold. The book covers the period from the fall of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister in 2015 to the eruption that toppled Malcolm Turnbull in 2018 and the remarkable recovery once Morrison had assumed control. The book looks forward as well as back, because the Morrison government was formed by forces that can easily return. The divisions among politicians do not end with a leadership ballot or an election.

  The tension between private ambition and national interest shapes every event in this book. Two arguments emerge. The first is that no government can deliver stability if it cannot contain the mercenary quests of its own careerist politicians, who know that turmoil brings reward because it removes those ahead of them in the queue for promotion. The second is that mercenary quests are nothing new but become easier than ever in a party room that turns every dispute into a leadership test, when its primary task is to form and hold stable government. Without a change to these incentives, any leader may be doomed.

  This book is based on 110 interviews with participants in these events as well as other less formal conversations. It draws on more than 75,000 words in notes and transcripts from these interviews. In establishing key events, I spoke to more than one participant whenever possible, and in some instances heard versions of meetings or conversations which were in direct conflict, in which case I have made this clear to readers. Some of these interviews were conducted on a background basis because the information would only be offered if the source remained confidential. Some interviews were on the record and are quoted. The book also relies on private text and WhatsApp messages between some participants as well as notes of conversations, written personal accounts and documents obtained from various sources.

  Politicians guard their memories with care, and some edit their accounts as time passes to be sure they can relive their preferred versions of events. I accept that disputes over parts of my account are certain. New information will emerge over time and the conflict over what occurred will probably never end.

  Canberra, June 2019

  PART ONE

  DECISION POINTS

  ‘The images of kings topple before their thrones do.’

  Peter L. Berger, Invitation to Sociology, 1963

  1

  THE WOUNDED LEADER

  JANUARY TO SEPTEMBER 2015

  AT THE END OF January 2015, when he had just made one of the biggest mistakes of his career, Tony Abbott telephoned a Liberal Party colleague to try to avert a political disaster. Abbott had been Prime Minister for 500 days and had the status of a conservative hero, one of only four leaders of his party to defeat a federal Labor government and take the Liberals out of opposition and into power in Canberra. Yet his instincts failed him on Australia Day when his love of tradition led him to award a knighthood to the Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, for his contribution to Australia. It was a catastrophic mistake. Members of Parliament from Abbott’s ruling Coalition arrived at Australia Day barbecues and citizenship ceremonies to find voters were mystified at this tribute to the royal family on a day meant to celebrate nationhood. Abbott was mocked without mercy.

  In all the ridicule, nothing was more dangerous than the protest from Liberal backbenchers, many of whom already doubted their leader’s judgement. Abbott called one of them, Luke Simpkins, in the hope of silencing the howls from party room members already exasperated by his unwillingness to consult on big decisions — his ‘captain’s calls’ — and his handling of unpopular budget savings in health and education.

  Abbott got through to Simpkins on the morning of 27 January and was instantly conciliatory. He expressed regret for knighting Prince Philip, explained that he thought it was the right thing to do and admitted it was unpopular. He did not apologise for it. He listened while Simpkins lamented the government’s policy confusion and the ‘bad and unpopular’ honour for the royal family, but there was no way for him to soothe this former ally. ‘My last faith in Tony Abbott was shattered,’ Simpkins wrote in his personal notes.1 He was a deeply conservative Liberal but he had given up on the Prime Minister.

  The phone call lasted ten minutes. Simpkins ended it by telling Abbott he had to go. The campaign to replace him was underway.

  Abbott had bestowed the knighthood with no thought to its political cost. He had received a message from someone he considered a ‘very reliable source’ telling him the Queen would be pleased if he gave her husband this honour. ‘I gave it twenty seconds’ thought,’ he said later, in an interview for this book.2 ‘Once this information came to me, I thought: “Well, that’s the end of the matter. If that’s what the Queen wants, it’s a perfectly reasonable request, let’s meet it.”’ He did not take the decision to federal cabinet. His own ministers learnt of it through the media. What turned the affair into the trigger for a crisis was not just that he surprised Australians but that he stunned his own colleagues.

  No single moment defines a political career, but this marked the beginning of the end for Abbott as Prime Minister — and the genesis of the feuds that would destroy the leader who came after him. The rivalries within the Liberal Party turned into lasting enmities once the members of the parliamentary party room put the leadership in play. The shared affliction of these politicians would be revealed over time: chronic disagreemen
t over what they stood for, endless argument over every decision, permanent scheming for personal advancement. The party room, whose stated purpose was to win and hold stable government, became a ferment that never subsided because its volatile chemicals were too combustible when mixed. The hatreds were toxic.

