Venom Page 9
Shorten accused Turnbull of trading ‘guns for votes’ in a grubby deal. Forced to be clear, Turnbull said the ban would stay. Angry at losing out, Leyonhjelm released emails from the previous year proving he had arranged the sunset clause with the ministers responsible for justice and customs, Michael Keenan and Peter Dutton. Casually dropping a bomb into the argument, he mentioned that Abbott’s office had been told of the arrangements. Abbott was so eager to defend his record he blundered the next night. ‘The point I want to make is that there were no deals — no deals,’ he said on the ABC’s 7.30 program. Yet an email from Keenan’s office to Leyonhjelm’s office confirmed an agreement on a sunset clause. ‘In return, Senator Leyonhjelm will vote against the Labor amendments,’ it said, referring to a migration bill that Dutton and Keenan needed to get through the upper house.
The claim about ‘no deals’ was in tatters. Tanya Plibersek, the Labor deputy leader, cited the emails in Parliament to pit Turnbull and Abbott against each other. Plibersek asked Keenan if his offer had been done without the authority of Abbott as Prime Minister. Keenan confirmed that Abbott’s office had been apprised of what was going on. Shorten then asked Turnbull to tell Parliament who was telling the truth: Abbott or Keenan. Turnbull backed his minister and contradicted Abbott. ‘I am satisfied that the Minister for Justice acted in the full knowledge of the Prime Minister’s Office at that time,’ he said.
Abbott was stung by the Labor suggestion that he connived at a deal to weaken gun controls and stood in Parliament to tell another side of the story, of his government’s decision in July 2015 to impose the ban on the seven-shot Adler in the first place, halting the arrival of 7,000 pre-ordered guns and up to 20,000 more on longer-term orders.
One fact was overlooked: at no point had the Coalition relaxed gun laws. The seven-shot Adler had been banned by the Abbott government. Turnbull had kept the ban in place. The entire drama had begun because Turnbull had broken the deal with Leyonhjelm and continued the ban. Yet the impression was that Turnbull and Abbott were in open conflict while their party looked weak on guns. The argument was unnecessary and would not have started if Turnbull and Abbott had been on speaking terms. This was not the last time Parliament would see this pattern: Turnbull slow to get his message right, Abbott eager to defend his record, Shorten quick to exploit their tensions.
Turnbull flew to Hangzhou for the Group of 20 summit hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, where he again opposed the construction of military bases on reefs in the South China Sea. The evening entertainment was a series of small boat rides to watch fireworks on West Lake, where Turnbull joined British Prime Minister Theresa May and their Italian counterpart Matteo Renzi. When a carp leapt out of the water and landed at their feet, flapping on the deck, the Chinese hosts assured all three that this gift from the lake was an omen of future success. History delivered political strife to all three instead.
Turnbull travelled on to Vientiane for the East Asia Summit, where he struck a defence agreement with Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. In the same month he flew to Washington to urge members of the US Congress to pass the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. At home, his government passed a $6.3 billion savings bill and finally enacted its superannuation tax changes. It felt like progress. In a bonus, Turnbull enjoyed the trouble visited on Labor when one of Shorten’s most ambitious young shadow ministers, Sam Dastyari, was exposed for accepting Chinese donations and influence, forcing him to step down from the frontbench.5 The scandal ran for days.
None of this helped Turnbull silence the complaints about his leadership. The first big setback came in a Newspoll survey at the end of September, when the Coalition fell behind Labor for the first time since the election to trail by 48 to 52 per cent in two-party terms. Worse came in early November, when the Coalition fell to its lowest level against Labor since Turnbull had become leader. The Coalition lagged by 47 to 53 per cent. At the time it seemed a shocking decline; later it became the new normal.
Abbott watched the government’s troubles in the belief that Turnbull had missed a chance to unify his side. After the election, Abbott thought Turnbull would offer him a job in the government, only to find that the Prime Minister had no intention of giving his predecessor any such role. The two men met in Sydney with a mutual friend to try to negotiate their differences a few months after the election, but the discussion quickly turned sour.
