Malcolm Turnbull ignored policy critics to his peril
Malcolm Turnbull’s critics were trying to warn him against straying from the conservative path. His clueless media boosters just didn’t see it.
Thanks to a chaotic decade of digital media-fuelled political trauma, Canberra journalists are so obsessed with leadership speculation that they joke constantly on Twitter about how “it’s on” (#itson).
So when a leadership coup unfolds under their noses, chews up a government and spits out an unexpected new prime minister, how then do they explain it?
Self-justification — conscious or not — might lead them to suggest events were impossible to foresee. How, then, to explain others’ warnings? Again, self-justification might demand portraying the cautions as coming not from observers but instigators of the shambles. This is the real story of the media’s dysfunction in this latest capital convulsion.
Readers of The Australian will not have been surprised that Malcolm Turnbull ran into internal strife over climate and energy policy. The media voices Turnbull and his supporters blame for fuelling moves against him surely were the ones warning him. His handicap was not in having critics but in ignoring them.
Political commentary is abuzz as journalists, especially from the public broadcasters, offer the absurd proposition that this crisis was about nothing, came out of nowhere and failed because Peter Dutton, the original challenger, didn’t get the leadership.
They portray it much like the spaceship scene in Life of Brian. Turnbull — a prime minister many saw as the Messiah — was running from his opponents when there was a bizarre interlude where aliens kidnapped him, took him into an inexplicable space battle, then crashed back to Earth, only for Scott Morrison to emerge from the wreckage and wander off from this pointless episode in his sandals. “You lucky bastard,” says an onlooker as the chase resumes.
As with any leadership coup, a range of factors was at play, including resentment, ego, polling and ambition. Turnbull failed the Newspoll test he set, making him vulnerable from the day he lost his 30th in a row. The Longman by-election, where a Liberal National Party primary vote below 30 per cent put the fear of obliteration into Queensland MPs, supercharged anxieties.
All the while, Tony Abbott and his loyalists had worn their sense of injustice like blue ties pulled too tight around their necks. With flushed faces and bursting veins, they were always going to erupt if an opportunity arose.
In this climate, Turnbull must have known he needed to avoid provocations. Yet he walked into this conflagration in the most predictable way. A party voted into office largely on a pledge to repeal costly carbon emissions reduction policy (axe the carbon tax), led by a man who previously had lost the leadership for trying to do a deal with Labor on climate policy and was trying to bed down another costly emissions reduction plan by striking a deal with Labor — this was always going to end in tears.
This is not hindsight. On radio, television and in the pages of The Australian, Turnbull was warned his national energy guarantee would test internal accommodations. The NEG was conceived in the wake of such a fright, almost two years ago, when environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg floated an energy intensity scheme. Turnbull had to move quickly to repudiate it and reassure MPs.
Editorials in The Australian have long warned of potential disruption over the NEG. “The prime minister and his team must act decisively to put solutions in place — which, to be fair, they are working towards — as they battle disunity within the Coalition on this issue,” the paper said in April. In July concerns were raised about the leap of faith involved: “Regardless of the former prime minister’s personal motivation, it is alarming but true, as Mr Abbott said on Monday, that the Turnbull government will be relying on the support of Labor states to back its national energy guarantee at next month’s crucial COAG meeting.”
Early this month I wrote that the Coalition was in dire strife and that “government MPs are torn between enjoying the ride as they go over the cliff and mustering the courage to do something about it”. The main problem was obvious. “In a twist of self-harm difficult to believe given Turnbull’s history on the issue (in 2009 he lost the leadership over climate activism), the Coalition is shrinking from a potential contest with Labor over climate and energy; preferring to appease the gods of Paris rather than reclaiming the nation’s cheap energy mantle.”
Turnbull’s media boosters at the ABC and elsewhere either didn’t see the looming problem or underestimated it because they supported the policy — wishful thinking. My columns were not informed by any plotting but, rather, assessments of policy and political trajectories. Given I worked for Turnbull when he lost the leadership in 2009 over climate policy, perhaps I was more sensitive to the dynamic. But a clutch of commentators was vigorously attacking the policy and Abbott and his backbench ally Craig Kelly were openly opposing it.
