Hoist with their own Ironbar

IS Wilson Tuckey mad, bad or just plain sad?

Mad because his leader, Malcolm Turnbull, is not paying enough attention to partyroom decisions, bad for breaking ranks and publicly condemning Turnbull, or just plain sad for not retiring with dignity now that he is a mature 74?

It may be that each of these propositions holds a certain amount of truth.

Tuckey has been a controversial political figure for many decades and unashamedly so, saying: "I give no quarter and I take no quarter. Don't forget I have long been the Liberal Party's hit man."

These days Tuckey is more than a political headkicker. He has turned into a strong dissenting voice against the Liberal leadership team.

Dissent in politics can be a good thing, of course. I suspect the public doesn't much like the increasing trend for our parliamentary chambers to be flooded with careerists who are well trained at toeing the party line.

But when rational dissent turns into outright vandalism by MPs against their own side of politics, democracy suffers. Many Liberals believe that is what Tuckey has been doing for many months. It would be a mistake, however, to think Tuckey has been doing so simply to be a troublemaker. In his mind he must stop the country from adopting an emissions trading scheme that won't solve climate change problems but instead will tax industry into the ground.

"It is nothing more than a process by which the government sells the right to pollute," he says.

Tuckey isn't afraid to break partisan ranks and condemn the government's ETS legislation, which failed to win passage through the Senate on Thursday, and Turnbull's alternative.

The Frontier Economics modelling didn't win Tuckey over: "It is no better than the government's scheme. What it is saying is that we are going to give more free certificates to the energy sector to pollute. It's bloody silly."

What will Tuckey do if his partyroom agrees to Turnbull's wish to pass the ETS in three months to avoid a double-dissolution election? "That will be on their heads, not mine. I will make a significant impact over the next three months to stop it happening. If it still happens I'll continue to campaign in the public against it."

Turnbull isn't the first Liberal leader Tuckey has undermined. He used to express concerns at regular intervals about John Howard's leadership, even when he was prime minister.

In fact, if you cast an eye over Tuckey's parliamentary career it reveals he has long been a maverick who, by his actions, sometimes risks damaging the way the public views its politicians.

The difference between yesteryear and today is that Tuckey, once upon a time, focused his attacks on the other side of politics. Tuckey's preparedness to break ranks and attack his leader has some Liberals asking why the West Australian Liberal state council doesn't disendorse him. The answer is because he would run and win as an independent, and it is questionable the conservative WA Liberal Party would even agree to disendorse him on the wish of the parliamentary party anyway.

Throughout his career Tuckey has been known for his willingness on occasion to use parliamentary privilege to besmirch the reputations of his opponents. Under privilege parliamentarians are exempt from defamation laws, which is why it is so important that the Speaker of the House of Representatives keeps a close eye on the way some MPs choose to address the chamber.

Privilege is also one reason Parliament House is sometimes referred to as "Coward's Castle". Many an MP has been forthright and unforgiving with their attacks in the chamber but cowardly and silent when asked to repeat those same remarks outside of it.

It is ironic that strongman "Iron bar" Tuckey is a user of the cowardly tactic of smearing opponents under parliamentary privilege. In the 1980s Tuckey attacked Paul Keating over a breach of promise action against him concerning an engagement in the early 70s. Keating believed Tuckey's words falsely implied an illegitimate child was involved. Tuckey would not withdraw the remarks and Howard would not agree to have them removed from the Hansard records: his argument when telephoned by Keating was that he simply couldn't control Tuckey. It is easy to take umbrage with some of the colourful language Keating often uses. But when he described Tuckey as a "loopy crim" he may have been at least half-right.

Not content with slandering the then treasurer, Tuckey also attacked the finance minister, Peter Walsh, in 1987 by saying he was intending to have a chat to Walsh about the senator's "affairs with his secretaries". These days Tuckey and Walsh have become family through the marriage of relatives.

For much of the 80s Tuckey got down and dirty in parliament, and he remains proud of it. In fairness to Tuckey the 80s were heady days and the Labor Party was not backwards in coming forwards when it came to hurling abuse across the chamber. But Tuckey more than joined in. The most you can get out of him now is the admission: "I frequently talk too much. I will concede that."

That also includes some of his commentary about his own side of politics.

Tuckey was one of the "gang of five" who orchestrated the rolling of Howard as leader in 1989, replacing him with Andrew Peacock. How a self-described policy dry such as Tuckey could be involved in installing the dripping wet Peacock over Howard is hard to fathom. But he was not alone in wanting to do so. The coup succeeded but Peacock got off to a poor start: three members of the gang of five agreed to be interviewed by the ABC's Four Corners program about their exploits, illustrating how underhanded the whole initiative had been. It damaged Peacock's leadership immediately.

During the Howard prime ministerial years Tuckey was largely kept in check. At first he was a minister, which meant he was forbidden from speaking out against the party line. Howard took the carefully crafted step of making Tuckey the minister assisting the prime minister, so that his chief of staff, Arthur Sinodinos, could keep a watchful eye over the maverick MP.

After Tuckey was dumped from the ministry in late 2003 he started up again, agitating from the back bench. But the enduring popularity of Howard ensured Tuckey never caused the sorts of tensions he is now creating that undermine Turnbull's leadership.

That is the difference between government and opposition.

If Tuckey's aim of late has been to destabilise Turnbull's leadership (he would argue that is a consequence of his real aim to draw attention to the faulty position Turnbull wants the Liberals to adopt on the ETS) he has succeeded, but only to a point.

The lengths to which Tuckey has gone to publicly criticise his leader have galvanised support for Turnbull.

When Tuckey launched into Turnbull at the partyroom meeting on Tuesday, after having telegraphed his punches for days beforehand in the media, Bob Baldwin jumped to Turnbull's defence and told Tuckey to shut up and stop damaging the chances of marginal seat MPs at the next election. But Tuckey points out Baldwin was the only MP to take up Turnbull's offer to respond to his criticisms. It is a sure sign Tuckey thinks many of his colleagues silently agree with his public comments.

Mad, bad or just plain sad, Tuckey won't stop his attacks against his leader as long as Turnbull pushes for some version of an ETS. And the Liberal Party has neither the mechanisms nor the guts to remove Tuckey from the parliamentary Liberal line-up.

Tuckey intends to go on, at least for the next parliamentary term.

But he would do well to reflect on his words in a media interview way back in 1986: "My personal philosophy is excellence. It's being good at what you're doing and being better than anybody else. I'm about winning."

If Tuckey is serious about winning the next election he might need to control his attacks against his leader, even if he disagrees with him.