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  The government had succeeded in Parliament with some policies since Turnbull had taken over. Laws had been passed to track the foreign ownership of farming land, clean up rorts in vocational education and discourage tax avoidance by global companies. Some of the tax concessions on superannuation were scaled back, raising $3 billion in revenue despite the protests from loyal Liberal supporters who hated the change. The Senate rejected the government’s amendments to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, ensuring it would remain an offence to ‘insult’ or ‘offend’ someone on the basis of race, but the government made changes to the way the Australian Human Rights Commission handled complaints. This was more than Abbott had achieved.

  Criminal laws were toughened to allow authorities to keep ‘high-risk terrorist offenders’ in detention after they had served their jail sentences. The government restored the industrial watchdog in the building industry, the Australian Building and Construction Commission, in a Senate victory that should have cheered the conservative heartland. The government imposed a levy on the nation’s five largest banks to raise $6.2 billion over four years, answering Shorten’s demands for a royal commission into the sector with a revenue grab instead.

  But every stalemate in the Senate made it more difficult for Turnbull to declare a triumph. No matter what was passed, attention turned to what was blocked. The government could not persuade Labor, the Greens or the crossbench senators to increase the Medicare levy from 2 per cent to 2.5 per cent to help fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme, even though the idea repeated a similar Labor increase in 2014. It took until April 2018 for Turnbull to admit defeat and scrap this plan.

  Towering over all these arguments was the idea that came to define Turnbull for many voters. He had campaigned for company tax cuts for more than a year but could not persuade the Senate to accept his claim that the economic gain was worth $65 billion in forgone Commonwealth revenue, the full cost of cutting the rate from 30 to 25 per cent for all companies over a decade. This was a totemic dispute. It contrasted Turnbull’s call for lower taxes with Shorten’s campaign for fairness and more generous spending on health and education. Day by day, Shorten branded Turnbull as an agent of the ‘big end of town’ and turned the tax policy into a political liability for its owner. The Senate gave its grudging support to part of the plan in March, cutting the tax rate to 27.5 per cent in a first step to a lower rate of 25 per cent for all companies with a turnover of less than $50 million. There was no appetite to go further. Every delay to a deal made Turnbull look ineffective, as he struggled to mandate the economic reform he said the nation needed.

  The barbs from Abbott found their mark. The election anniversary made Turnbull want to acclaim his achievements. More than that, he wanted to make sure his enemies knew he would not go quietly if they thought of signing up to Abbott’s sedition. He used an interview with the Sunday Herald Sun to make it clear that anyone who tried to drag him out of The Lodge would also risk dragging down the government.

  Turnbull seemed to think out loud as he answered questions from journalist Annika Smethurst about his record and his future. He mentioned the lesson of John Key, the New Zealand Prime Minister who had resigned and left Parliament six months earlier. Would Turnbull leave Parliament if he was replaced? ‘It is a big wrench going from being leader to not, I understand that,’ he said.33 ‘When I cease to be Prime Minister, I will cease to be a Member of Parliament. I am not giving anyone else advice but I just think that’s what I would do.’

  The ultimatum was put mildly but was an ultimatum all the same. In a government with a majority of one in the House of Representatives, Abbott and his small group of allies had fair warning that Turnbull would give up his eastern Sydney seat of Wentworth and trigger a by-election if they moved against him.

  I am not giving anyone else advice. That was just as well, because Abbott would not take it anyway. Abbott was a man with a conservative mission and was about to throw himself into another crusade.

  5

  THE GULF ON MARRIAGE EQUALITY

  JUNE TO DECEMBER 2017

  MEMBERS OF THE BLACK Hand gathered in Sydney to celebrate their influence over the Liberal Party in the winter of 2017. The Cherry Bar at Star Casino was crowded with politicians and lobbyists from the moderate wing of the party, led by one of the wittiest and wiliest members of the Turnbull government. Christopher Pyne, the Defence Industry Minister, gave a typically energetic speech that praised his factional allies, George Brandis and Marise Payne, and promised victory over the conservative wing in the disputes to come. It was Friday, 16 June, and the members of the Black Hand, a jokingly sinister name the moderates gave themselves in the 1980s, were overjoyed to have one of their own in The Lodge.

