PM v NSW Premier: How bitter political infighting is undermining Covid fightback
Bitter differences at state and federal levels and a shaky relationship with the PM mean Gladys Berejiklian’s strategies to hold back the Delta tide are on increasingly unstable ground.
NSW
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Last Saturday Sydneysiders woke to the news in The Saturday Telegraph that Canberra had found an extra 50,000 doses of Pfizer from its reserves after national cabinet had rejected Gladys Berejiklian’s plea for more vaccine.
It was a good news story from an otherwise gloomy week that had seen the state government declare the outbreak a national emergency.
So you might have expected NSW’s health minister to be across the news.
But when Brad Hazzard fronted the cameras later that morning he seemed bewildered about the offer.
“I have no idea how much, if any, are in our national stockpile. I simply don’t know that. I would like to know,” he said.
“Can I say if the Prime Minister has said that – and if he is – I welcome that offer. I just need to see it in writing and know exactly what that means.”
What was even stranger than the health minister’s failure to get on top of the story, was the fact the night before, the federal government seemed to have anticipated Hazzard’s response by making it clear the offer for the extra doses had been given to the NSW government – in writing.
That Friday was a low point of the relationship between the commonwealth and NSW governments which saw Canberra blindsided by the national emergency declaration.
But it’s clear that even if they come from the same side of politics, relations between the Berejiklian and Morrison governments are far from warm.
It is also clear that divisions in the Berejiklian government over lockdowns reflect splits inside the Liberal Party’s branches in NSW, and the longer the current crisis continues the deeper these divisions are likely to become.
The anger with Hazzard in some quarters of the federal government is palpable.
“Hazzard is a bit of a disaster and he hates us,” is how one minister bluntly sums up the NSW health minister.
Others are just mystified.
“Who knows why he does what he does?” one senior figure said.
“It’s always counter to what the Commonwealth does. It’s beggars belief.”
The source said there is particular anger at the way Hazzard has banged on about the lack of Pfizer while the Commonwealth has been pushing the only currently available option, AstraZeneca.
“You want people to get vaccinated, don’t you? It doesn’t make sense.”
Over the past few months journalists have grown used to the two governments briefing against each other. That it has got so willing can probably be explained in part by the rough and tumble nature of NSW politics.
But as the situation has deteriorated in Sydney in recent weeks, the frustration on both sides has been mounting to the point where some ministers in Canberra are saying in private they find it easier to deal with the government of the socialist republic of Victoria than Macquarie St.
There is a view expressed in Canberra, especially from MPs outside the state, that the dynamics of factional politics in the NSW Liberal Party have played their part how the two governments have dealt with each other.
It’s a widely, but not universally accepted thesis.
You also need to grasp, according to one federal minister, that the people running Australia’s biggest and most important state government, don’t see themselves as subordinate to their federal counterparts.
“They’re a bit like Vic Labor and Fed Labor – they see themselves as equal. Actually they see themselves as more than equals,” the minister said.
A federal cabinet minister from NSW agrees.
“It’s a bigger, better resourced and has scale and capability that no other state government can match,” he said, adding “it’s ordinary human psychology” that its members would take themselves more seriously.
“That’s not factional,” he said.
“I’d call them ordinary human tensions in working relationships.”
From the outside NSW Liberal factional politics has long seemed orderly and stable – certainly compared to Victoria – with three easily defined groups.
The largest group are the Left – or Moderates as they prefer to be called – who control roughly 40 per cent of the numbers in the state’s branches.
Premier Berejiklian hails from this group but its leader in state parliament is the MP for Hornsby, Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean.
Roughly the same size or, depending if you listen to some people, slightly smaller, are the Right whose leader in Macquarie St is the Treasurer Dominic Perrottet.
The third, smaller, grouping are the Centre-Right headed by the federal Immigration Minister Alex Hawke, the faction to which Scott Morrison belongs.
Hawke began his factional life in the Right but famously split from them in 2009. For the next decade he enjoyed the power that came from sitting between the two larger factions.
