Malcolm Turnbull still can’t win over sore conservatives

A GOVERNMENT can’t be seen to be held hostage to nongs, and Turnbull had to assert the authority of his office. Which he has done, says Miranda Devine.

PM Malcolm Turnbull

• Vladimir Putin is putting us all at risk
• Premier Mike Baird is spinning out of control

YEP, Malcolm Turnbull had a plan. The last thing the man has ever lacked in his life is a plan. As he reportedly told colleagues: “Just because the press gallery doesn’t know what I’m doing doesn’t mean that I don’t know what I’m doing”.

It’s not really as if the Prime Minister hadn’t made his intentions clear. Ever since Palmer United senators turned independent crossbenchers Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus staged a childish mid-dinner walkout at The Lodge, they’ve been on borrowed time.

A government can’t be seen to be held hostage to such nongs, and Turnbull had to assert the authority of his office. Which he has done, taking almost everyone by surprise with his plan, approved by the Governor-General, to bring the Senate back for three weeks to pass, or not, the blocked industrial relations bills which would trigger a double dissolution election on July 2.

Prime Malcolm Turnbull / Picture: Kym Smith

Either way, he wins. Either way, the Senate is brought to heel and no one is in any doubt about who is boss. And either way the Coalition is in pole position to win the next election, comfortably. And yet, and yet, there is a disconcertingly stubborn group of conservative former Liberal supporters who are so fearful of Turnbull that they say they would prefer Bill Shorten to win the next election.

Despite the fact a Shorten win would cement union control of our economy, reward the economic vandalism of the Rudd-Gillard years, expand the reach of government into our lives, create a new generation of supplicants to the state, further entrench political correctness, restrict religious and personal freedoms, undermine the family and destroy any chance for fiscal discipline, this is what these disaffected conservatives wish for.

“I know of no conservative/Liberal who wants to Vote 1 Liberal at the next election,” one friend texted me this week.

Conservatives are split into two groups: The first, the majority, in my view, is willing to give Turnbull a conditional benefit of the doubt, for now. For the sake of the nation, they hope he can improve the economy, bring order to the Budget, the Senate, and policy processes, without indulging his inner Green by dragging the government irrevocably to the Left, a suicidal act which would simply create the conditions for a new party on the Right, a better outcome than a Shorten government, in any case.

The second group I mischievously have described as Delusional Conservatives (Del-Cons) who imagine that Abbott will one day retrieve his crown. A fairer description would be that they are Disaffected Conservatives or Dis-Cons.

In part their disaffection stems from a sense of loyalty to the vanquished Abbott, who this week inserted himself unhelpfully into the government’s campaign narrative.

He used an interview with Sky News’ Paul Murray to damn his successor with faint praise: “The Turnbull government is seeking election on the Abbott government’s record, and that makes me a very enthusiastic supporter.”

Abbott claims he is not out to destabilise the government, only to defend his “legacy”. But his legacy, like every prime minister’s, will be assessed by history in due course, and nothing he or his supporters say now will make any difference, other than perhaps to add the unflattering epilogue of a sore loser.

However, the Dis-Cons are angry about more than just the loss of Abbott. They resent the fact 54 members of the Liberal party room voted out a first-term elected prime minister, proving themselves as feckless as Labor. It is just not the Liberal way, they say.

Professor James Allan, writing last week in The Spectator, Dis-Con HQ, urges a vote against the Coalition in the upcoming election because, if Shorten wins, it will teach the Liberal Party a lesson it won’t forget. John Stone recommended strategic voting by conservatives which would reduce the Coalition to a bare majority.

Then there is the character of Turnbull, who lost the trust of conservatives during his disastrous stint as opposition leader when he was ousted for championing Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme, against the wishes of his party room.

The Dis-Cons believe Turnbull has learned no lesson and that if he is re-elected with his own mandate inevitably he will move the party left, with bipartisan support, betraying the Liberal Party’s core purpose as custodian of the centre right tradition.

“He’s not one of us,” the Dis-Cons mutter.

But maybe that is Turnbull’s strength. For all his flaws of temperament and ego he is a political outsider who has made a personal fortune through success in every career he has tried, business, law and journalism. He is ruthless and self-assured in a way no career politician can fathom, and feels no need to do politics the usual way.

His ascension freed conservatives in the party room to speak out in a way they couldn’t when Abbott was PM, out of loyalty to “one of us” ... even if he was selling them down the river. Turnbull may be more willing to give ground on touchstone conservative issues in order to fulfil his brief as a consensus leader, and to keep his job. The numbers on the backbench who signed a petition against Safe Schools, 43 of 81, are enough to give him pause. Abbott lost his job because he lost conservatives in the party room. It’s not certain Turnbull will make the same mistake.