Plenty of Australians must be wondering why the Prime Minister won’t just sack Bridget McKenzie over the sports rorts affair and be done with it. The Auditor General found that the guidelines for allocating $100m in taxpayers funds were breached. Sport Australia recommendations were ignored. Coalition marginal seats were favoured.
Surely all of that should result in instant dismissal right?
Wrong. Not when you consider all the ancillary issues in the mix. That is, the political calculations going on behind the scenes.
Don’t get me wrong, I have been calling for Scott Morrison to sack McKenzie from the get go. He has the authority and he should use it. It is high time politics and pork barrelling in this country was cleaned up.
But that isn’t the way political operatives like Morrison think.
He would be worried about what she might do after being sacked: possibly spilling the beans on the involvement of others in the grants process. As this newspaper reported on the weekend, the PM’s office had a hand in the allocation of grants, and I bet the tentacles of this sorry saga don’t end there.
The PM wants a clean and crisp excuse for getting rid of her which won’t feed back into who else might have been involved in the sports rorts scandal. The pathway to that is the investigation his head of department (and Morrison’s former chief of staff) is doing. That is, looking into if she breached the ministerial code of conduct in one narrow respect: not declaring a membership of an organisation a grant went to.
If she can be dumped on that grounds alone, everyone else is protected and can carry on. So the PM will wait for that investigation to conclude, and if he does act he will act on that and that alone.
It’s inspiring stuff.
Then you have to consider the many other pork barrelling opportunities that the government may have taken up which are yet to be exposed. Which haven’t yet undergone the scrutiny of an Auditor General’s report. Nationals leader Michael McCormack is no doubt concerned about exactly that, which partly explains why he is lobbying against McKenzie getting the boot.
The other reason McCormack doesn’t want to lose his deputy is because doing so opens the door for a Barnaby Joyce comeback — onto the front bench and perhaps into the deputy leadership. And the return of Joyce wouldn’t end there: the former leader would no doubt eye off another step up, stealing McCormack’s job at some point down the track.
Morrison like all good Liberal leaders wants to try and maintain a healthy relationship with the Nationals. Sacking McKenzie against their wishes makes that harder.
And Joyce returning to the front bench fold would mean that the Nationals are less likely to be as subservient in the Coalition relationship as they currently are.
A weak Nationals leader suits Morrison, who isn’t well known for his collaborative skills.
Then you have to consider the hypocrisy of easing McKenzie out but not having acted against Angus Taylor, for example, whose office is currently under police investigation, no less, for allegedly using a forged document to vexatiously attack the Sydney City Lord Mayor.
Finally, there is the conventional wisdom that sacking ministers is a bad look, can harm morale internally and it is better to ride out a crisis and hope that other issues take attention off elsewhere. This was the cynical lesson John Howard learned after sacking a bunch of ministers in his first term for electoral entitlements abuses before battening down the hatches and not doing the same for a decade.
Morrison no doubt has that precedent on his mind too.
These are all complicated political calculations, when doing the right thing is rather obvious and simple. McKenzie should be sacked, and not for the narrow reason she perhaps will be.
But unfortunately politics is rarely about doing the right thing these days.
Peter van Onselen is the Political Editor at Network 10 and a professor of politics and public policy and the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.
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