It earned him a lot of enemies.
“The most untrustworthy man I’ve ever dealt with in politics,” in the words of a senior right factional operative, while a former Malcolm Turnbull government minister politely describes him as “a very actively disliked guy”.
To be fair the view is not universal. One former senior party functionary of the Left said while he might have the reputation of being the devil made flesh, he always found Hawke honourable.
“Hawke is hard nosed and arrogant and he tells people what he thinks of them but in my experience he sticks to his deals,” the factional operator said.
The Prime Minister and Hawke were undoubtedly close for a long time but opinions differ on how close they are these days.
“Hawkie briefs out constantly how close he is to Scott, but Morrison distances himself from Hawke at every opportunity,” according to one federal minister.
What everyone agrees on is that sometime in the past two years Hawke’s run as the swing vote in the NSW Liberal Party came to an end when the Left and the Right started to deal with each other directly.
“They always kept the Left in power and what’s happened now is the Left has done a deal with the Right so they don’t need the Hawke-Morrison group,” one MP said.
And the view from Canberra is that this new factional arrangement in Macquarie St has weakened the Premier.
“Gladys is basically there at the behest of Dom Perrottet and Matthew Kean,” one federal cabinet minister said.
“They’ve had the numbers to knock her off for some time.”
Others say while this may be technically true her standing with the public means there is no chance she will be moved on any time soon.
Reports of how well the Premier and Prime Minister get on are mixed.
Sources close to the Prime Minister are at pains to stress that while there might be trouble between the governments the relationship between the two leaders is good.
“Any rift between Scott and Gladys is overstated. They’ve obviously had days where it’s been slightly troubling,” a senior government source said.
It’s a view that is disputed by others from the NSW Liberal Party.
“Scott has relentlessly briefed against Gladys – I’ve no idea why he’s done this – it started during the bushfires,” one former Turnbull government minister said.
“Even if she’s your greatest factional enemy which she’s not – why would you do that?”
To be fair to Morrison, the traffic hasn’t all been one way.
Berejiklian hasn’t been afraid to blame the feds when it suits her.
The difference is she’s tended to do it in public.
Her recent complaints about the lack of vaccines are nothing new.
As long ago as 2018 she was blaming her government’s by-election bloodbath in Wagga Wagga on the federal government’s switch from Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison.
But while there might be some mystery about the relationship between Gladys and Scott, there’s no mystery about what the Feds think about some of her ministers.
In the words of one source close to the Prime Minister, the constant sniping of the NSW Treasurer “won’t be forgotten any time soon”.
The source said the difficulties of dealing with the NSW Government compared with Victoria last year had been compounded because it was divided over how to handle the crisis.
“Her cabinet is divided – extremely divided in the way they handle this,” the source said.
“She’s pro-lockdown but she’s got others who aren’t.
“Dan just called the shots and he went bang bang bang whereas she’s had that pressure from day one.”
The split in the government reflects splits in the Liberal Party branches according to one north shore activist from the Right.
“Dominic has been trying to push pretty hard to relax what’s been put in place but he’s been in a minority.”
The activist said this division has now spilt over into the organisation.
He said that there was a lot of sympathy from some conservatives for the NSW Liberals Ross Cameron and John Ruddick who have quit the party for the Liberal Democrats in what could be a sign of things to come.
But he said some were reluctant to follow them because of the failure of the breakaway Australian Conservatives led by former South Australian Senator Cory Bernardi.
“Some party members are reluctant to walk out because they saw what happened to Cory,” he said.
“We lost a fair number of people who walked out, some of them have come back, and they’re not all that keen to be burned again but it’s too early to say.”
He said while “still some residual loyalty to Gladys, it’s definitely starting to be ground away”.
“We thought we were different. We thought we were better,” he said.
“We had the professional contact tracers and so on, whereas in fact we just got lucky.”
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Originally published as PM v NSW Premier: How bitter political infighting is undermining Covid fightback
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