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  ‘I accept that things have gone wrong, I accept that it is partly my fault,’ Abbott said in this private plea. ‘If the spill motion is carried it will be a vote of no confidence in the government by the government and it will be a decapitation of the government. Now I know I don’t have forever to turn it around. If I can’t make it work in the next few months then people will draw their own conclusions.’

  Abbott promised a recovery but spurned advice when his colleagues suggested two ways to bring one about. He would not replace his Treasurer, Joe Hockey. He would not replace his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. The fate of his leadership turned in part on his loyalty to these two friends, although the idea that dropping them would have saved his government will always be an untested theory. Hockey had contested the leadership against Abbott and Turnbull in 2009 in the ballot that installed Abbott as Opposition Leader. He was now one of the Prime Minister’s most important ministers and allies but was blamed for fumbling the government’s economic policy and doing a poor job of selling unpopular budget savings, even though both tasks were shared responsibilities with Abbott and other cabinet ministers. Could Abbott really throw Hockey overboard to save himself?

  While Hockey was popular, Credlin was divisive — even hated. She had been instrumental to Abbott’s success as Opposition Leader and central to the Coalition’s victory at the 2013 election, not least for the way she brought discipline and deadly political tactics to a leader prone to unguarded remarks. Once in power, Credlin was ruthless with those who were close to Abbott and might threaten her influence, and she antagonised cabinet ministers with petty restraints, such as adding another minister to ‘chaperone’ Bishop at a global climate conference, or telling Turnbull who he must appoint as his chief of staff.8 Her long list of enemies grew with her power. Her marriage to the Liberal Party’s federal director, Brian Loughnane, worried party members who wanted an absolute separation between party organisation and Prime Minister’s Office.

  Abbott called her the ‘smartest and the fiercest political warrior’ he had ever worked with. As the attention on Credlin increased he became brittle when asked about her role, to the point he told a radio host it was ‘impertinent’ to ask if she would be moved.9 This was a powerful partnership of two strong characters, yet their close relationship fuelled jealousy and rumour. Abbott’s refusal to put checks on her influence angered ministers and backbenchers, while the complaints infuriated her and made the culture at the top of the government all the more toxic, an astonishing malady barely half-way through its first term. The rage unleashed during this period continued to storm through the government and the Liberal Party years later, long after Abbott had been transferred to the backbench and Credlin to a television studio. Like the Greek furies, the vengeance and retribution never subsided.

  Craig Laundy had refused to sign Simpkins’ motion, yet he was starting to give up on Abbott’s ability to save himself and his government. Laundy had won the marginal electorate of Reid from Labor and could see voters turning against Abbott in the multicultural suburbs of Sydney. He warned Abbott of this, one week before the Prince Philip knighthood, when the Prime Minister called to ask how he thought the government was faring.

  ‘Do you want me to tell you what you want to hear or what you need to hear?’ Laundy asked. Laundy advised Abbott to take two steps towards a rescue: move Credlin, move Hockey. He canvassed the idea of a swap to make Turnbull the Treasurer and transfer Hockey into the communications portfolio. Abbott dismissed this on the grounds that Turnbull would never do it, but Laundy argued it was worth an attempt. ‘Let me speak to him,’ he said.

  Once he had Abbott’s approval to make the approach, he raised the idea with Turnbull and was told it was ‘absolutely’ possible. The obvious fear in the Prime Minister’s Office, that Turnbull would use the treasury portfolio as a platform to seize the leadership later, was the problem. When Laundy told Abbott that Turnbull was open to the portfolio swap, he found the Prime Minister had suddenly cooled. You can’t trust the bloke. You don’t know him like I do. These were the words Laundy remembered. The idea of moving Turnbull into treasury had been put to Abbott for months, but he could not do it. He could not give a bigger role to the man he had defeated in 2009.

  After giving Laundy permission to speak to Turnbull about an idea that might help, Abbott had slammed the door. Laundy thought of this as the point when Abbott could not be saved. ‘That is when he really lost me,’ he said.10

  Turnbull was close to a decision to run. Early on Sunday morning, 8 February, one day before the vote on the leadership motion, he took Laundy by surprise with a phone call while the backbencher was at the Royal Canberra Golf Club.

  ‘They’re telling me that if I put my head up over the parapet I can win,’ Turnbull said.

  ‘Do not put your head up under any circumstances,’ Laundy replied.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘You’re my friend and my only interest is in getting you into that job. And if you stick your head up and lose you’ll never get there.’ Laundy estimated the motion would have 40 votes and would fail. Turnbull held back.

  The final warning to Abbott came from one of the most conservative members of the party room. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells had entered the Senate in 2005 with support from the right of the New South Wales division and a readiness to wage eternal factional war against the moderate wing of the party. The child of Italian migrants, she had a ready smile, an easy laugh and the cold steel of a political professional who had prospered in a world of men. On Sunday night, hours away from the spill motion, she went to Abbott’s office in Parliament House and told him what nobody else would say about the rumours hurting his office.

  ‘Politics is about perceptions,’ she said. ‘Rightly or wrongly, the perception is that you are sleeping with your chief of staff. That’s the perception, and you need to deal with it.’11

  Abbott responded with an instant and calm denial. Credlin denied it when Fierravanti-Wells’ remarks were made public one year later. ‘Completely false, utterly untrue, unfounded and wrong,’ she said. ‘I can’t be any clearer. It is about as low as it gets. It’s vicious and malicious.’12 The whispers were damaging and hurtful to Credlin, Loughnane, Abbott and his wife Margie, but they were spread in a Parliament where rumours flowed freely. They were part of the poison in the party room, then and later.

  The nation’s politicians went to church on Monday morning, 9 February, at a special ecumenical service to prepare for the first session of Parliament for the year. Abbott read from the Gospel According to Mark, 12:28–34, including a passage on loving your neighbour as yourself, but some of his backbenchers were contemplating another reading. The Newspoll in The Australian that morning showed Abbott’s personal rating was at the lowest level for any Prime Minister since Paul Keating in 1994. Asked who they would prefer as Prime Minister, 30 per cent named Abbott and 48 per cent named Shorten, the Labor leader, who had taken the lead on this metric the previous November. This was humiliating. No Prime Minister had performed this poorly against an Opposition Leader since Keating sank to 28 per cent against Alexander Downer two decades earlier.13 In two-party terms, the government trailed Labor by 43 to 57 per cent, a catastrophe if repeated at an election.

  Liberals gathered at nine o’clock in their party room in Parliament House so the chief whip, Philip Ruddock, could hand out ballot papers asking for a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the motion to unseat the leader, with no speeches beforehand. There were 39 in favour and 61 against, with one informal. This was an extraordinary act — proof of the desperation of the backbench, the weakness of the leader, the crisis of confidence in the government. The cry from the backbench was so loud it jolted everyone into the realisation of just how many MPs wanted a challenger to emerge and would, over time, make sure one did. The vote for the ‘empty chair’ kneecapped the Prime Minister.

  ‘I’ve listened, I’ve learnt and I’ve changed,’ Abbott said after the vote. He did what all leaders do in the circ
umstances and emphasised his majority. ‘I am confident that what we have shown the Australian people is that we have looked over the precipice and we have decided that we are not going to go down the Labor Party path of a damaged, divided, dysfunctional government which votes no confidence in itself.’ Then he uttered a remark that rebounded within hours. ‘The fundamental point I make is that the solution to all of these things is good government, and good government starts today. Good government starts today.’

  Shorten attacked when Question Time began. ‘If good government starts today, what on earth has the Prime Minister been doing for the past 521 days?’ The Labor argument proved the accuracy of Abbott’s prophecy. A vote of no confidence in the government by the government. It had taken the Labor caucus two and a half years to revolt against Rudd in the organised challenge to place Gillard in power, led by faction leaders such as Shorten. It had taken the Liberal party room less than eighteen months to launch its first strike against Abbott.

