Three years ago, Christopher Pyne was holding court at the Star casino's Cherry Bar, boasting to a crowd of fellow Liberal "moderates" that they were "in the winners' circle" of the government.
They had an ally as prime minister in Malcolm Turnbull, they were dominant in cabinet and, in Pyne's telling, they were going to deliver marriage equality - perhaps sooner than thought.
Audio of Pyne's roast at that Black Hand dinner was leaked to News Corp's Andrew Bolt and soon consumed the news cycle. Much later, after leaving Parliament, Pyne said his boasting nearly cost him his career.
"Quite a few of my colleagues were trying to push me under the bus, but they didn't succeed," he told this newspaper's Good Weekend magazine in July. "I survived."
Kelly O'Dwyer, Malcolm Turnbull, Julia Banks and Julie Bishop speak with Scott Morrison and Christopher Pyne on August 23, 2018.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
It is an interesting thought experiment to ponder what would happen if something similar were to happen now. It is also far from clear what an equivalent faux pas would be - even in the quagmire of energy policy, nothing is quite the tinderbox that same-sex marriage proved to be.
Today, the Prime Minister is a socially conservative evangelical Christian who once brandished a lump of coal at the dispatch box and didn't even turn up to the vote on marriage equality. Pyne has left Parliament, as have Julie Bishop, George Brandis and Kelly O'Dwyer, the leading moderates of their time. The faction still has a strong presence in cabinet but the personalities are quieter - Simon Birmingham in trade, Marise Payne in foreign affairs and Paul Fletcher in communications.
And yet almost to a man the small-l liberals bench of the so-called moderate faction say life under Scott Morrison is, well, better.
"I think our influence is as great now as it has ever been," says one backbencher. "Morrison comes to the table from a different angle but still ends up at the same place. Morrison knows that electorally, a conservative viewpoint on a whole bunch of issues is not going to get you across the line, and therefore he brings a liberal philosophy to a lot of economic decisions."
Liberals love to say they don't have factions in the style of Labor's militantly-organised groups. But they are still well-oiled machines. The moderates have a history of making policy interventions as a pack; when journalists seek their views on an issue, they will often confer and then send one or two MPs out to make a statement.
For example, after the first phone call, word gets around pretty quickly that The Sun-Herald and Sunday Age are working on a piece about "the moderates under Morrison". Enthusiasm to participate varies.
The left side of the Liberal Party has had a lot of monikers over the years. In the Hawke-Keating years they were generally known as the "wets", and supported a greater amount of economic intervention than the free market "dries".
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, Goldstein MP Tim Wilson and Mackellar MP Jason Falinski in Parliament in 2019.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
These days the moderates have embraced economic and social liberalism. They are less likely than their conservative cousins to support the government "picking winners", such as underwriting a new gas-fired power station in the event the market does not deliver.
At the last election, a handful of progressive Liberals experimented with their branding, dubbing themselves "modern Liberals" on corflutes and other paraphernalia. Tim Wilson, Dave Sharma and Jason Falinski adopted the term.
It was a reflection of the party's image problem in progressive urban seats. After a term of tearing themselves apart over marriage equality and climate change, the MPs wanted to signal they were worlds apart from the conservative rump.
But it's a different world now, and a different party room. The destructive era of Turnbull versus Tony Abbott is long gone. There are no towering, divisive social issues like marriage equality on the agenda. Climate change and energy remain challenging but the heat, so to speak, appears to have been taken out of the debate.
Under Turnbull, every sign of discontent was a possible canary in the coalmine for a leadership showdown. The threats came mostly from the right, although a gang of up to half a dozen "rebel" moderate MPs tried to maintain the impression they might go feral if something wasn't done to legalise same-sex marriage.
Morrison's majority in the lower house is barely bigger than Turnbull's, but politically there is more room for MPs to stick their necks out - within reason - on issues they care about. Senators Andrew Bragg and James Patterson, plus Wilson and Falinski, are leading a ginger group to try to stop the superannuation guarantee increasing to 12 per cent from 9.5 per cent.
North Sydney MP Trent Zimmerman has backed a target of net zero emissions by 2050, and last week made a quiet intervention on media policy when he called for the government to compel streaming services such as Netflix to create Australian content. He told The Sun-Herald and Sunday Age those services should have to spend 10 to 15 per cent of the revenue they earn in Australia creating Australian productions.
