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  ‘I believe they were in many instances inept and most definitely in many instances unnecessary,’ Joyce said. He still thought he could keep his leadership and work with Turnbull, but his fellow Nationals MPs were not so sure. The only hope for recovery was to send Joyce far into the countryside, well away from Canberra, to spend time with Campion in a townhouse in Armidale lent to them by a Nationals donor. Even here, though, Joyce could not stay out of the limelight. He agreed to an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald and insisted he could remain Deputy Prime Minister. He did not help his relationship with Turnbull, however, when he was asked when the Prime Minister first learnt of the Campion affair.

  ‘He never asked any direct questions and to be honest, if I believed it was private, I wouldn’t have told him either,’ said Joyce.18 The truth was that Turnbull had asked him at The Lodge the previous year.

  Catherine Marriott watched the spectacle from Canberra in dread. Every time Joyce appeared on her television or in her news feed she remembered an incident with him outside the Hotel Kurrajong in Canberra on an August night, eighteen months earlier. She had told friends what happened that night but had not written a word of complaint. Now every reminder seemed to make the burden heavier. Marriott was a shire councillor in Broome who had been named Western Australia’s Rural Woman of the Year in 2012. She travelled to Canberra often and had organised a networking night at the Kurrajong as part of a beef industry week in Canberra. Joyce was the guest speaker.

  Joyce and Marriott had talked outside the hotel for a while. There, he had made a move that she considered sexual harassment and he claimed was consensual. She had gone back to her room and burst into tears. Now her guilt and anger were growing. Every news bulletin seemed to tell her she was weak for staying silent. Marriott called a close friend, Sue Middleton, one day after Turnbull announced the bonk ban, to say she wanted to lodge a complaint against Joyce. Marriott also spoke to a friend and lawyer, Emma Salerno, to find out if there was a process at the Nationals to deal with her complaint.

  ‘I’ll have your back,’ Middleton told Marriott. They had spoken about Joyce before; the story of the Hotel Kurrajong did not surprise Middleton. She had been close to rural politics for years without being a member of any political party. She ran a farm with her husband in Western Australia’s wheatbelt and had been Australia’s Rural Woman of the Year in 2010.

  Just as Joyce held a press conference to call Turnbull ‘inept’, Marriott made a complaint about him to the WA Nationals. She spoke to the state party’s former leader, Terry Redman, who then spoke to Middleton in a conversation that confirmed the claim was serious. Redman told the state party leader, Mia Davies, and the deputy leader, Jacqui Boydell. Davies mentioned the complaint to the federal president of the Nationals, Larry Anthony, on Saturday, 17 February, when he was visiting Perth. There was no higher authority in the organisational wing of the party to consult on this complaint. A formal letter claiming sexual harassment went from Salerno Lawyers to the New South Wales Nationals on Tuesday, 20 February.

  The news was leaked at frightening speed. The Daily Telegraph reported the sexual harassment complaint on Thursday night, barely two days after the complaint was made. The newspaper did not name Marriott but its report began a frantic search for the woman with this devastating claim, a very different story about Joyce than the consensual affair with Campion. Middleton told Marriott to get on a flight from Broome to Perth. By Friday afternoon they were driving to Middleton’s farm, where intruders would have to cross endless private fields to find their target. Marriott’s phone was switched off, but this did not stop journalists. She was named in the Weekend Australian on Saturday. It was barely four days after her lawyers had sent her confidential complaint.

  In the farmhouse near Wongan Hills, surrounded by paddocks and a piggery, Marriott was shut off from the world. It took until Saturday afternoon for her to look at a television and see herself on the news. ‘She absolutely went to pieces,’ said Middleton. ‘That was the night I really feared for her. It was just too much. It did feel like she’d destroyed her life.’

  Joyce was stewing over his fate in Armidale when he took a call from Anthony. When can we meet? The next night he headed to an Armidale motel at 9.30 p.m. to find Anthony waiting for him in a small room with Bernard Ponting, the honorary legal counsel to the Liberal National Party of Queensland. They had flown in that afternoon. It was Wednesday, 21 February.

