Can Linda Reynolds really continue as Defence Minister?
In the latest development, she has another medical certificate lasting nearly another month. Everyone wishes the Defence Minister a speedy recovery. No one doubts the genuineness of her illness. But is this situation really in the national interest?
The government now has two members of cabinet’s critical national security committee — Reynolds and Attorney-General, Christian Porter — on sick leave.
The controversies surrounding rape allegations over the past few weeks have rocked the government. Labor has played the politics of these issues in a ruthless fashion. Much of the controversy surrounding Porter is wildly unfair, but it is still having a destabilising and partially crippling effect on the government.
There is no doubt about the authenticity of Reynolds’ medical condition. But it is a terrible look for the government that a minister who broke down in parliament over her response to the Brittany Higgins rape allegations, and then had to correct her evidence to the Senate twice, has subsequently avoided all parliamentary scrutiny.
She will now avoid Senate question time and Senate estimates committees.
There was deep unhappiness in the Morrison government that Reynolds had an all but invisible profile in the first 18 months of her tenure. The government is spending more money on defence than any previous government in Australian history and getting no political pay-off for it at all.
The submarine project — the most expensive in our history, and designed to create out most formidable military capability — has become a public joke because the government has comprehensively abandoned the field of advocacy, or even explanation, about the program.
At the same time, Australia’s strategic circumstances are continuing to deteriorate and there is no public guidance or sophisticated dialogue with the Australian people from the cabinet, unless the Prime Minister does it himself.
Reynolds was to kick off a new higher public profile with a speech to the National Press Club on February 24. She would certainly have faced intense questioning on the Higgins matter. Instead, the senator was in hospital.
To repeat, there is not the slightest suggestion from anyone that Reynolds is feigning any element of her illness. But the affairs of the nation are more important than any single individual.
And the politics of it all are diabolic. If Reynolds leaves Defence — and given the tragic decision of South Australian backbencher Nicolle Flint to leave politics at the next election — it will be easy enough for the government’s enemies to say the only political victims of the rape controversies were two women. Nonetheless, it is possible to have the greatest compassion for a cabinet minister who is ill, and still decide that the nation needs to make alternative long-term arrangements.
When Naval Group global chief executive Pierre-Eric Pommellet was recently in Australia he watched the government lose its parliamentary majority and then lose the services of the Defence Minister he come to see.
Again, whichever way you slice it, this is an unsatisfactory way for Australia to conduct such critically important business.
Finally, the public could be reasonably excused for thinking that this bout of Reynolds’ illness was at least partly provoked by the stress and turmoil of the politics she was enduring. Health Minister Greg Hunt in commenting on her illness described parliamentary politics as “the most intense” environment in Australia, which seems to be wildly overstating things (more intense than a surgeon battling for a patient’s life, more intense than a police officer trying to prevent an ice-addicted offender murdering his partner?)
Everyone should wish Reynolds well. But it is reasonable to ask whether an illness that can be triggered by stress is not problematic for a Defence Minister.
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