Pyne’s blunder gives Turnbull a chance to regain trust

CHRISTOPHER Pyne represents all that’s wrong with the Liberal party, writes Miranda Devine. If Malcolm Turnbull is to succeed, he must realise this.

TONY Abbott spoke truth on Monday: “One of the problems when you have the political execution of a first-term, democratically elected PM is there is long-term bad blood created, and it takes time for those wounds to heal,” he told 2GB’s Ray Hadley.

No kidding.

The Liberal Party should never have toppled Abbott. It doesn’t matter that it was his fault that he lost the faith of the majority of his colleagues — both conservative and left-wing — barely two years in.

The coup was a breach of trust with the electorate, an ­admission of catastrophic failure where none existed. It vindicated the disastrous Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era, destroyed the Liberals’ reputational ­advantage over Labor and cemented the idea that our major political parties are run like oligarchies.

All of which I wrote at the time, although without anticipating just how profoundly Abbott would break his promise of “no wrecking, no undermining, and no sniping”.

And now the boasting of his once closest ally, Christopher Pyne, has laid bare the rot at the heart of the Liberal party.

You only had to listen to Pyne in his favourite milieu, ABC’s QandA, on Monday night, to understand the disdain he has for the electorate.

He said Australia’s system of compulsory preferential voting protects treacherous, unrepresentative Liberals like him from being punished by disaffected voters.

“The unhappy Liberal voter still has to vote,” he bragged. “Do they put Labor ahead of me if they’re unhappy with me? My experience in nine elections is they don’t.”

Over to you, Liberal voters of Adelaide.

Pyne represents everything that is wrong with the Liberal party. “He’s a cancer”, says one of his conservative colleagues.

Senator Cory Bernardi, who quit the Liberals this year to start his own party, Australian Conservatives, says his fellow South Australian is “the most untrustworthy person I’ve ever met in this business”.

And sure enough, Pyne confirmed these character assessments at a late-night booze-fuelled party of left-faction Liberals on Friday night at Star City Casino’s Cherry Bar, when he boasted that he and George Brandis had “voted for Malcolm Turnbull in every ballot he’s ever been in”.

That’s despite the duty Pyne had as a member of the Abbott government’s leadership team to support his leader.

Abbott expressed disappointment this week at Pyne’s betrayal. But he can’t have been surprised. He was warned repeatedly by Bernardi. The enduring mystery is why Abbott promoted a treacherous leftist like Pyne into his inner sanctum, while sacking Bernardi for comments, ironically enough, criticising gay marriage. Abbott’s fate would have been very different if he had done the reverse.

Also on Friday night Pyne boasted that the Liberal party’s left-wing faction, a.k.a. the “moderates”, is “winning” and would legalise same sex marriage “sooner than people think”.

“We are in the winner’s circle, friends, we are in the winner’s circle but we have to deliver a couple of things and one of those we’ve got to deliver before too long is marriage equality,” the Defence Industry Minister said in a secret recording leaked to Sky News.

“We’re going to get it. I think it might even be sooner than everyone thinks. And your friends in Canberra are working on that outcome.”

Well not any more, thanks to The Fixer.

Pyne has torpedoed any plans being cooked up with North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman to sneak gay marriage through parliament.

The mechanism would have been either by a private member’s bill or by having two or three Liberal backbenchers cross the floor to vote with Labor on a so-called procedural motion to debate a bill.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull knows that same-sex marriage is the ETS of 2017 for him. If he were to plough ahead, we’d have a spill motion. (Pic: News Corp)

Conservative MPs have always known some of their colleagues were plotting to subvert the Coalition’s promise at last year’s election not to legislate gay marriage without a plebiscite.

But with his careless boasting, now Pyne has forced Malcolm Turnbull decisively to close the door on alternative options: “We will not support a vote on gay marriage in the parliament until there has been a plebiscite at which every Australian gets an opportunity to vote and that plebiscite has voted yes for gay marriage,” the PM told Melbourne radio yesterday.

“Private member’s bills have to be considered by the bill selection committee… Our position is we do not support a bill relating to gay marriage being brought on until there has been a vote of the Australian people.”

Turnbull also rightly sheeted the blame back to Labor, which blocked the plebiscite in the Senate and, while in office from 2007, rejected nine opportunities to legislate gay marriage.

“If those people who are disappointed that same-sex marriage is not legal in Australia, they have one person to blame, and that is Bill Shorten.”

Turnbull may personally support gay marriage, but he knows that it is kryptonite in the party room, and any floor-crossing would be regarded by conservative MPs as a vote of no confidence in him.

“The PM knows that same sex marriage is the ETS of 2017 for him,” says one MP. “If he were to plough ahead, we’d have a spill motion that day ready to roll and whether we won or not it would be death by a thousand cuts.”

Abbott’s media cheer squad has been hauling around the corpse of his leadership ambitions like something out of Weekend at Bernie’s.

But a leadership change won’t fix the party’s polling problems, and in any case, Abbott’s numbers in the party room have dwindled from the size of a phone box to “a batman suit”, according to one colleague.

If Turnbull stares down the sly agitators and vicious bullies of the gay marriage cause, that will be a sign of good faith to conservatives, who have put up with a lot.

If he sticks to delivering on issues voters care about, like lower energy prices, his government might even start slowly winning back their trust over the next 18 months.

But he can’t succeed with Pyne on board.

MPs close to Turnbull say they were already sick of Pyne. They will be urging his demise in the next reshuffle.

The voters of Sturt are readying their baseball bats, in any case.