  Ponting told Joyce of the letter of complaint but did not name the complainant. As soon as he described the encounter, however, Joyce knew who he meant and named Marriott. Ponting read aloud from the letter. Barnaby insisted it was consensual, that he had text messages from Marriott after the night at the Kurrajong to show it was. Ponting and Anthony dwelt on the political implications, the risk of disclosure and the danger of another scandal in the media. ‘That would be blackmail,’ Joyce argued. There was no plea for Joyce to resign, no demand that he do so, but there was a heavy emphasis on the good of his family — Natalie, his four daughters, his parents, Campion. The message was simple. ‘Consider your position.’ Their preference was clear.

  Nationals MPs saw the damage from the scandal to their party and their prospects. One of them, Andrew Broad, unleashed his moral condemnation. ‘When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘Telling words for the leadership of the National Party.’ Broad, an avowed Christian, had once accused Turnbull of a ‘failure of leadership’ in bringing marriage equality to a vote in Parliament. Now he was quoting American evangelist Billy Graham with a judgement that made headlines. His words would be remembered months later.

  Joyce resigned on Friday, 23 February, at a press conference on a hillside overlooking Armidale, where he said the sexual harassment complaint was ‘spurious and defamatory’ but was also the end of his leadership. ‘The allegations that I read in the paper, I just thought, that has to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.’ He said his family had already been through too much. ‘This has got to stop. It’s not fair on them.’ He did not dismiss the idea of being leader again one day.

  There was no phone call to Turnbull to let him know what was coming. The Prime Minister was in Washington DC, preparing for a meeting with Donald Trump, when texts came through to Cray and others about the imminent news. Rather than speak to Turnbull, Joyce instead told Cormann, who was acting Prime Minister while Turnbull was away and Joyce was on leave.

  Turnbull was having evening drinks with journalists in Blair House, an historic home opposite the White House, when news spread that Joyce was about to resign. The Prime Minister was shown a mobile phone with the news from Canberra, reported by the Australian Financial Review, almost two hours before Joyce made it official.19 It seemed fitting that this played out near the Lincoln Room of Blair House, a townhouse built in 1824 and now an official residence for presidential guests. Turnbull was dealing with a government in turmoil in the rooms where Abraham Lincoln used to visit friends during the Civil War.

  The Joyce affair had turned Parliament House into the backdrop for a tabloid scandal. Australians gained a glimpse of life in Canberra for some of their elected representatives when they were away from their families and surrounded by young advisers. The platitude uttered so often about the challenges faced by the ‘conscripts’ in political life — the partners of the politicians — suddenly had real meaning.

  Joyce was destined for a crisis as soon as Campion became pregnant, something he admitted months later. ‘I was going to lose my job,’ he wrote. ‘I had to play the game as events determined, not as I wanted.’20 In fact, he did nothing to manage the situation other than prolong the secrecy. It was foolish and selfish and exposed the government to damage and division. By the time Joyce was on the backbench, replaced by Michael McCormack as the new Deputy Prime Minister, the Nationals party room had split into camps according to whether MPs believed Joyce was a lost cause or a leader in
exile.

  The government might have navigated this without the harassment claim from Marriott. Joyce denied the claim absolutely. He called it spurious and defamatory and said it should go to the police so he could defend himself. A Nationals investigation was inconclusive.21 Yet Marriott’s decision began a conversation about the treatment of women in Australian politics, separate from the questions about Joyce. Once Marriott lodged her claim, the culture of the Parliament was on trial. This was a world where more than one man was known as an ‘octopus’ for his roving hands. Women in Parliament House shared accounts of harassment but chose not to risk their careers by naming someone in power.

