Centre-Right implosion has Australia turning left

Peter Dutton in Question Time in the House of Representatives at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture Kym Smith

The Turnbull government is being destroyed from within but the real damage is far greater — the ­centre-Right of Australian politics is locked into a spiral of self-­destruction likely to endure for many years, with the Shorten Labor Party positioned to win the election and shift our national life to the Left.

What was the scorecard last evening? The Turnbull government is being torn apart. Turnbull is a crippled leader heading a divided party with the certainty of more bad polls.

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Peter Dutton from a standing start got 35 votes and has gone to the backbench, ready to strike again and terminate Turnbull. Yet Dutton, an effective minister, would be an experimental gamble as PM with no certainty he would poll better than ­Turnbull.

This is the revenge of the conservatives. Late yesterday Concetta Fierravanti-Wells resigned as minister, releasing a lethal note to the Prime Minister. Her resignation letter went to the essence: Turnbull had moved the party “too far to the Left” with the result that “we were losing our conservative base”.

Turnbull has long been given this warning; now it has reached a climax. Turnbull’s narrow 48-35 win yesterday — able to be reversed with only seven defections — consigns him to borrowed time.

The Liberals with their special brand of panic are now close to a lose-lose scenario. While Turnbull is diminished probably beyond recovery Dutton is neither an obvious political saviour nor assured vote winner. By pulling down Turnbull for Dutton the Liberals have made a fateful call. Many MPs felt they faced their doom and had nothing to lose — but once this fatalism seeps into a government it becomes terminal.

Yesterday almost half the Liberal Party told the Australian public they had no faith in their government — and by preparing to elevate Dutton they are ready to take a major leadership gamble.

Turnbull leads a house divided against itself. That house will remain divided after any successful political assassination of Turnbull by Dutton. There is no pathway back to salvation; the future is more betrayal, recrimination and disillusion.

The Liberal Party is being diminished in every sense — it is split over leadership; it is more polarised between conservatives and progressives; it is riven by profound dispute over energy/climate change and social policy issues; it is stretched to breaking point by ­divergent political cultures across the states; it swings hopelessly between belief in markets and new aggressive forms of government intervention; it has lost its philosophical anchor; it has left the business community agog with shock at this week’s events; and it is nearly broke without obvious means of financing a pivotal election campaign.

Consider the performance of the Liberals.

They pulled down Tony Abbott during their first term and they are pulling down Turnbull during their second term. They voted out Abbott as a conservative leader and are getting ready to vote out Turnbull as a small-L liberal leader. Neither Abbott nor Turnbull as prime ministers has been able to unite the party or bind its sprawling social-economic base that extends from progressive Melbourne to regional Queensland.

There is no figure in the Liberal Party today who can command it across its needed voting base — there is no John Howard, no Malcolm Fraser, no RG Menzies, the three leaders in the history of the Liberal Party able to hold its ­coalition of interests together.

Turnbull was devoid of any credible strategy yesterday after the vote. He failed in an emotional, personal or policy sense to reach out to his detractors. But Dutton is also under pressure.

From yesterday he is seen in a new light — he will be assessed by the media and politicians as a ­future PM. Is Dutton up to the job? Does he possess the appeal, personality, skills and policy nous to command the nation? Being a hard man is not enough, a point Dutton knows.

In explaining his challenge, Dutton was smart and effective — no personal animosity towards Turnbull, no declaration of policy war, no hint of another showdown. The idea he is a puppet of Abbott is absurd.

But manager of opposition business Tony Burke fired a warning shot over the Coalition benches yesterday. With Bill Shorten planning to make health the frontline election issue, Burke raised Dutton’s poor record as health minister over the 2014 budget with the outcry over cuts to hospitals and higher Medicare charges. Have no doubt, Labor will cast Dutton as a threat to Medicare. You can just imagine the ferocity of the campaign.

Turnbull’s capitulation over energy policy on Monday documented his declining authority. The PM and his office misjudged the import of this brawl. Abbott and the rebels intimidated Turnbull by their threat to cross the floor against the national energy guarantee.

The Dutton camp then intimidated him by warning it would be intolerable to legislate the NEG by relying on Labor.

The upshot was that Turnbull was left arguing an untenable proposition for any PM: that he lacked the numbers on the floor of parliament to legislate his own policy. Beyond this, the NEG had a totemic meaning.

This revolt captured all the resentments at Turnbull’s multiple failures: the alienation of the conservative base; the inability to champion conservative values; the failure to devise a Queensland strategy; the conflict with the ­Catholics over school funding; lack of action on religious freedom; the need to adjust on immigration and infrastructure; and the inability to nail the Opposition Leader.

Culture and structure are undermining the foundations of centre-right politics. The organis­ational arm of the Queensland Liberal National Party wants Turnbull gone and policies the Victorians will not wear. Pauline Hanson is a permanent reminder of the 6 per cent of the Coalition vote lost to her breakaway movement.

The centre-Right is fragmenting, a function of “outsider” culture and disillusion with the main parties.

Turnbull does not relate in Queensland but Abbott did not relate with affluent small-L liberals.

Turnbull was right to take the initiative yesterday and declare the leadership vacant. He had to go on the offensive and flush out the challenger. Dutton had no option but to nominate.

In their sudden head-to-head ballot, Turnbull survived. But it was not enough. Most of the cabinet stayed with Turnbull. It is believed only Greg Hunt, Steve Ciobo and Michael Keenan from the cabinet voted for Dutton. This suggests a major cabinet-­backbench split.

Dutton did the right thing in resigning from the frontbench — this was formal notification he no longer accepts Turnbull’s leadership. Turnbull told Dutton he wanted him to stay as home affairs minister but Dutton knew his own mind. He has come to this break from Turnbull slowly and deliberately.

He has supported and helped Turnbull’s leadership on issue after issue. But as a Queenslander and a conservative, he watched Turnbull’s failure to relate to the Liberal base, his refusal to acknowledge the Liberals as a conservative tradition party and his inability to reverse the trend to Hanson.

The Dutton push is driven by the conservatives and is integral to the question: what is the nature of the Liberal Party?

The conservatives believe Turnbull is not on their wavelength, the message they drew from the Longman by-election.

This penetrates to the Dutton challenge. It goes to the essence of the party and its values. Dutton would reorient the government in a conservative direction. In this sense his challenge threatens to accentuate the party’s tensions.

If he gets the top job, Dutton is astute enough to know he has three tasks: to repair the conservative vote; avoid an offsetting loss of progressive votes in Sydney and Melbourne; and keep the party united. A daunting triple act.