Who Runs the Liberal Party?

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. Or, as the Prime Minister might put it, there had never been a more exciting time to be an Australian.

On Australia Day 2016 love was in the air. The honourable members of the bunyip meritocracy, the self-appointed guardians of our nation’s moral fibre, were best pleased with themselves. A prime minister whom they loathed, a champion of battlers and tradies who went to war with Q&A and the Human Rights Commission, a global warming sceptic, friend of coal mines and scourge of wind farms, a constitutional monarchist, God-fearing Catholic and defender of traditional marriage, had been banished.

In his stead—or so they thought—was one of their own, a green-and-pink-tinged Eastern Suburbs-dweller, who happily chatted on the ABC about renewable energy, gay marriage and a republic, and sent out selfies catching public transport rather than donning a hi-vis vest and hard hat to publicise building roads.

Effusing that excitement, on the eve of the 228th anniversary of the nation’s foundation day, all the state premiers, the opposition leader and the leader of the Australian Republican Movement—replete with jejune arguments and matching red neckerchief atop his glossy pate—were noisily clamouring for a republic.

A transgendered speech-writer and her former boss, the erstwhile chief of the army, were battling it out in the political correctness contest for the crown of Australian of the Year, a job that latterly involves haranguing ordinary Australians into minding their Ps and Qs, not to mention their LGBTIs.

Just as Australia Day 2015 will remembered for the knighting of Prince Philip, an affront to all bunyips of merit who redoubled their efforts to undermine the then prime minister, Australia Day 2016 detonated its own time bomb. The appointment of former Army chief, Lieutenant-General David Morrison, as Australian of the Year, a soldier whose most significant victory was fought, not in a theatre of war but in a battle with sexists, was provocative enough. But using his inaugural address to campaign for a republic and accusing fellow Australians of discriminating against minorities ignited unprece­dented anger. Around 7000 people signed a petition calling on Morrison to resign, furious that he had used his soapbox to preach gender equity while ignoring the high rates of suicide among returned service personnel.

His appointment gave oxygen to scandals over his sacking of allegedly innocent soldiers accused of “misogyny”, his $15,000 public speaking fees, and his reported acceptance of $200,000 for twenty-five days work as a “diversity adviser” from a company that had just won a multi-million-dollar defence contract while he was Army chief.

Just as the ire at Morrison began to subside, the resumption of parliament caught the Prime Minister with one foot out of the bed as his honeymoon with the media began to sour.

“Change the prime minister and you change the country,” Paul Keating warned voters before the federal election in 1996. They took him at his word and dumped him in a landslide for John Howard.

Never had Keating’s aphorism seemed more apposite than in the removal of Abbott and his replacement by Turnbull. But when a prime minister is changed without an election, only the media and the parliamentary party have a say.

Yet having installed their man, the commentators are starting to have their doubts. As Mark Kenny, chief political correspondent for Fairfax, put it: “Turnbull’s retreat on the GST expansion at the first whiff of grapeshot has punctured the overblown expectation created around his ascension, of new and purposeful economic leadership based on explanations rather than slogans.” For Kenny, and many others in the press gallery, “One obvious conclusion to draw from all of this is that like the refusal to put same-sex marriage equality to a free parliamentary vote, or even to lend qualified support to a new republican push, the government’s political interests come before the oft-invoked national interest.”

Laurie Oakes chronicles the disenchantment in a collection of headlines: “Malcolm in muddle”, “Turnbull fails to take risk on growth”, “Turnbull thinks small after large ambitions go bust” and decries the caution and drift. “Consultation and process get such priority that he fails to convey strength or a sense of direction,” laments Oakes. Niki Savva, who played a key role in Turnbull’s ascent, tells him bluntly to “extract the digit”.

As for the parliamentary party, the jockeying for promotion and Machiavellian skulduggery that played an important part in Turnbull’s rise continue. Many of those who switched their vote to Turnbull in exchange for promises of advancement were rewarded in the post-coup reshuffle. The swift fall from grace of some who had done little wrong in terms of parliamentary procedure and the dogged defence of others whose transgressions were more clear-cut in terms of parliamentary protocol suggest that the latter were rewarded for their support while the former, who voted against Turnbull, could be cast asunder with no compunction.

A number of long-standing MPs have also announced their retirement. There is nothing unusual about this in an election year. Indeed, others are also expected to announce their retirement. That the Opposition have leapt on this as a sign of turmoil is predictable. That the media have swallowed that line is par for the course. It is a beat-up—this mix of generational renewal and neophytes blotting their copybook or being brought down by conveniently exposed skeletons is the quotidian fodder of politics.