‘We had a fairly brutal conversation,’ Abbott remembered.6 ‘He said that I was never going anywhere near the cabinet under him and I said: “Well, fair enough Malcolm, that’s your right as the Prime Minister, but you’ve got to understand that I’ll do my own thing and you’ve got more to lose than I have.”’ With the path to cabinet blocked, Abbott felt free to speak as he liked on the government’s direction. ‘I certainly did what I thought was necessary in the period from the end of 2016 through until August of 2018 to nudge the government in what I thought were more sensible policy directions, most notably on energy and also on immigration.’
John Howard, an enormously influential figure in the Liberal Party after his time as Prime Minister, believed Turnbull should have asked Abbott to join the cabinet.
‘I felt it would have been better if Tony Abbott had been in the team,’ Howard said in an interview. ‘The transaction costs, as they’re called, of removing a Prime Minister who’s won a very big majority in his first term are considerable, and I felt it would have been a good idea if he had been included after the 2016 election.’ Howard said this to Turnbull at the time. ‘It’s not something I banged on about but I was of the view that Abbott should come back and I put the view to Malcolm directly.’7
The year ended with another farce in Parliament when the fractious Senate resisted the government’s new income tax rate for visitors to Australia on working holidays. The ‘backpacker tax’ changed by the day as Shorten rejected the government proposal and forced Turnbull and Cormann to negotiate with the crossbench. The rate was 19 per cent, then 15 per cent, then 10.5 per cent and then 13 per cent over the space of four days, depending on who was making the latest demand. It was proof of the pettiness of the 45th Parliament: the Senate would fight to the end over an obscure tax on young travellers, even when some of the senators barely understood what they were fighting over.
Turnbull paid the price. Voters had no reason to care about his talks at global summits when they saw division and disorder in Parliament.
Abbott fed the anxieties in the party room with more advice for Turnbull on how to protect the Liberals from the threat of Pauline Hanson, whose One Nation party was using its new influence in the Senate to appeal to conservatives by calling for a halt to Muslim immigration and a stop to action on climate change. ‘If we lack a strong centre-right party we will get people on the fringes coming to the fore,’ Abbott said.8 ‘What the government needs to do is not to over-react to Hanson, but to get on with the job of being a strong and sensible centre-right government.’ The question was whether Turnbull was the leader to stop conservative voters drifting to Hanson.
Liberals were tormented by doubts over their ‘base’ and their direction. The party no longer had the widespread community membership that had swept it into power just five years after its foundation in 1944, when Robert Menzies set a target of recruiting 100,000 members and then surpassed his goal to claim 197,984 members by 1950.9 The party now had about 50,000 members in branches and state divisions which were troubled by factional conflict or bitterness over the removal of Abbott. This was a structural weakness: a smaller party was easier for factional leaders to exploit by using a tiny band of allies to stack branches and wield influence. The party would have swollen to almost 300,000 members if its branches had kept pace with Menzies’ original target in an expanding, multicultural nation.
The Victorian division president, Michael Kroger, acknowledged the decline in a letter to members. ‘The party membership across Victoria has only increased by 312 out of a membership of around 13,000 in the last 12 mont
hs,’ he wrote.10 ‘The party always welcomes new members, particularly given the fact that the membership is only 50 per cent of what it was when I was last president and given that half of our party members are over 70.’ The last time Kroger had been president of the division was 1992. The Australian population had grown by a third while the Liberal Party had halved. The anxiety about the party’s identity and direction was made worse by the desertion of so many voters at the election and the return of Hanson to the Parliament. How should the Liberals respond? Should they replicate or repudiate the language of the far right?
The fatigue with the political parties was bipartisan. Labor had reached 75,000 members just before the split of the 1950s but only had about 54,000 members more than five decades later.11 Union membership had contracted from 2.5 million in 1976 to 1.5 million in 2016, a period when the workforce had expanded with long periods of economic growth.12 The unions remained a major force in Labor campaigns, proven by the number of union volunteers who would mobilise for an election, but Labor struggled like the Liberals to reach new parts of a changing community. Shorten was yet to achieve his stated ambition of increasing membership to 100,000 members, a target Menzies had met so swiftly in an earlier era. The party was left to rely more heavily on a new political force, GetUp, which claimed 670,000 people in its ‘movement’ but required no commitment other than an email address. Shorten had helped the activist group with a donation from the Australian Workers’ Union before he entered Parliament, but the organisation’s loose structure meant it might equally support the Greens. It was no replacement for loyal branch members.