  The knighthood only mattered because Abbott was already unpopular with voters and unloved by too many of his own MPs. He had stormed into government in September 2013 after four years as a political killing machine, opposing the Labor administrations of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard with such ferocity they collapsed into policy disputes and leadership challenges. Abbott was a friend to bishops, an Anglophile with a boxing blue from Oxford, a believer in Western tradition and an implacable opponent of social change. He was expert at applying pressure until his opponents crumbled. He practised his politics with the same unrelenting energy as his daily cycle at dawn to the top of a Canberra hill before attending Parliament.

  Abbott could joke about himself with a staccato laugh. ‘As a journalist I was a frustrated politician,’ he would say. ‘As a politician I’m a frustrated journalist. While a trainee priest I was just frustrated.’ His followers were intensely loyal, yet Australians sensed this man was yearning to govern the country in an earlier age. They saw their suspicions confirmed with his eagerness to restore knights and dames and his willingness to indulge in honours for royalty. Asked to name their preferred prime minister, voters favoured Bill Shorten, who had led the Australian Labor Party since October 2013.

  The Liberals did not need to look far for an alternative leader who might lift their fortunes. Malcolm Turnbull was always available. The man who had led the party six years earlier, until he was dispatched by Abbott in a crisis over climate change, remained the people’s choice for the Liberal leadership. Turnbull was renowned for his ambition – and his arrogance, temper and impatience. He had come to politics to squeeze a fourth life into his crowded career. He was the barrister who fought the British government in the Spycatcher trial, the investment banker at Goldman Sachs, the investor who made so much money he could buy one of Sydney’s most expensive harbourside homes. One of his colleagues likened Turnbull to a great white shark. He had to keep moving to stay alive.

  Turnbull lived the Liberal credo of enterprise and opportunity but was regarded with suspicion as ‘not a real Liberal’ when his conservative critics listed his flaws, not least his belief in taking action on climate change, his advocacy for a republic and his support for same sex marriage. Worse, perhaps, was his struggle with the pretence of the modern politician. He could never be a man of the people. He knew emotional hardship more than some, given the departure of his mother when he was ten years old, and talked often of love and family. Yet he was patrician by nature and absolutely certain he knew best, to the point where he could turn suddenly savage against someone on his own side. Those who came close could never be sure when he might unleash derision.

  The unrest of early 2015 threw the Liberals into a political disorder that lasted for years. The anger at Abbott spread through the party room during the two weeks following Australia Day until it set off a bizarre confrontation in which the Prime Minister faced a protest vote without a declared challenger to take his place.

  And the bitterness from one confrontation poured into the next. It cascaded through the party room in the leadership contest of 2015 and the hostilities of the next term of Parliament, until it ravaged the government in an overflow of acid in 2018. Only when the Liberals won the election of 2019 did they reach a point where they might be safe from the flood.

  *

  Simpkins had smouldered over the knighthood after hearing the mockery from voters at a citizenship ceremony at the showground in Wanneroo, part of his electorate of Cowan in the northern suburbs of Perth, days earlier. He called two fellow Liberals, Steve Irons and Alex Hawke, and told them he believed the Prime Minister was finished. They agreed. ‘It was clear that we felt the same and believed the PM must go. Both of them told me they and others were consulting colleagues,’ Simpkins wrote.

  Simpkins was an unlikely rebel. A former policeman and champion rower who had joined the army and risen to the rank of major, he agreed with Abbott on Liberal Party philosophy and was, like his leader, a social conservative who opposed same sex marriage. His concern was Abbott’s political skill, not his ideology, and he discovered over subsequent days that others in the party room were just as frustrated at the poor performance since the election in September 2013. They wanted a different leader.

  Turnbull was constantly mentioned as the man to replace Abbott, but the early members of this rebellion had someone else in mind.

  ‘Has the time come?’ Simpkins messaged Scott Morrison on 26 January.

  ‘That is up to the backbench,’ Morrison replied. It was a tantalising answer, leaving options open.3

  The invitation was plain. Simpkins regarded Morrison as the ideal new leader.

