Joe Hildebrand: Factional divide could tear Perrottet government apart for good
Matt Kean and David Elliott were already on a path to all-out war long before the fall of Ayres created a power vacuum – and the battle isn’t over yet, writes Joe Hildebrand.
Opinion
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Even the most bedevilled governments can sometimes withstand massive trauma.
The Gillard government limped over the line in 2010 after Labor’s seismic leadership coup and the Morrison government snatched victory in 2019 after two similarly bloody splits.
But there is one thing that no government on earth can survive without – the will to live. And the Perrottet government is currently looking like it has lost both the capacity and desire to even function.
The irony is that this has little to do with the Premier Dominic Perrottet himself, who is smart, energetic and brimming with ideas.
His early childhood education reforms alone will grant him a well-deserved place in history.
But every emperor needs a praetorian guard and Perrottet’s is somewhere on the spectrum between shambolic and non-existent.
His deputy leader Stuart Ayres has finally fallen on his sword – something a truly loyal deputy would have done weeks ago – over the utterly idiotic and wholly unnecessary fiasco that is the John Barilaro affair. Yet the move has come too late to do his government any good.
Perrottet has acted too slowly to cauterise the wound and his deputy Ayres has acted too slowly to save his honour.
Thus this has only managed to achieve the worst of both worlds — and we’re just getting started.
Ayres was given the deputy position in the first place in a deal to maintain something resembling peace, because the man who really had the numbers – moderate powerbroker Matt Kean – is such a divisive figure that the party could destroy itself when he secures the job.
On that subject, watch this space. Even running unchallenged, the Kean problem won’t go away.
And in the greatest of ironies Perrottet – a conviction Catholic from the hard right faction – only got his job thanks to the support of Kean’s dripping-wet left faction.
In the middle is the centre-right – which used to be the hard right before the Catholics came along – and this is where the loveable bomb-lobber David Elliott comes in.
As astute political observers might have picked up, Elliott does not particularly like Kean and Kean does not particularly like Elliott. And while I am aware of many enmities within political parties, I have never in my life seen one played out so publicly and so viciously as the war between these two.
In recent months it has been self-evident that each cares more about destroying the other than they do about the Liberal Party’s electoral fortunes, although each no doubt also believes that the other is responsible for undermining said fortunes.
Despite Perrottet’s somewhat disempowered pleas for peace, they were already on a path to all-out war long before the fall of Ayres created a power vacuum.
And, that was during the supposed peace.
Now their fight for the position of 2IC has been abandoned after Elliott withdrew – although the conflict between these rivals will continue.
Concern over a bruising deputy contest explains why Perrottet took so long to demand Aryes’s resignation. While it might once have solved a massive public problem it would also have created an even bigger political one. At least now that particular issue has been stalled.
Still, it is easy and not entirely incorrect to blame Perrottet for the Barilaro mess.
But whatever decision he made was always going to be line ball — a 51-49 split between the threat to his external standing and his internal support. The problem is that by making it too late he has damaged both and reaped the rewards of neither.
At the same time Perrottet is also a victim of the revolving door politics that has beset NSW and Canberra. Time passes achingly slow in the Covid age and so it is easy to forget that he has not even been Premier for a year.
Longer serving leaders, especially those with an election win under their belts, are better equipped to identify and eliminate political problems. Newcomers lurch from crisis to crisis without the experience to either avert them or snuff them out quickly.
Cerebral politicians are also often the most vulnerable. Thinkers often think too much while thugs just throw punches.
Little wonder it’s the geeks who tend to end up on the mat.
This brings us to Perrottet’s decision to pull funding for suburban football grounds.
Whether it be an overhang from Ayres’s obsession with gold-plating the Moore Park stadium or a Sahara-level dry economic rationalist assessment of Treasury expenditure, this was an exceptionally bad call – and one no second-term premier would have made.
It was already a terminal case last week and the shocking collapse of a stand at Leichhardt Oval was an unequivocal death blow. A good God-fearing man like Perrottet couldn’t help but have seen it as a sign.
Nice guys rarely succeed in politics, and it seems likely now that the Premier will prove that axiom at the next election.
Maybe Dominic Perrottet is too nice. Maybe he is too smart by half.
Either way, there is another axiom that will get you far in politics: Don’t fool with football.
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