  ‘Now there was a time when people said it wouldn’t happen,’ Pyne said of Turnbull’s rise to the leadership.1 ‘But George and I kept the faith. We voted for Malcolm Turnbull in every ballot he’s ever been in. So we are actually doing pretty well, we moderates for you in Canberra.’

  Pyne spoke with energy and enthusiasm, unaware that this made it all the easier for someone in or near the Cherry Bar to record every word and pass the audio file to the conservatives. The tension between the factions was on display that weekend, when the Liberals met for a federal council meeting in Darling Harbour to debate policy and appoint officials. Abbott’s choice for party president, former cabinet minister Richard Alston, was at his last council meeting before relinquishing the post to Turnbull’s preferred president, former New South Wales Premier Nick Greiner. In a proxy war between the rival camps, state division presidents including Michael Kroger from Victoria and Gary Spence from Queensland had succeeded in ousting the acting federal director of the party, Andrew Bragg, who had taken the job at Turnbull’s request to modernise the party machinery. A selection committee chose a new director in Andrew Hirst, former deputy chief of staff to Abbott as Prime Minister. The rancour was so great that Alston tried to prevent Bragg giving the federal director’s address to the council before giving up the post.

  The spy at the Cherry Bar had a willing network of conservatives who were anxious to know what the moderates were up to. Their suspicions were realised when they heard Pyne promise to legislate same sex marriage, an idea that provoked the right like few others.

  ‘One of those [things] we’ve got to deliver before too long is marriage equality in this country,’ said Pyne into the microphone. The crowd cheered. ‘We’re going to get it. I think it might even be sooner than everyone thinks. And your friends in Canberra are working on that outcome.’

  Anxious and watchful, the social conservatives retaliated as soon as they heard this hint of a plan. Sooner than everyone thinks. It sounded like a conspiracy, at least to those who had managed to delay the change in 2015 and wanted to do so again. By Monday night the boast could be heard from an audio file freely available from Andrew Bolt’s blog at the Herald Sun, with the columnist condemning the ‘gloating’ about the sway of the ‘Liberal Left’ in a government he said was being annihilated.

  The Marriage Act had become so sacrosanct for one side of the Liberal party room that any question about changing the law led to mutterings about changing the leader. Turnbull was exposed to danger whenever his colleagues tried to bring the marriage question to a head, whether the pressure came from the left or right. Marriage equality was second to only one other issue, climate change, in its power to turn Liberal against Liberal and weaken the government. Yet there was no way to keep delaying a decision when social attitudes were changing and marriage equality appeared to have enough support in Parliament to legislate the change if everyone was allowed to ignore party edicts and vote with their conscience.

  Five Liberals were working to make this happen. Western Australian Senator Dean Smith was preparing a draft bill to legalise same sex marriage. Warren Entsch, Trevor Evans, Tim Wilson and Trent Zimmerman were working towards the same goal in the House of Representatives. All believed the time had come to change the l
aw. All except Entsch were gay. All saw that Labor was ready to vote for marriage equality and that a handful of Liberals could make the difference in Parliament. All knew that any attempt to force a decision would provoke the conservatives and put pressure on Turnbull to speak up for change, but they were not going to hold back merely to make it easier for the leader to keep the peace. They wanted a decision.

  What troubled Entsch was not the fact of the leak from the Cherry Bar but the ferocity of the response. He wanted vocal support from the Prime Minister to allow a free vote on marriage as soon as possible, but Turnbull responded to the Pyne remarks by making it obvious he did not want to encourage the equality campaign at that moment. Would he ever? The government’s stated policy was a plebiscite in which every voter would have a say on marriage. Asked about the commitment to a plebiscite after Bolt’s leak, Turnbull was emphatic: ‘We have no plans to change it. Full stop.’

