Josh Frydenberg’s destiny once seemed set, but that’s no longer certain

Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg.

Destiny is a word that hangs around Josh Frydenberg. The young ambitious staffer worked for Liberal giants John Howard and Alexander Downer. He secured the same seat as Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, Robert Menzies. Frydenberg liked to quote Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, too. The member for Kooyong was a consummate networker, fundraiser and self-promoter. And hardworking? You bet.

There was much to admire about the rise of Frydenberg, the son of a Holocaust survivor who had fled Hungary for Australia. Many thought Frydenberg would become the leading politician of his generation and eventually a Liberal prime minister with the gravitas of those Liberal forebears.

Frydenberg’s statement on Monday that he doesn’t want to reclaim Kooyong won’t end speculation. Anyone who knows Frydenberg, and those who don’t, know his ambition is bigger and more unmovable than Mt Bogong. But ambition is not enough. That Frydenberg is destined for great things in politics is far from certain any more.

It would be cruel and unusual punishment to put Frydenberg in the same boat as Malcolm Turnbull. But some similarities can’t be dismissed. As seats go, Wentworth and Kooyong couldn’t be more different from the middle-Australia seats that secure a party government.

The Liberals will reclaim Kooyong one day because teals will do their dash and in any case Monique Ryan is the most politically flaccid of the independents.

Still, this is no longer the Kooyong of Andrew Peacock or Menzies. Can Frydenberg get a grip on policies that matter to mainstream Australians when he is ingratiating himself with Kooyong’s well-heeled denizens? Frydenberg loves to be loved.

As energy minister Frydenberg championed the national energy guarantee, a policy that suited Kooyong and Liberal prime minister Turnbull. But it didn’t end well. The policy caused an internal civil war and was dropped just days before Turnbull lost the leadership.

After losing the leadership, Turnbull said there was “a huge gulf” in the party on energy. Turnbull being Turnbull he ended on a snarky note, saying many Coalition MPs didn’t believe climate change was real.

The real point is that large parts of Australia can’t afford the high cost of energy policies that suit the politics of Kooyong voters. Yet, when Scott Morrison settled on net zero by 2050, many in and outside the party assumed that too was Frydenberg at work.

Then look at the Indigenous voice referendum. Teal MP Ryan was “immensely proud” that Kooyong returned a strong Yes – around 60 per cent, an inversion of the nationwide result where 60 per cent of Australians rejected the proposal.

By the time of the vote, Frydenberg was back in the private sector and quiet about the referendum. But few were in any doubt about his position. Voice backer Ken Wyatt said the referendum would have had a better chance of succeeding if Frydenberg were still in parliament because Frydenberg “would not have opposed bipartisan support”.

In August 2021 when Frydenberg launched Andrew Bragg’s book Buraadja, in favour of the voice, the then treasurer said: “We must ensure that the change, in whatever form it takes, is bipartisan.”

As one very senior Liberal told this newspaper after the proposal tanked: “With all due respect to my good friend Josh, if Josh was leader, he would’ve had a free vote in the party. He would’ve been out there advocating Yes because, like Turnbull and Hockey, he looks at it through the lens of his electorate. And the party would be tearing itself apart. Albanese would be in the ascendancy.”

Howard will always be a political giant because he united a broad church of Liberals and he resonated in middle Australia. The long-term challenge for the Liberals goes beyond Frydenberg: can any Liberal in a seat such as Kooyong become a successful prime minister? It would require extraordinary skills.

The morning after Frydenberg became treasurer, there was the cringeworthy, made-for-cameras catch-up with Peter Costello at a Hawthorn cafe. Frydenberg assured the media he would seek advice from the man who delivered 10 budget surpluses.

Frydenberg did this a lot during his time in politics: assure people with liberal tendencies that he was following in the footsteps of Howard and Costello. To be fair, the pandemic was uncharted terrain for the new treasurer. Not a time for ideology, Frydenberg liked to say, quoting Howard.

Still, the Liberal treasurer could have shown greater caution when spending taxpayers’ money. Australian government gross debt increased from $534.4bn in March 2019 to $895bn in October 2022, with further increases under Frydenberg’s reign forecast to rise to $1.159 trillion – or 43.1 per cent of GDP – by the end of the 2025-26 financial year.

Frydenberg and Morrison can’t take the credit for the Australian economy rebounding after the pandemic. That happened for three reasons: soaring commodity prices, pent-up consumer demand and record government spending.

There was no Liberal genius to this outcome. Labor could have done the same, explaining why there was no thank you at the ballot box in May 2022.

To his credit, Frydenberg slammed Victorian premier Daniel Andrews during the severe lockdown in his home state. But it reeked of hypocrisy given he was part of the Morrison’s inner circle that brainstormed the model of cutting Australians off from one another, including by locking Australian citizens out of the country. Illiberalism begets illiberalism. News over the past few days that the former treasurer was interested in running for Kooyong wasn’t mindless gossip. Frydenberg’s use of the media has been likened to Kevin Rudd’s. Both men were relentless when it came to promoting themselves in different ways at different times, often behind the scenes.

After former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett told Frydenberg to put up or shut up, the former treasurer skulked away.

What’s Frydenberg waiting for? A gold-edged invitation from the party to save them. Like Costello, who blew any chance at the leadership. The claim that Frydenberg shouldn’t be ousting chosen candidate Amelia Hamer because she’s a woman is crackers. You wouldn’t find manners like that at a Kew garden party, let alone in the Victorian Liberal Party.

With Frydenberg dipping out, Katie Allen will have a better claim on Kooyong if it ends up swallowing part of her former Higgins electorate. Or is the Hamer name enough to kill that, too? And Victorians wonder why they haven’t had a Liberal prime minister since Malcolm Fraser.

Alas, Frydenberg has a bigger problem than leaving some unsightly blood on the moribund Victorian political landscape. Does he have the liberal mettle to deliver the goods that he has never been shy about claiming to have?

Over the past two decades or so, Labor and Liberal have been in lock-step with swathes of the illiberal left, becoming more interventionist, more paternalistic, keener to think they themselves are so clever that they know how to spend more of our money on us.

It’s not enough to quote Reagan and Thatcher or to stand in the shadow of Howard and Costello. As Frydenberg told David Speers on Insiders three years ago: “Thatcher and Reagan are figures of hate for the left because they were so successful.” Will Frydenberg ever be prepared to be hated by the left?