Delcons are done, but pitfalls still await Morrison
TONY Abbott and his band of wreckers are finished, but that doesn’t mean new PM Scott Morrison will have an easy ride, writes Miranda Devine. He needs to choose his cabinet carefully to avoid factional warfare.
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THE Delcons are finished.
The delusional conservatives who wanted Tony Abbott back on his throne have lost bigly, as Donald Trump would say.
They helped destroy Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership but they will never see their man back as PM.
As new Prime Minister Scott Morrison told his party room Friday, after winning the Liberal leadership ballot over Peter Dutton 45-40, a “new generation” is in charge and they are “closing the door” on the Turnbull-Abbott era.
The party room cheered, according to one insider. The king is dead. Long live the king.
It was another disastrous outbreak of fratricide, but the transaction costs of Friday’s coup are lower than before because the electorate had no emotional connection to Turnbull, he’s leaving, and because, as a fiery Abbott told a dinner of NSW right-wingers in Sydney Friday night: “Live by the sword, die by the sword”.
Justice has been done. Now is the time for healing, at least until the next election.
The Machiavellian subplots of the bloodless coup by our new Prime Minister ScoMo are still to be appreciated. But at least it puts an end to the hatred between Turnbull and Abbott that had held the party hostage for a decade.
Turnbull had the last laugh, engaging in strategic delays and sharp, lawyerly tactics in the final hours of his reign to deny victory to his nemesis, Abbott, who had laid the ground for Dutton’s ambush with his relentless destabilising and sniping.
Turnbull bought Morrison enough time to get his numbers.
On Friday morning, the Dutton camp thought they had it in the bag. They counted 47 votes. But seven had defected, including, crucially, Josh Frydenberg, the former Energy Minister whose hard work the other Dutton backers had sabotaged.
He easily won the ballot for deputy leader, and what a happy coincidence! He and Scomo voted for each other.
The Dutton forces were played off a break by Morrison who had kept his hands seemingly clean. All the blood was spattered on Dutton and his plotters.
The good news is that Scomo is an instinctive social conservative with backbone who won’t have to be told to “chuck Safe Schools in the bin”, for instance.
He is economically competent, can sell a message, and is a genuine suburban “daggy dad” from the Shire who can connect to regular voters as well as the forgotten people of the Liberal heartland who have decamped to One Nation. One of his first tests will be how he treats the Ruddock report on religious freedom that emerged from the same sex marriage vote. He could appeal to disenfranchised No voters in western Sydney.
But he has to neutralise a serious problem in his home state which has been sparked by his victory.
Morrison now owes his new job to lobbyist Michael Photios, the Voldemort of the NSW Liberal party, who controls the moderate or “left” faction which switched its numbers and its organising nous from Turnbull to Morrison, blindsiding Dutton’s Right faction
amateurs.
As someone close to Turnbull put it: “They’ve just managed to replace Malcolm with the one person they hate almost as much”.
Morrison denies any affiliation with Photios, but his subgrouping of the Centre Right, run by Right traitor Alex Hawke, effectively is under Photios control.
Photios is a toxic blight on the Liberal party. But his power is set to be diluted after the next election when NSW starts using plebiscites to preselect candidates, as is the case in Victoria, giving conservative grassroots Liberal members the power to dislodge Photios’ plants.
But the role of Photios operatives in Morrison’s ascension threatens to taint his prime ministership.
Morrison is being advised to neutralise the Photios problem by bringing into cabinet backroom powerbroker Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, whose control of the numbers in the NSW Right faction is legendary and entrenched.
She was Minister for International Development and the Pacific and one of the first ministers to resign last week, sending Turnbull a blistering resignation letter accusing him of dragging the party to the left.
This has nothing to do with Abbott. It is a battle for the soul of the Liberal Party.
If Morrison rewards Hawke and the “moderates” who backed him with seats in Cabinet, he’ll need to include Fierravanti-Wells, who, as a bonus, will ameliorate the party’s “woman problem” which Frydenberg made a point of addressing in his victory speech as deputy leader.
And if Senator Marise Payne is dropped from Defence, as conservatives hope, she may need an overseas posting, perhaps to the United Nations, further diminishing female representation. (John Howard is one who thinks Tony Abbott should be brought into the tent, perhaps replacing Payne in Defence, where he could at least declare war on gender-neutral pronouns, but there’s stiff opposition in the party room to rewarding wreckers, and Morrison wants generational change).
Fierravanti-Wells is believed to be angling for the job of Foreign Minister, assuming Bishop is moved on, perhaps to become Governor-General, since General Peter Cosgrove’s term is up.
Morrison will have to be deft to avoid the NSW factional wars, which he understands well, from exploding before the election.
With an election in months, it’s time for the Liberal party to focus on the real enemy, Bill Shorten, or “Shifty Shorten” from the house of Slytherin, as former ad man Morrison calls him.
Game on.