  Entsch was hell-bent on making this change. He had fought for gay rights for years in parliament, starting with laws to stop discrimination against same-sex partners who were turned away from social security or the war widows’ pension. What drove him was the memory of a friendship from decades before, when he had looked up from a beer in a Queensland hotel to see a ‘good looking sheila’ working behind the bar, only to discover she was someone he had known months earlier in a different guise. She had just returned from a sex change in Sydney. The friendship changed Entsch, who had started his working life as a Royal Australian Air Force engine fitter before getting into real estate and becoming a crocodile farmer. Once in Parliament he became a passionate political advocate for marriage equality.

  Entsch knew how arduous it would be to make yet another attempt to change the law. He had argued with John Howard in 2004 when the Prime Minister, at the peak of his authority, oversaw a change to the Marriage Act that specified a bond between a man and a woman. He had voted for change in 2012 when most political leaders — not least Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd — ensured the bill was defeated. He had broken with Tony Abbott in 2015 when the Liberals and Nationals held their long meeting in Parliament House, running late into the night, over whether to allow a conscience vote.

  Smith remembered a conversation that came out of that marathon meeting in August 2015. Smith was a monarchist, an economic conservative and a Liberal who believed in free markets and personal liberty. He had watched in disbelief as Abbott argued for a plebiscite and imposed the idea on the party room. Smith was enraged at what he saw as the trashing of Liberal principle. He left the meeting convinced that Abbott belonged in the Democratic Labour Party, the Catholic party of paternal state power and big government in the 1950s, a party more interested in tightening social controls than loosening economic ones. He’s not one of us. He’s a DLP man. Smith took a call that night from someone offering sympathy and support on the path to marriage equality. It was Turnbull. ‘We’ll get there together,’ he said.

  Two years later, the mission of the Liberal Party’s marriage equality campaigners was to free the government from the dead weight of Abbott’s old pledge. Turnbull had risen to the leadership in September 2015 with an implicit promise to the conservatives and a written undertaking to the Nationals to pursue the plebiscite, a position he guaranteed during the election campaign. Even Liberals who preferred a conscience vote on marriage felt they should honour the election pledge to give the Australian people a chance to cast their ballots. This held true even after the Senate rejected the bill to set up the plebiscite in November 2016.

  The clamour for change grew louder because Australians who believed in marriage equality saw it enacted by parliaments around the world. A referendum in Ireland in 2015 had shown that Catholic tradition could not stop a popular campaign. A snap vote in Germany in June 2017 confirmed that even a conservative leader like Angela Merkel had to recognise and act upon the shift in social attitudes.

  Smith found a way to rescue the reform from its defeat in the Senate. The original plebiscite bill included a draft law to change the Marriage Act, prepared by the Attorney-General’s Department on the instructions of Brandis, an important advocate for change. The Brandis draft had been reviewed by a Senate committee but was tied to the doomed plebiscite. Smith had been part of this process before the failure of the plebiscite, when he spoke to Cormann to form the Senate committee and prepare the bill with Turnbull’s knowledge. Smith regarded this as a ‘grand bargain’ to find a path towards a free vote. Now he snatched the draft bill from the political furnace and worked on it over the summer, sweating over the fine print with Anna Brown and Lee Carnie from the Australian Human Rights Law Centre, as well as Corey Irlam. This was clandestine work during the early months of 2017.

  The five Liberals spoke more often after the Pyne leak and began holding a teleconference every few days to discuss how to use their numbers in Parliament. Smith knew he could use his position in the Senate to call for change and negotiate with independents, Labor and the Greens to get the numbers to make it happen. Entsch, Evans, Wilson and Zimmerman created a bloc in the House of Representatives that was big enough to tip the balance when and if they could force the matter to a vote. They understood the power of this calculation because Evans, Wilson and Zimmerman were new to the Parliament. Their bloc had not existed when Abbott pushed back against Entsch in August 2015. Their arrival changed everything.