  The arc of a government begins in triumph and ends in defeat, a journey few escape. What set Abbott apart was the speed of his destruction. The protest vote marked the point at which his government lost all capacity for flight, its energy sapped by its own divisions. Australia now had a government hurtling towards its end at a pace unseen in two generations. The federal parliamentary Liberal Party had never engaged in this calculated brutality, even in the difficult period after the resignation of Robert Menzies in 1966 and the death of Harold Holt in 1967, when the party room gave John Gorton three years and one election before cutting him down. Malcolm Fraser won three elections and led the government for more than five years before Andrew Peacock resigned from cabinet and prepared for a challenge, which he justified at the time on the grounds he had joined the party ‘because it was a liberal party, not a conservative party’.

  Fraser waited several months before calling a ballot, which he won by 54 to 27 votes.14

  The fault lines in the party room had existed for years, but they now threatened greater political violence with a move against a Liberal leader in his first term as Prime Minister.

  A party room capable of a revolt like this was a constant danger. What else might it do? When would it next erupt?

  Abbott had lost face and trust with voters before his party room turned against him. He had gone to the September 2013 election promising no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions and no cuts to the ABC or SBS, only to announce savings in all these areas in the government’s first budget in May 2014. He worried fiscal conservatives with his expensive scheme to expand paid parental leave while at the same time antagonising voters with proposed spending cuts elsewhere. First, there was a Medicare co-payment that made it more expensive to visit the doctor. Next, a change to Age Pension indexation that eroded the incomes of elderly Australians compared to workers, an incendiary message to constituents who tended to favour the conservatives. Then there was a ‘wait for the dole’ policy to require young unemployed Australians to wait six months before qualifying for income support, a period regarded by many as punitive.

  ‘Without a doubt it was the worst received budget since I’d been elected in 1996,’ recalled Andrew Southcott, who represented the safe Liberal seat of Boothby in Adelaide.15 Voters recoiled from the co-payment, pension change and welfare waiting period. The government refused to admit the problems at first, only to concede ground on all three policies by amending or dropping them. Every change came too late.

  Abbott had made it easy for Shorten to portray him as a Prime Minister who had broken his election promises in the pursuit of an austerity budget and a social agenda that took Australia back to the 1950s. He claimed success for his government in halting asylum seeker boat arrivals, striking trade deals with China, Japan and South Korea, repealing Labor’s resource tax on iron ore and coal, and abolishing Labor’s scheme to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, just as he had pledged. But he could not appease voters with spending increases as Howard had done, during an astonishing surge in tax revenue from the commodities boom, and as Rudd had done, with the Age Pension, before the global financial crisis ended the years of plenty. The budget deficit was $48.5 billion, or 3 per cent of gross domestic product, in the year to June 2014. It was $37.9 billion the next year.

  Australian political leaders now ruled at a time of economic constraint and fragile loyalties, an era when voters would be merciless with a government that lost their trust. The Victorian state election in November 2014 saw the swift removal of a Coalition government after only one term in power, the result of a 3.6 per cent swing to Labor that installed Daniel Andrews as Premier. The Queensland state election in January 2015 saw the savage defeat of another Coalition government after only one term, a swing of 14 per cent that put Annastacia Palaszczuk in power. The Liberal National Party, led by Campbell Newman, the ‘can-do’ engineer and former soldier, discovered voters did not want its $37 billion privatisation program or the Premier himself. The party began the campaign with 78 seats and lost 42 of them, including Newman’s own.

  The disintegration in Queensland compounded the desperation in Canberra. Abbott, like Newman, was a committed conservative who could be abrasive and uncompromising. The fall of Newman led the Queenslanders in the federal party room to fear the same fate for themselves if Abbott could not make a drastic change. The old loyalties to the two major parties were weaker, because about one quarter of all voters were inclined to give their first preference vote to others, and the propensity to swing was stronger. The seething electorate produced a startled party room ready to jump at any threat.