Abbott opened the new year with a new offensive. At the end of January 2017 he stepped onto the podium in the Arkaba Hotel, in the Adelaide suburb of Fullarton, in his usual blue suit and blue tie, to address an audience of Young Liberals. Behind the speech was the rise of ‘deplorable’ voters overseas and Abbott’s desire to harness the same political energy in his favour. He cited Britain’s rejection of the European Union in the Brexit vote and the rise of Donald Trump, who had taken office as United States President just ten days earlier. ‘The American electorate rejected all the mainstream candidates to catapault into the White House an outsider feeding off grievances that are deeply felt but rarely acknowledged by the system,’ Abbott said.13 He had described Trump’s remarks about women as ‘absolutely disgusting’ the previous year, but he could see the new President’s appeal to voters who were disenchanted with politics as usual. Abbott, the man thrown out of his own government, the leader in exile, now presented himself as a champion for the outsiders.
‘The past year has shown us what happens when mainstream parties lose touch with their supporters,’ he said. The local threat, Hanson, was a warning that Liberal voters could not be taken for granted. Abbott taunted the government with a simple demand: ‘our first big fight this year must be to stop any further mandatory use of renewable power’. It did not matter that his government had legislated the current form of the Renewable Energy Target (RET), choosing a compromise with Labor rather than a demand for abolition, and nor did it matter that Turnbull could not get the numbers in the Senate to amend the RET any further to reduce the subsidies to solar and wind. In his usual pattern, Abbott argued about the present as if the past had never happened.
The speech was relayed to The Australian for an exclusive report that emphasised the way Abbott aimed at his successor’s Achilles heel, climate change.14 Andrew Bolt amplified the message: ‘Tony Abbott has clearly written off the Turnbull government, and not without reason.’15 Two days later, Abbott was in Sydney having dinner with Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan, respectively the executive chairman and co-chairman of News Corp, the home of Bolt and the publisher of The Australian.16 Joining them at Le Manoir, Lachlan’s mansion in the eastern suburbs, were Rupert’s wife, Jerry Hall, and Lachlan’s wife, Sarah Murdoch, and several dozen others. Abbott made no secret of this friendship. ‘Lachlan’s a terrific bloke. I first started catching up with Lachlan in the late 1990s. I’ve got a lot of time for Lachlan.’17
Abbott saw no shortage of encouragement for his call for a new direction. He chose to strike again before Parliament resumed at the end of February. He was more strident this time, more aggressive with his demand to start a row in the Senate to scrap the renewable scheme. The outcome mattered less than the fight itself. His speech, at the launch of a book called Making Australia Right, set out what became known as his five-point plan:
Why not say to the people of Australia: we’ll cut the RET, to help with your power bills; we’ll cut immigration, to make housing more affordable; we’ll scrap the Human Rights Commission, to stop official bullying; we’ll stop all new spending, to end ripping off our grandkids; and we’ll reform the Senate to have government, not gridlock?
Our challenge is to be worth voting for. It’s to win back the people who are giving up on us like the Making Australia Right authors.
It won’t be easy but it must be possible, or our country is doomed to a Shorten government that will make a bad situation immeasurably worse.
In or out of government, political parties need a purpose. Our politics can’t be just a contest of toxic egos or someone’s vanity project.18
Whose ‘vanity project’ did Abbott have in mind? Whose ‘toxic ego’ was the problem? The speech was brazen and aggressive in the way it repudiated Turnbull’s policies and scorned Turnbull himself. As soon as he had delivered the speech in North Sydney, Abbott headed to the Sky News studio to talk with Bolt. He added new complaints, such as Turnbull’s decision to live in his Point Piper mansion rather than moving to the Prime Minister’s official Sydney residence, Kirribilli House. He predicted doom if there was no change. He said the government was drifting to defeat.