  What they could not get around was the government’s control of the Selection of Bills Committee, the gatekeeper for every law that went to the House for a decision. They needed a majority in the Coalition party room to agree that the time had come to abandon the plebiscite and allow a free vote.

  Smith felt like giving up after the leak against Pyne. He worried there was too much chatter and not enough determination when their opponents were ready to exploit any show of nerves. It took him time to decide he had to finish the job. In early July he made a public call for a conscience vote on a bill he wanted to introduce into Parliament. ‘Yes, I will do it,’ said the headline in the Sunday Times, his hometown newspaper in Perth.2 Smith revealed the existence of his draft law and said the Parliament should decide the matter without a plebiscite. He was anxious about a counter-attack from his opponents and aware that cabinet ministers could turn on him for giving up on an election promise, but he heard nothing from Turnbull. For months, Smith had suspected that Turnbull would not take a stand if Liberals challenged him on the plebiscite. He felt his suspicions being confirmed.

  The five Liberals spoke by phone on Monday, 10 July, and agreed to force a debate on marriage. Three days later they put the finishing touches to the bill and signed a letter to Turnbull so he would know to prepare for a significant debate in the party room. All knew they would be accused of inflaming division among the Liberals and Nationals, so they included safeguards to assuage those with religious objections to the change. No priest would be forced to solemnise a marriage between two men or women; no church would be forced to rent out its hall for the marriage of two women or men. But as they wrote their letter, the five Liberals left no doubt they wanted the law to be changed swiftly and were willing to cross the floor and vote against their own party if they had to do so.

  ‘A foundational principle of the Liberal Party, and an institutional distinction between ourselves and Labor, is that Members and Senators are elected to Parliament with a free vote on all matters,’ they wrote.3 ‘As a sign of respect to our colleagues and the processes of the Liberal Party Room, it is our strong desire to be able to share our bill with colleagues prior to the resumption of Parliament on Tuesday, 8 August.’ The deadline was set, but they did not want to take Turnbull by surprise. The letter was sent to David Bold in the Prime Minister’s Office, who took it to Turnbull. It was another message for federal cabinet on a problem it never seemed to solve, but there was no written reply. The official response to the five authors was silence.

  Peter Dutton approached Entsch and Evans about taking a completely different path. The Home Affairs Minister had b
een working on the idea of a postal vote to replace the plebiscite. Dutton had a public image as a conservative hard man, but colleagues knew he wanted the issue settled before the next election, as long as it could be done in a way that honoured the election pledge of a people’s vote. News of his plan had leaked in March.

  ‘It won’t work,’ Entsch told Dutton. How would this version get through the Senate if the original had failed? Smith despised the idea of a postal survey. He called it ‘junk mail’.

  Evans stayed in touch with Dutton despite the doubts. He did not oppose a public vote on same sex marriage, given he had supported it as official policy when he entered parliament in 2016 as the Liberal member for the seat of Brisbane. As the first openly gay MP from Queensland at either a state or federal level, he was willing to consider all options to get the law changed. ‘If it takes a plebiscite to do it, that is an easy decision to take,’ he thought. He knew he could work with Dutton. Years before entering Parliament, as a Liberal Party volunteer, he had taken a year off from his work as an economist to become Dutton’s chief of staff. It made sense for him to be the group’s main contact with the Home Affairs Minister.

  Believing the conscience vote had to be the priority, the five Liberals drafted a media plan to build support. They knew they could only succeed if Turnbull accepted their plan. At the same time, they could feel him pushing back because the risks to his authority increased with every outbreak of strife between the party’s warring sides. Zimmerman could not help but voice his frustration to Pyne, his flatmate in a shared house in Canberra when Parliament was in session. ‘Malcolm’s bleeding because he’s not standing up for something,’ he said. Pyne cautioned Zimmerman against forcing a crisis. He argued that unilateral action could bring down the government. They both wanted Turnbull to succeed.