  Predatory behaviour was common, wrote journalist Karen Middleton in a personal account of sexual harassment in the Parliament and the Press Gallery over the years. ‘Many of my female peers had these kinds of stories,’ she wrote.22 ‘They all involved men who were older and most were in positions of some sort of authority.’ The dynamic had not changed greatly in a Parliament where men still held most of the leadership positions. Months after Marriott’s claim, a sexual harassment allegation against the New South Wales Opposition Leader, Luke Foley, suggested the problem was not contained to federal politics.23

  Joyce blamed Turnbull for his downfall. He felt cabinet ministers had connived with the media to spread stories about himself and Campion, including a long examination of their travel allowances. Others dismissed this as laughable. What benefit was there to anyone in the government from the exposure of the affair or the relentless coverage that followed? Ministers regarded Joyce as a man who thought he was invincible but fell victim to his own weakness — in his personal behaviour as much as his political judgement.

  At the height of the media storm, between newspaper revelation and political resignation, Joyce gave voice to his frustration at what he regarded as Turnbull’s attempt to get rid of him. As senior ministers prepared for a meeting of the national security committee of federal cabinet, but before Turnbull had arrived, Joyce warned about the trouble ahead if he ended up on the backbench.

  ‘I’m sure if we had the time, Tony and I could get the numbers,’ Joyce said.24

  Abbott had shown the trouble one former leader could cause from the backbench. Now there were two.

  7

  CLIMATE CRISIS

  FEBRUARY TO JULY 2018

  TURNBULL WAS NEVER SAFE from conservative unrest on climate change and energy. He was doubly vulnerable in the beginning of April 2018 when Abbott and his lieutenants began pressing their colleagues for a shift in the government’s direction. The former leader and two close allies, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews, prepared an argument that sounded like a policy debate but could easily turn into a leadership test. They had an idea that was certain to divide the Liberals: the need for government intervention to build or subsidise coal-fired power stations. They chose a timeframe that was certain to maximise the damage to Turnbull: the first week of April in 2018, when the opinion polls would show the government had lost 30 Newspolls in a row against Labor and had therefore failed the benchmark Turnbull had named when challenging Abbott for the leadership more than two years earlier.

  Abetz, a man with so much influence in the conservative wing of the Tasmanian Liberal Party he could decide the fate of state colleagues, nursed a grudge against Turnbull. He had prospered as Employment Minister during the Abbott government but found his career cruelled by Turnbull in September 2015, when he was removed from cabinet in one of the first decisions by the new leader. ‘A great injustice has occurred for no good reason,’ he said later of his demotion, when describing the verdict from his friends.1 Andrews felt the same wound. One of Abbott’s loyal supporters in government, bound by shared Catholic beliefs, he was so bitter at the coup, and his removal as Defence Minister, that he called a press conference to reveal his departure before Turnbull had time to announce it. Andrews denied any concern about himself. ‘It was all about the stability of our defence force in Australia,’ he said.2

  Abbott, Abetz and Andrews were united in seeking revenge. All they needed was a slip of paper with a strong brand name and a divisive idea. The result was the Monash Forum, a putative group of Liberal and National MPs who would stand up for the conservative cause on climate change and energy. The name came from one of the nation’s greatest military heroes, John Monash. The idea was to save coal-fired power stations from the competition they faced from wind and solar farms, using taxpayer funds to intervene, subsidise and possibly own new electricity generators to be powered by coal. It was an unlikely manifesto for Liberals who claimed to believe in free markets, but the three men cited Turnbull’s proudest energy policy, the expansion of the Snowy Hydro scheme, to justify spending taxpayer funds to replace the Hazelwood power station, which had been closed by French company Engie in March 2017.

  Their argument glossed over political, economic and environmental reality. Snowy Hydro, a profitable company, had been owned by taxpayers since the 1950s and had been put under full federal control in March, when the Turnbull government bought the 58 per cent owned by New South Wales and the 29 per cent held by Victoria. The company was studying a proposal to build new tunnels and storage to generate about 2,000 megawatts of hydro-electric power, adding to the 4,100 megawatts from its existing turbines. Snowy Hydro could pump water uphill when wind power was cheap, such as in the middle of the night, and pour it through the turbines when demand for electricity was high, such as a hot summer afternoon. The risk was significant, given the costs of construction and transmission, but this was a commercial study.

