Abbott should show a little respect

Malcolm Turnbull

MALCOLM Turnbull didn't deserve to be treated the way he was on Wednesday when chief opposition whip Warren Entsch sent out an email admonishing the former leader and four of his colleagues for missing divisions.

And Tony Abbott - who at the least sighted the email before it was distributed, at worst approved it - needs to understand he is fuelling instability by authorising public insults against colleagues.

Abbott may have implored his partyroom not to make itself the issue the day before the email was sent, but he needs to start taking his own advice.

Yesterday he told the Nine Network that Entsch was correct to do what he did.

A public insult is what Entsch's email was. By sending it out to the entire lower house team of the opposition, the email was always going to leak. Entsch would have known that, especially given that back in October 2000 he was on the other side of a similar exchange between recalcitrant MPs who missed votes and the then chief whip for the Howard government, Michael Ronaldson.

In those days email wasn't in vogue, the fax machine was. Ronaldson sent a similarly chastising fax to the partyroom and Entsch found the move insulting, he said as much in a facsimile response. It was reported at the time.

Apart from Entsch's sloppiness in not even getting the number of missed divisions by Turnbull and others right in his widely distributed email, he is something of a hypocrite for doing exactly what he found inappropriate more than a decade earlier. Not to mention untruthful. At first, when asked, Entsch claimed he had acted independently of Abbott and the leader hadn't even seen the email. Later he admitted showing it to Abbott but not to seek approval, only as a courtesy.

In the highly professionalised world of major party management, if you believe Abbott couldn't have controlled his chief whip you will believe anything. Of course Abbott (or his office) could have stopped the email going out. They chose not to.

Telling lies (or being misleading to be a little kinder) seems to be contagious in the Coalition at the moment. When I spoke to one of Abbott's senior media advisers on Thursday he told me Abbott had no knowledge of the email until after it went out. His office had been pushing that line all over the place. Thanks for the spin, but we now know that to be false.

Then there is Abbott's hypocrisy in authorising the Entsch email, remembering that when Turnbull was leader and the vote for or against the government's $42 billion stimulus package happened, Abbott slept through no fewer than five divisions.

For the record, sleeping through five ringings of the bell in Parliament House (he was on the couch in his office) is hard to do. They aren't exactly soft in tone. But Abbott had been at dinner earlier that night consuming copious amounts of alcohol (he said he lost count of the number of bottles of wine drunk when asked about the session by a journalist at the time) with Peter Costello, Peter Dutton and Kevin Andrews. They made it to the vote but Abbott didn't.

Consider the importance or otherwise of the divisions Abbott missed v the divisions Turnbull missed: voting on the largest economic stimulus in our nation's modern history to combat the worst global downturn since the Depression v voting on giving a handful of members a chance to speak in parliament for an extra few minutes.

Granted the Coalition can now defeat Labor on the floor of the chamber courtesy of the hung parliament, meaning that votes are more than just symbolic. But the symbolic significance of the stimulus voting under Turnbull's leadership has shaped the economic narrative of the two main parties ever since. And the now Liberal leader slept through it because he had been drinking earlier in the evening.

Advocates of on-message politics are upset that Turnbull during the past week has been speaking on climate change and in the process causing Abbott and his direct action policy some discomfort. While at times Turnbull's tone belied his claims of discipline at sticking to the script, as a former leader (and one who lost his job standing on principle on exactly this subject) he has a right to speak beyond his portfolio area from time to time. That right is something John Howard spruiked during his wilderness years (a time when he was in regular contact with then leader John Hewson's press secretary, Tony Abbott).

Turnbull is too intelligent to do what many MPs happily do and stick to bland scripts and avoid answering questions that would take them off message. That, of course, gets him in trouble from time to time, and probably illustrates why he isn't suited to modern politics. But it also speaks to what is wrong with modern politics and why the public is increasingly cynical of what our leaders say and do.

Surely debate, in parliament or via the media, is a good thing for our liberal democracy. However, if our major party leaders and their spinning strategists had their way - and this is a criticism of both sides - MPs would act like mindless robots who do exactly what they are told. That might work for the leader in the here and now, but what happens when those robots migrate to the leadership or ministries themselves? They don't have the training or the wherewithal to succeed, or at least most don't.

That is one reason why the political class of today isn't as impressive as the political classes in years gone by.

Turnbull is unlikely to again lead the Liberal Party. A third of the partyroom would rather blow the place up than allow him to successfully lead. Another third of the partyroom may have sympathy for a second Turnbull stint as leader (not at present on the numbers, mind you), but the final third wouldn't want to go through the turbulence the anti-Turnbull forces would create.

That leaves the member for Wentworth a long way off fulfilling his ambition to lead his party again. This is something he probably knows.

While Turnbull is no doubt happy for others to plumb for his return, or indeed for a promotion to the shadow treasury over his one-time mate Joe Hockey, Turnbull isn't engaging in the sort of backgrounding that he is being accused of. Far from it.

Abbott would do well to pay Turnbull more respect, at the same time as paying less attention to fears that he is undermining him. There is one sure way to anger a bull in a paddock: taunt it.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia.