Newspoll divides Turnbull camp

Education Minister Simon Birmingham is looking a lot like the tomato that ripened early.

Birmingham is buying political enemies for his inability to strike peace with the Catholic sector. Picture: Kym Smith.

The latest Newspoll will divide the Turnbull government into two camps.

The old guard will be looking closely to exit politics in time to craft a new career or step quietly into retirement.

The second camp will consist of the young and ambitious who can still see themselves with a political future after a couple of terms of a Shorten government.

This is the evidence of the polling that has, for many months, provided deeply limited cause for optimism for the Coalition.

It is this dynamic that has made Education Minister Simon Birmingham’s bungling of the politics of the Catholic education funding issue bewildering for a growing number of Coalition MPs.

Birmingham, at 43, is still young enough to be considered capable of being a serious leader of the next Coalition government, whenever that might be.

His hometown supporters will probably encourage him to contest a lower house seat and potentially even lead the Liberal Party, making him the first South Australian to do this since Alexander Downer in 1994-95.

And yet Birmingham’s handling of the Catholic education war has mystified large slabs of the Turnbull government, not so much because of his policy ambitions but his apparent determination to actively and deliberately blow up the relationship with the nation’s dominant religion.

The issue has soured so badly for Birmingham that key members of Cabinet are privately questioning how he could bungle the politics so comprehensively and there will be a legacy issue for not just the Prime Minister but the Education Minister himself.

That is, if the Turnbull ship goes down — as it most likely will — there will be recriminations.

Birmingham’s direct and indirect, public and private slagging of Catholic Education Melbourne is angering MPs and members of the Victorian Liberal Party.

Birmingham is buying lifelong political enemies for his inability to strike peace with the Catholic sector.

With a state election looming late this year in Victoria, messages have been sent to Canberra — the PM included — that the relationship needs to be repaired.

It will take much more than one meeting with CEM head Stephen Elder to fix this dynamic, no matter how hard Birmingham tries to spin it.

The Education Minister is facing the political humiliation of having to accept that the current Socioeconomic Status funding model is flawed. Some would argue dysfunctional.

The review of SES funding will almost certainly lead to an overhaul of the policy, which is at the core of the Catholic demands.

It’s true that more money has been tipped into education under Birmingham but it’s equally true that his increases will be nowhere near the size of that being promised by Bill Shorten.

Birmingham is offering the motoring equivalent of a VW Beetle, Shorten a Porsche.

In many ways, the argument is futile, because the Turnbull government is pretty much cooked.

So if Birmingham is so smart, why has he been such a political dill?

One theory is that, being of the South Australian disposition, he doesn’t understand the more muscular Catholicism in Victoria and NSW.

The South Australian version of Catholicism is a softer brand, in part because of the history of the church’s slow rise to numerical dominance.

Yet if Birmo were to have a look at the latest Census figures, he would learn that there are 300,000 people who marked themselves down in South Australia as Catholic.

This is 18 per cent of the state’s population in 2016 and just over 4 per cent below the national average.

In political terms, these are potentially election losing numbers.

Perhaps he is relying on the deep angst in the community about the sex abuse issue, gambling on the assumption that the church’s stocks are so low that it no longer matters.

The problem with this assumption is that the church still educates vast slabs of the national community; the challenge is not so much the parental love for the church.

It’s more about the parental loathing for having to pay higher school fees.

This discussion is not about Xavier or St Kevin’s College or Riverview or even Rostrevor.

It’s all about the low fee paying schools, where Catholic education does most of its business.

“He’s utterly f. ked it,’’ said one senior MP.

Birmingham privately thinks he has his critics pegged, that he knows who they are and they are the usual suspects.

He is wrong.

The internal critics are just as likely to be non Catholics as Catholics.

``He’s the dunce from central casting,’’ is how another senior Liberal responded.

Birmingham is looking a lot like the tomato that ripened early.

He is spoiling his long-term career prospects through arrogance and false assumptions.

This is not so much about religion but the cost of living.

Unless he shows his colleagues the ability to compromise and change direction, his career will start and end in the Senate.

Maybe he doesn’t care.