  There was no such blueprint for a new Hazelwood. It had no corporate sponsor, no useful estimate of the government spending or subsidy required and no answer to the biggest question facing any power station that burned coal: how to deal with the prospect of government regulations, over decades, to impose a price on carbon emissions. The same questions shadowed another coal-fired power station, Liddell, which was owned by AGL and scheduled for closure in 2022. The ‘carbon risk’ alone could make a new or extended power station unviable, but none of this deterred Abbott, Abetz and Andrews. They turned coal-fired power into an article of faith, knowing they could not be criticised for articulating a policy even when the ultimate target was Turnbull.

  Abetz took the Monash Forum paper to his colleagues in the Senate in the week before Easter. Andrews spoke to Liberals and Nationals in the House of Representatives, where he could count on the support of Craig Kelly and George Christensen, two voices in the joint party room who spoke up for coal. Barnaby Joyce, seething on the backbench after his fall from the leadership, joined as well. Ian Goodenough, a quietly spoken Liberal in a safe seat in suburban Perth, signed up thinking he was joining a group with a new name to continue a social gathering he already attended.

  The conservative group had existed ever since those on the right of the party began having lunch in the ‘Monkey Pod’ room in the ministerial wing of Parliament House, named for the tropical hardwood used in the room’s central table. The meetings were a constant source of suspicion. With Christopher Pyne’s ministerial office on one side of the room and Peter Dutton’s on the other, the Liberal moderates aligned with Pyne were able to keep an eye on the conservative gatherings, which included Abbott, Abetz, Andrews, Dutton and others.

  Yet the Monash name was not enough to persuade all the Monkey Pod conservatives to join the new crusade on coal, as Abetz discovered when he put the idea to conservative Liberals in the upper house, including Amanda Stoker from Queensland, James Paterson from Victoria, Slade Brockman from Western Australia and Jonathon Duniam from Tasmania, the last of these a former adviser to Abetz himself. None would sign up. For all their concerns about the rising cost of electricity, and their objections to subsidising renewable power, they did not think government ownership of a coal-fired power station was the answer. They also knew it was a provocative move on the leadership. Some conservatives in the lower house, such as Andrew Hastie, also declined to sign. Few were inclined to
trust Abbott in the Liberal Party’s debate on energy subsidies and government intervention. Paterson, a student of conservative philosophy, could see no consistency in the Monash Forum’s new argument.

  None of this history was mentioned when Peta Credlin revealed the existence of the Monash Forum on 2 April. ‘A group of Coalition MPs are pushing to nationalise Liddell coal-fired power station,’ said the headline on her Sky News program. Credlin talked up the policy dispute on energy and the political challenge for Turnbull. It was Easter Monday and Parliament was in recess for five weeks — a lull in political news that was filled the next morning with speculation over the leadership. The Daily Telegraph reported a ‘backbench revolt’ against the Prime Minister over coal-fired power, while The Australian called it a ‘backbench test’ and reported a claim from Christensen that twenty MPs had signed up to the new group.3 The twenty Liberals and Nationals were never identified, but the claim was enough: the sock puppet of the Monash Forum was floodlit and magnified by the media to cast a shadow across the entire government.

  The membership list for this revolt amounted to only five confirmed Liberals out of a party room of 85 members: Abbott, Abetz, Andrews, Goodenough and Kelly.4 None of this would have mattered so much without Abbott’s former chief of staff encouraging the insurrection. Credlin wanted the revolt to happen so badly she imagined the conservatives rallying around Abbott even when they were not. She was agent and observer all at once, in a dual role nobody called out when they appeared on her program. At one moment she was urging the conservatives forward, at another she was pretending to be a news host asking questions. It was a rerun of her work the previous November, when she and Bolt had inflated the threat from Christensen to quit the Coalition if Turnbull remained leader. In the business of destabilising a government, exaggeration never failed.