  Turnbull prepared to launch a challenge. By the time the May budget had come and gone, with its attempts to soften the pension and welfare changes from the previous year, he was being told by his supporters that the government could not survive and he would have to challenge. By the end of June 2015, Turnbull was hosting dinners at his apartment in Kingston in Canberra for close colleagues when they flew into the capital for each session of Parliament. The Sunday night meals, usually pizza with a few bottles of wine, included Mal Brough, Peter Hendy, Craig Laundy, Wyatt Roy and Arthur Sinodinos. Two of his trusted ministerial advisers, Sally Cray and David Bold, sometimes joined. Guests were added over time.

  One of Turnbull’s oldest friends in the Parliament could see the dangers ahead. Russell Broadbent was a tenacious Liberal campaigner who had been elected to Parliament in 1990, lost in 1993, elected in 1996, lost again in 1998 and returned in 2004 as the member for McMillan (later renamed Monash), the Victorian electorate stretching from Wilsons Promontory to Phillip Island and inland to Moe. An influential small-l Liberal with a history of speaking up for the humane treatment of asylum seekers, Broadbent could sense the mood of the electorate better than most. He had helped when Turnbull first entered Parliament in 2004 and they were backbenchers together. Now, during the winter of 2015, Turnbull called him when he was on Phillip Island to tell him Abbott would have to be removed.

  ‘I’m just going to knock him off,’ Turnbull said.

  ‘Fine,’ said Broadbent. ‘What’s your plan?’

  ‘Jobs and growth,’ Turnbull replied. He spoke as if an economic message would be enough on its own, but Broadbent was sceptical. He remembered a conversation over dinner with Turnbull and others years earlier when he had predicted Rudd would seek revenge against Gillard after she had replaced him as leader. Now Turnbull asked Broadbent to look into the future again.

  ‘Anyway, Russell, you always know what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen?’ he asked.

  ‘You’ll knock him off, you’ll be Prime Minister for three months and you’ll be defeated,’ said Broadbent.

  Turnbull dismissed this grim prophecy. He defied it, too, but Broadbent remembered the conversation years later when the defeat ultimately came. ‘Nobody understood the ramifications of knocking off the leader,’ he recalled.16

  The support for Turnbull began to grow beyond the moderate wing of the party. This was n
ot a mission to shift the government on ideology or philosophy but an attempt to win the next election by removing an unpopular leader. In any case, old labels could lose their meaning in a world where Liberals wanted the ‘conservative’ crown for themselves and jealously argued that others were not worthy of the name. The very words ‘conservative’ and ‘moderate’ were terms of convenience on a Liberal Party spectrum where differences of economic principle were rare and MPs could easily unify behind welfare cuts, laws to curb union power, the abolition of Labor’s carbon price and the repeal of Labor’s mining tax.

  The old gulf between ‘wets’ and ‘dries’ no longer defined party room debates because it belonged to an earlier era of dispute over small government, lower taxes, free trade and fewer subsidies, the ideas that created some of the backdrop when Peacock challenged Fraser and the Howard government took power in 1996. These ideas were still elemental to many in the Liberal Party but they no longer formed the great dividing line between rival camps warring over economic policy. The greatest disputes were now on social affairs. Should the Marriage Act be amended to recognise same sex marriage? Should government schools run a program, called Safe Schools, to support gender diversity? Should it be an offence under the law to ‘insult’ or ‘offend’ someone on the basis of their race? Were Muslim Australians doing enough to identify and stop terrorists in their own communities? Only those who answered ‘no’ to every question could claim the crown of the true conservative in the contemporary sense of the word inside the party. To be an economic conservative who believed in gay rights was to sit outside the conventional conservative ‘base’ and to lack a champion among the powerbrokers on the right.