  Morrison was a suburban everyman compared to Abbott and Turnbull, both of them Rhodes scholars. The son of a policeman, he came from a middle-class household and attended a state school while embracing the strong faith of his Presbyterian parents. He married his teenage sweetheart, Jenny, not long after leaving university with a degree in economic geography and a job in the property business. Yet he was political from the start, helping his father fight local elections as an independent councillor for sixteen years. Behind the family man was a shrewd political operator who was running the NSW division of the Liberal Party not long after he turned thirty. And he knew how to win a ballot. He lost the first preselection contest for the electorate he wanted, Cook, but muscled his way into Parliament by making sure the party forced a second ballot he could win.

  Watched with suspicion by leaders on the left and right of the party, Morrison was known for attending events with both factions, in one case on the same evening. Yet he had a tight group of friends who had entered Parliament with him in 2007 and joined him for bible study every week when in Canberra. Alex Hawke, Steve Irons and Stuart Robert were the core of this small but cohesive bloc, sometimes dismissed as the ‘prayer group’, which had stuck with Morrison on his rise to federal cabinet. As the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection during the Abbott government’s first year, and the opposition spokesman in the area for almost four years before that, he had devised tough policies to stop asylum seekers arriving by boat. The measures, including turning back boats, made him a contentious figure in the community but earned him high praise in the Liberal party room. His close friends were sure he would become Prime Minister one day, but they also knew that now was not that time.

  A new leadership team was openly canvassed to install Turnbull as Prime Minister, retain Julie Bishop as Liberal Party deputy and Foreign Minister and promote Morrison to Treasurer.4 One of Simpkins’ colleagues in Western Australia, Don Randall, had been working to remove Abbott and elect Turnbull from the middle of the previous year. ‘Put your house on it. Turnbull will get there,’ he told a friend.5

  Mathias Cormann, the Finance Minister, attempted to shield Abbott from this backbench brushfire. He called Simpkins and urged him to retreat, only to hear a flat rejection. ‘I told him I wanted Scott as PM, or maybe Julie, but not Malcolm,’ recalled Simpkins. The conversation led him to make another attempt to recruit Morrison. He called him on 3 February and asked him outright to stand. ‘He told me clearly he would not and he would remain loyal to the PM.’

  Morrison had told Turnbull towards the end of November 2014, in a meeting in Turnbull’s electorate office in Edgecliff in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, that Abbott was probably finished. This was an astonishing verdict less than fifteen months after Abbott had taken power, but it became a shared view among others over the summer, even before the Prince Philip knighthood. Some Liberals regarded Morrison as the first and most active cabinet minister to encourage the backbench defiance in February — a sensitive and contested verdict because of the way this event shaped everything that fol
lowed. The fact that Morrison was asked to be a candidate in early 2015, and the fact that Turnbull was a reluctant choice for many in the party room, meant there was always an element of doubt over who should lead. Bishop, too, had her champions. The Liberal Party’s leadership rivalries and anxieties were never settled.

  The complaints about Abbott continued over the first week of February. A Queensland backbencher, Andrew Laming, proposed legislation to ban knights and dames from the honours list. A former cabinet minister, Mal Brough, criticised the handling of a Medicare co-payment that made it more expensive to visit the doctor. In the most telling remark, Arthur Sinodinos, a New South Wales Senator and former chief of staff to John Howard during a decade in the Prime Minister’s Office, said his support for Abbott was ‘not unconditional’ and the government needed to lift its performance.6 Asked on Sky News whether Abbott would still be Prime Minister the following week, Sinodinos replied: ‘Comrade, come and ask me next week.’

  Impatient that nobody else would force a ballot, Simpkins spoke to Randall and Brough, who were both arguing for Turnbull as leader, and said he would act when the party room met in the first week of Parliament for the year. He drafted a motion with the aim of encouraging Bishop to stand for the leadership if Morrison would not. It said the Liberal party room would resolve, by secret ballot, that the senior positions of the parliamentary party be declared vacant. This meant Bishop’s position as deputy would also be in play — the only way, Simpkins thought, to get her to run.

  Simpkins had the motion seconded by Randall. One of them wanted Morrison or Bishop, one of them wanted Turnbull, both wanted change.

  Abbott called Simpkins again. He voiced no anger when told of the motion but issued a warning. You are damaging the country. Abbott saw this move as a dangerous weakening of the entire government after the leadership challenges of the Labor years under Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. He also pleaded for time. In public, he had tried to lift his stocks by dropping one of his most iconic but least popular policies, an expansion of paid parental leave which was generous to wealthier families, an expensive idea at a time of budget cuts and divisive for Liberals because it was funded by a levy on business. In private, he conceded to backbenchers that he had six months or a ‘few months’ to improve.7 One of those MPs listened to a voicemail from the Prime Minister and remembered his words.