The back-story, unsurprisingly, has been largely missed or misunderstood by the mainstream media. That story is the way in which the ascent of Turnbull has played into the factional battles within the Liberal Party broadly between Liberal luvvies, or as Savva calls them “Conservative Lefties”, on the one hand, and the broad Right of the party, encompassing fiscal dries and social conservatives, on the other. The two camps roughly coalesced into Abbott backers and Turnbullites, with a number of key Abbott supporters switching sides to deliver Turnbull the prize he set his sights on in childhood.

The Abbott-backers who switched were won over with the promise that policies would not change, merely the way they were sold. But pronouncements which they see as calling for the appeasement of radical Islam, the embrace of Human Rights Commissioner Gillian Triggs, the softening of rhetoric on asylum seekers, the possibility of new tax slugs on superannuation (a policy first advocated by the ACTU and the Greens) and new restrictions on negative gearing (a policy touted by Labor) suggest to them that the government will move a long way to the Left, if not before the election, then certainly afterwards.

Slowly, as if awakening from a drug-induced phantasmagoria, some of those erstwhile Abbott-backers are asking themselves what they have done. Their deepest fear is that by changing leaders they have not just changed the country but the party.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives Lefties, who prefer to describe themselves as moderates, feel emboldened as never before. They see the installation of Turnbull as a historic and permanent shift to what they regard as the centre and are seizing the opportunity to install their candidates wherever they can.

Nowhere is the battle more ferocious than in New South Wales, the most dysfunctional state branch of the Liberal Party, where an electoral redistribution has made safe Liberal seats notionally marginal and has unleashed a fight to the death for pre-selection in the federal seat of Hume.

Seldom has a pre-selection battle seemed so consequential for the direction of a mainstream political party. At its heart it is not just about candidates and factions but the very structure of the party Menzies created seventy-two years ago, who gets to represent that party, and what the party stands for.

The member for Hume, based in rural Goulburn, is Angus Taylor. It’s hard to imagine an MP better suited to this constituency. Taylor was brought up on a farm near Nimmitabel and went to the local school, before going on to win the University Medal in economics at Sydney University and a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. His father was Vice President of the National Farmers Federation. His mother’s father ran the Snowy Mountains Scheme from 1949 to 1967.

As if all this wasn’t enough, he brims with the decency, honesty and the straight talk of country people, is tall, dark and handsome and has a charming wife and children. Many see in him a future treasurer, even prime minister. He has the backing of Howard, Abbott and Turnbull.

And yet, over the last two months, Taylor has been in the fight of his political life. The challenge comes from Russell Matheson, member for Macarthur, a seat centred on Campbelltown in western Sydney.

Matheson, a sergeant with the New South Wales police for twenty-three years, is serving his second parliamentary term. A redistribution made his seat notionally Labor when he first ran in 2010 but he won it with a swing. Another redistribution has made it marginal again and rather than fight to retain it, Matheson wants to displace Taylor in Hume.

By the time this article is published, the pre­selection will have been held. Only a few dozen pre-selectors, some Taylor was prevented from meeting until the eleventh hour, will have been able to vote. Amazingly, Taylor has even been actively prevented from opening branches in his own electorate. Turnbull says he backs Taylor, yet the uncertainty continues. There is no mechanism, as in the Labor Party, for federal intervention.

When he was prime minister, Abbott appointed Arthur Sinodinos to reform the New South Wales Liberal Party, without success. As a result, in one instance, a virtually unelectable candidate was pre-selected, twice, for a critical winnable seat and lost both times. Abbott also commissioned an expert panel, chaired by Howard, which has called for a radical overhaul of how federal and state candidates are pre-selected.

Turnbull’s cabinet reshuffle six days before the pre-selection vote raised hopes that common sense would prevail. Taylor’s appointment as Assistant Minister to the Prime Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation may not be the most spectacular promotion, but in the long run it may be the most important.

As the government struggles to craft its economic policy, the critical issue is whether factional forces can be forced to accept the pre-selection of the man the Prime Minister wants to drive the digital transformation of the economy and the government, a man latterly called in by some of the biggest companies in the country to solve the problems they couldn’t solve themselves.

It raises the stakes considerably for Taylor’s pre-selection. If the Matheson challenge goes ahead it puts into the starkest relief the dangerous dysfunction of the government and prompts a question that has been ignored for far too long: Who really runs the Liberal Party and what do they actually stand for?