Libs in turmoil as agenda unravels

This is the week the zeitgeist of the nation turned against an embattled Coalition. The mood is not just chaotic, it’s dangerous.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

This is the week the zeitgeist of the nation turned against an embattled Coalition. The government has lost control of the parliament, cannot maintain discipline on its own side, confronts an increasingly hostile public and is besieged by a series of causes for which it has no answer — a stronger role for women, gay rights and firmer climate change action.

Australia now enters a chaotic six-month interregnum before the election in May next year with the government’s opponents seizing the political agenda and an emotional tide of progressive opinion crashing across the government benches. Scott Morrison must now fight for Liberal principles when those principles are in jeopardy from within.

The new age of progressive virtue in Australia will come with a high price. The Liberal and National parties are confronting the failures of the past five years where they lost most of the battles of ideas and their genuine economic achievements are being denied recognition.

The government’s message is being drowned. The mood is not just chaotic but emotive and dangerous. The prime exhibit is Labor’s determination to ridicule Morrison by seizing the initiative and legislating the PM’s pledge to remove the law permitting schools to exclude gay students — this comes with a clear warning from Attorney-General Christian Porter that Labor’s bill is a “radical change” leaving the nation’s religious schools and the one million Australians they serve without the legal foundation “to act in accordance with their beliefs and the tenets of their faith”.

The balance in Labor’s bill, sure to be backed by progressive lawyers, is an appeasement of LGBTI demands at the cost of religious freedom protections as they have existed in this country.

The government will seek modest amendments to Labor’s bill. If denied, Morrison and Porter will do everything they can to stop this bill becoming law on the grounds that universally agreed protections for gay students cannot come at the cost of the mission of religious schools. The government faces an uphill fight.

The abject weakness of religious schools in this battle is merely one example of the social and cultural transformation under way in Australia that the Liberal Party in office has missed or on which it has suffered tactical defeats.

The country is changing decisively against the Liberals.

During the past 18 months the conservative wing of the party, on issue after issue, has fatally exaggerated its public support and has been vanquished. The smashing of the Liberals in their Melbourne heartland last weekend exposes the party to a dangerous upcoming six months that could influence its long-term future.

Malcolm Turnbull’s game plan was fixed before he fell — he planned an economic statement in early 2019, an election to be announced on Sunday, January 27, and the poll on March 2 — before the NSW election later in March. The parliament would never sit in 2019. Morrison has altered that for an election on May 11 or 18.

Morrison’s calculation is that he needs time. That is true. The risk, however, is that time may be his enemy. There is one certainty — parliamentary sittings are now his enemy. This is the tactical lesson from last week.

The government has been correct to minimise pre-election parliamentary sittings next year because they offer nothing but danger — a forum for its multiple opponents to use their numbers, to destroy its agenda and to undermine Morrison’s authority.

For Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, the alarming feature of the week was the drowning of their economic message. The symbolism was epic. On Tuesday at the precise time the Prime Minister and the Treasurer met the media to announce an April 2 budget next year — that will be in surplus after a decade of deficits — also confirming a May election, backbencher Julia Banks was sabotaging the government on the floor of parliament with her announcement she was resigning to become an independent. Morrison knew nothing about it. This was pure treachery.

What was the image from the week? The Morrison government on the verge of a fiscal victory with a budget surplus and growth economy? Don’t be ludicrous. The fiscal issue is so yesterday’s politics.

The dominant image was the power of compassionate and independent female MPs defying the grey old Liberal Party.

The colours told the story — confident women in vibrant purple, red and blue dresses and coats — and Julie Bishop’s famous red shoes heading for the Museum of Australian Democracy.

Nothing better captures the changing moods of the country, its impatience with the government and its emotive quest for something different. The feminisation of politics comes at the worst possible time for the Liberals. But that’s the whole point — it has momentum precisely because the Liberals have got a serious “women problem” that defies any quick fix. Every snap of Bishop is now a reminder of her political humiliation by the Liberals.

A frustrated cabinet minister, Kelly O’Dwyer, had her remarks leaked telling a private session of MPs on the Victorian election debacle that the Liberals were widely seen “as homophobic, anti-women and climate-change deniers” — and was unable to deny she made such comments when asked in parliament. Expect to see this as the basis for a lethal ALP ad next election. No government can survive an internal culture war of such ferocity.

It is easy to exaggerate the decline of fiscal responsibility as a political force but the fact of that decline cannot be doubted. In Victoria the Andrews Labor government scored a massive victory having cynically announced pre-election state debt would be doubled from 6 per cent to 12 per cent of GDP. Now it has a mandate.

The Abbott government was destroyed by its ill-judged 2014 budget that tried to find a pathway back to surplus. Neither Turnbull nor Morrison in office could escape the branding put on the Liberals as the party of cuts to health and education, despite Morrison’s revamp as treasurer to make restraint, not cuts, his policy.

The plight of the Coalition is obvious — it will get little credit for the surplus despite being damaged so much at the start for its ill-judged effort. No Australian under 45 years has lived through a recession as a labour market participant and the meaning of debt, deficits and economic responsibility has receded. It is another pivotal cultural change.

“It will be a budget which is the product of the years of hard work of our government, of successive treasurers and prime ministers,” Morrison said. But was he whistling into the wind? The government needs the Christmas break to settle the mood. This week all the images, messages and stories were hostile to Morrison’s government.