Sharma, a former ambassador to Israel, has latitude to speak on China and has been critical of the government's travel ban during the COVID-19 pandemic, calling it a "pretty extraordinary restriction on people's liberty".
Liberal MP Dave Sharma says Scott Morrison doesn't feel the need to enforce strict discipline on his MPs.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
The freedom to freelance is not absolute. Earlier in the year Morrison and Payne summoned a group of MPs including Sharma and Wilson, and conservatives Andrew Hastie and Craig Kelly among others, for a gentle reminder about the need for sensitivity when discussing China.
"Even when he's had to sound a note of caution, it's always been in a respectful rather than a disciplinary sense," says Sharma. "He's quite secure enough in his own leadership not to feel the need to enforce strict discipline on people's views."
That wasn't always the case. After Morrison won the 2019 election, he put his foot down. In July of that year he confronted party room unrest over superannuation and the Newstart payment, bluntly telling MPs to air their grievances through internal processes rather than in public.
"You go outside of those processes, it's showing disrespect to those you're sitting next to, it's showing disrespect to your other colleagues," Morrison warned.
Politics has since mellowed. Wilson, the Liberal MP for Goldstein since 2016, says it's a different ball game to when he entered Parliament under Turnbull. "When I first arrived a lot of policy debates were proxies for leadership and personality," he says. "Now policy debates are about policy."
Energy policy is the obvious example: Turnbull was ultimately rolled using the National Energy Guarantee as a precursor. Plenty of moderate Liberals still believe the NEG was great policy, even "perfect", but are happy to settle for Morrison's "good" alternative, including his "gas-led recovery".
Some hate the PM's plan to build a gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley if AGL does not replace its Liddell coal plant. But the detractors aren't jumping up and down because they don't think it will actually happen. One MP says gas is the perfect halfway house for Morrison, who is always going to look out of place on a solar farm.
At least with gas, the MP says, "you can still turn up to industrial plants, wear high-vis vests and knock about with tradies".
Wilson says Morrison's strength is he "has respect for principled liberal policy, but understands how it is received by the punter, which makes for a more sustainable lens for progressing values to policy outcomes".
"Every day I become happier I voted for him to be PM. There's no buyer's remorse," says Wilson. "We're given clearer parameters about the freedom to differ, which means we are free to debate issues so long as we understand the responsibility to keep the team united."
In agreement: Senator Andrew Bragg and Liberal MP Tim Wilson. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Moderate MPs who speak to The Sun-Herald and Sunday Age are keen to emphasise the policy leadership coming from their side of the fence. It is true they have been ferocious authors since the election; Bragg wrote a book on super, Bad Egg, and is working on another one outlining the conservative case for backing the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Wilson wrote a book on liberalism called The New Social Contract, for which Morrison penned a glowing foreword.
Bragg believes his policy activism has been "valued and appreciated" by the PM. "I'm trying to make the boat go faster," he says. "Everything I'm advancing around getting a better super deal or getting a better deal for Indigenous affairs is consistent with our policies."
And if the liberal side of the party is deliberately active, the conservative side is in something of a funk. Peter Dutton was bruised by his failed leadership tilt, as was Mathias Cormann, who will leave politics by year's end.
"Cormann has been physically present but not mentally present," says one MP. "Dutton is not the force that he was. The people under him - [Michael] Sukkar, [Zed] Seselja and [Tony] Pasin - are not bringing the same political skills that Abbott brought. The fact [Alan] Jones is no longer on morning radio talking to large sections of NSW and Queensland is also having a huge impact."
Whether all the books, opinion pieces and policy contributions amount to anything will be made clear come the inevitable reshuffle once Cormann departs. Other ministers have arguably under-performed and there would be plenty of scope to elevate new talent, should Morrison choose.
Tom Harley, the Liberal moderate and former party vice-president who founded the Black Hand dinner with Brandis, says he has every confidence Morrison will maintain factional balance in a future frontbench.
"In some ways it's a return to business-as-usual, where the moderates are a substantial part of the party and their positions are considered and respected," he says. "Scott is ruling from a centre-right position but is running a pluralist party rather than a winner-takes-all party."