Cormann watched the Bolt interview live from his office in Perth, astonished at the deliberate destruction of the government. He was up before dawn the next day to reproach his former leader.
‘I find it sad,’ Cormann told Sky News at 5.30 a.m. in Perth. ‘It was completely unhelpful. It was quite self-indulgent.’ There was a precision to his words, a clinical judgement on Abbott that carried weight with Liberals because it came from a friend who had been loyal for so long.19 Cormann had helped vault Abbott to the leadership in 2009 by resigning from Turnbull’s frontbench. Now he was trashing Abbott in public. ‘I cannot see any scenario in which there is a return of Tony Abbott to the leadership of the Liberal Party,’ he said. There was united support for Turnbull and Bishop. ‘I cannot see that change in any scenario this side of an election.’
Another friend, Dan Tehan, a man who had sat next to Abbott in Parliament in the months after he lost power, urged him to be a team player. The most forensic response came from Pyne, who debunked the five-point plan by listing the ways Abbott now argued against his own policies as Prime Minister — on immigration, the Human Rights Commission, taxes, spending and the RET. The reaction intensified an argument which continued in the media for days and did not stop when Abbott voiced lukewarm support for the government in another television interview. The trite expression of support fooled nobody.
Abbott knew he could exploit the panic among Liberals who believed they were losing old supporters to One Nation, a trend that was gaining ground. Hanson and her party had thrived over the summer like a new vine taking over an old garden. Only 4.3 per cent of voters had cast their ballots for One Nation in the upper house at the election. This climbed to 8 per cent in the polls in early February.
Abbott warned of the spread of One Nation but watered the vine with every speech. His appearance on Sky News occurred just as Newspoll started calling voters to ask what they thought of Turnbull’s leadership and his government. The live coverage of Liberal division ran from Thursday night to Sunday morning, neatly coinciding with the polling period. The result on Sunday night was predictable: another slide in the government’s support to its lowest point under Turnbull so far, trailing Labor by 45 to 55 per cent in two-party terms. This was wor
se for the government than the survey three weeks earlier, when voters were polled just after Abbott’s speech to the Young Liberals. Support for One Nation rose to 10 per cent at the end of February.20
This was not the last time the government would see Abbott burst into the media with a dire warning that split his own side of politics just before voters started getting calls from Newspoll. Could Abbott time every prophecy to make it come true?
The squabbles within the Liberals and Nationals put everyone on edge, as if they were members of a dysfunctional family who could never be sure where the next argument would start. Would it be the parents in the kitchen or the children on the stairs? Those who served on the backbench had to watch their language in case their opinions about a policy were portrayed as a protest against the government or a revolt against the leader. It was harder now to criticise the leadership without sounding treasonous. John Howard had governed with doors open and lieutenants ready to hear a complaint and convey it to the leader, guaranteeing the message from the backbench could change policy without wrecking the government. This looked easy but required a mastery of politics and a loyal retinue — like Sinodinos, the chief of staff to Howard for a decade, a man who was always listening in the night for the creaking of the floorboard before an argument had even begun.
All parties and all governments engage in a tussle of practical and philosophical disputes to set a direction, an essential process for any administration outside a moribund dictatorship. Done well, it keeps a government alive. Overdone, it drives a government to its death. The balance was increasingly difficult in a Coalition party room where every difference of opinion could deepen a feud, where a small group of provocateurs were willing to turn any argument into a test of Turnbull’s authority. What was presented as a disagreement on Liberal philosophy could be mere camouflage for a personal grudge. Abbott’s closest allies were Kevin Andrews, his former Defence Minister, and Eric Abetz, his former Workplace Relations Minister, the ‘AAA club’ to their critics. On questions of conservative values, Abbott could sometimes rely on backbenchers such as Andrew Hastie, the former Special Air Service captain who came to Parliament after serving in Afghanistan, and Craig Kelly, the former small-business owner who sold furniture before entering politics. The group was small and fluid, but its permanent members knew how to question Turnbull’s judgement and weaken his standing without needing an outright challenge to his leadership.