Even worse, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, Morrison could do. Julia Gillard predicted this week that a “great feminist wave of change” was coming. But that wave has arrived and is sinking the Liberals. They had five years to prepare and never saw the wave, another cultural failure.

Wide sections of the media hailed the Banks resignation as an act of principle.

After the leadership change Banks accused Liberals of “bullying” tactics but said she would stand by Morrison. In her resignation speech Banks’s core justification was: “I’ve always put the people before the party.”

What people? The people who elected her to parliament as a Liberal? These are the people she has betrayed, not just the Liberal Party. Banks has the hypocrisy to attack Liberal MPs she dislikes for acting “undeniably for themselves” — as if this isn’t exactly what she has done. It is true those conservatives who backed or “understood” Cory Bernardi’s defection to create a new party and now criticise Banks are hypocrites.

But the case of Banks raises an intriguing media conundrum: how is an act of betrayal presented as an act of integrity? Or is there a spurious assumption women possess a superior virtue in politics?

In an age of escalating female assertion the Liberals are stranded — women in Liberal ranks are under-represented in the government and parliament. One of the startling legacies of the Turnbull-Bishop liquidation has been the eruption of the party’s “women problem”. Liberal women MPs number roughly half that of the ALP. Their numbers are less than when John Howard won the 1996 election, though that is partly misleading because total Liberal numbers were greater then.

And there is no quick repair. The Liberal branding as weak on women will last for some years.

For the government, the Turnbull removal has had the disastrous consequence of costing two seats in the House — with Kerryn Phelps and Banks joining Rebek­ha Sharkie and Cathy McGowan as female independents — consti­tuting a powerful image of independent women who symbolise the story of Liberal Party failure.

They also symbolise the government’s humiliation to minority status where it lacks a majority in either the house or Senate and could even face the remote possibility of its opponents securing laws that it cannot accept. The independents rattled their sabres this week — they have six month to make political hay before a major­ity Shorten government reduces them to irrelevance.

In a progressive MPs “love-in” on Thursday the Greens and independents outlined their agenda for a new brief “power sharing” era.

Their announced plans for bills including removing sick asylum-seekers from Nauru and Manus Island based on psychiatric advice, a national integrity commission, halting public funds to coal-fired power stations, banning live sheep exports, calling for urgent action to repeal laws allowing discrimination in religious schools against gay students and teachers, and the possibility of section 44 referrals to the High Court.

Their voices in setting the agenda will be loud. But the gulf between agenda setting and legislating such bills is still vast. To impose new laws on the government they would need all seven independent crossbenchers, the Labor Party and Coalition defections — an unlikely scenario.

The Victorian election, however, has ripped open the deepest vulnerabilities of the Liberal Party. In its Melbourne heartland it is incompetent, alienated from its base and faces a moment of unique danger. Will more high-profile independents emerge to challenge senior Liberal ministers in their once supposedly safe seats? Will a high-profile woman nominate to contest Tony Abbott in his seat?

The danger in NSW is different but just as lethal. The risk is the Liberal Party’s existential crisis will jeopardise or even ruin the re-election prospects of the Berejik­lian government in the biggest state. The state government will now face the polls before the Morrison government. If Berejiklian loses, the internal rancour will become even more poisonous.

In the interim Morrison faces a long, hot summer — literally. The fires are now burning in Queensland. The progressives are mobilising their forces. The funding for the proposed Adani mine will ignite the progressive legions in their anti-coal crusade; school kids are striking over climate change; while Morrison’s focus is on reducing power prices will be targeted as too weak on emissions reduction. Can the government hold the electoral ground on this battle or will it succumb to the tide of progressive propaganda?

Another message from the week is that the vanquished leaders, Turnbull and Bishop, are not marching towards any political monastery. Bishop has not forgiven the party. Turnbull will never forgive the party.

This week Bishop extolled the virtues of the Turnbull government’s abandoned national energy guarantee and its ability to provide long-term certainty for generators and ignite essential investment.

Bishop’s words were sweet reason and inflammatory politics. The NEG is no longer Liberal policy — it is Labor policy. Bishop happily suggested the government secure a bipartisan regulatory framework with Labor but Morrison is bent upon the opposite tactic. Bishop called for an approach that balanced prices with environmental concern — but Morrison has separated the energy and environmental ministries.

Bishop struck at the heart of Morrison’s energy policy and that is integral to his re-election strategy. For the time being she will remain on the political stage, a reminder to the party of the choices it made. Bishop is the endorsed candidate for Curtin. Her current intent is to contest the seat, yet she has still kept her options open.

As for Turnbull, he will select the time and method of his future media appearances. The one certainty is that Turnbull will operate and speak as a free agent with a record to defend. Morrison and Frydenberg know — Turnbull will not stay silent.

Meanwhile Bill Shorten looks better all the time. He has a government that keeps delivering him gifts. Shorten radiates confidence and his speeches have bite and penetration. Consider his motion this week against the government: “This is a government that has simply ceased to govern. The ramshackle, reactionary Coalition sitting opposite are so consumed by some form of existential identity crisis, some bizarre debate about what it means to be a real Liberal. They watch and rewatch the old footage of John Winston Howard and they roll him out, in some sort of video, to prove that they were once Liberals. They talk to themselves about themselves in conservative echo chambers. They pontificate about this mythical right-wing base and they write off whole communities as irrelevant.”