As far back as April 7, I wrote: “The prime minister has been given an opportunity to retreat in the name of common sense, economic sanity and political advantage. But he stands in a no man’s land of stranded coal assets and stored hydro schemes where he risks another insurrection on the same futile battleground.”
Nine days before he called last week’s first spill, my column said Turnbull would “face open revolt over his national energy guarantee; the outstanding questions are how widespread it will be, whether it derails the policy and/or his prime ministership”. A week later I wrote about the “climate and energy debate that is so volatile it could yet destroy Turnbull’s prime ministership and/or the Coalition government”.
On that day this newspaper’s editorial warned: “Malcolm Turnbull needs a circuit-breaker to rescue his national energy guarantee, revive his government’s direction and protect his leadership … The Coalition was elected in 2013 largely on a promise to defend electricity prices from conceitful climate gestures. (Turnbull and Frydenberg) will abandon that policy and political ground at the grave peril of their own positions and that of the Coalition.”
Turnbull and his cabinet persisted with the policy too long. Even after the Coalition partyroom approved it a fortnight ago, MPs’ concerns deepened as they realised Australia would become the only country to write the Paris targets into law. It became an issue of economic sovereignty.
The policy fell apart and on August 20 Turnbull effectively shelved it, saying he would not put the legislation to parliament, ostensibly because it wouldn’t pass but more likely because it might pass with Labor support while a dozen or more government MPs crossed the floor to oppose it.
Announcing this capitulation, the prime minister looked broken and a challenge suddenly appeared inevitable. Until a few days earlier, it had been all about changing the policy, not the leader. Now it would be both.
This week the ABC’s Media Watch portrayed the event as a media-driven panic. Host Paul Barry failed to mention the critical energy conflict that triggered the crisis or report the detailed warnings about Turnbull’s perilous path. Barry, in line with much of the gallery, drew other lessons that entirely missed the point. “Well, one is not to let a cabal of conservative commentators persuade the Liberal Party to do something the public hates — knifing an elected prime minister.”
This is an extraordinary distortion. Media Watch argues loud voices antipathetic to Turnbull from the moment he seized the prime ministership from Abbott — Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones, Peta Credlin, Ray Hadley and others — killed off a prime minister by spooking his party. Other commentators have promoted media conspiracy theories. This not only insults the MPs and grossly exaggerates the role of open and honest opinion, it also ignores the majority of media voices at the ABC, SBS, Fairfax Media, commercial TV and radio, online publications and many in News Corp papers who have been supportive of Turnbull and sympathetic to his energy and climate aims. Turnbull’s problem was not (admittedly aggressive and relentless) conservative commentators polluting the minds of his MPs but green-left journalists insulating him from reality.
It is instructive to go back three years: if the ABC and others can say this upheaval was all about nothing and attributable only to a minority media cohort, what did they say about the media’s role when Turnbull overthrew Abbott? In September 2015, Media Watch at least recognised some journalistic antipathy towards Abbott (which was much more widespread than anything Turnbull faced). Barry said Fairfax “was hostile” to Abbott but pointed to “loud support” from News Corp. “So to say the prime minister was given no chance by the media and they were united against him is just absurd,” Barry said. “In fact, what’s remarkable is that he lost his grip on power despite all that media support.”
This is truly Orwellian: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. The public broadcaster dismisses media culpability for Abbott’s fall but blames the media alone for Turnbull’s.
Journalists have reacted differently to leadership trauma, depending on the victor and the victim. When Abbott took down Turnbull in opposition in 2009, Fairfax’s Peter Hartcher called it “kamikaze fundamentalism” that would make it harder for the Coalition to win and would be likely to prompt Labor to “bring it on”.
Yet years later, after Abbott had won in a landslide and Hartcher and many others had helped internal opponents chip away at him, he welcomed Turnbull’s ascension as the most popular figure who would govern from the “sensible” centre. Last week, Hartcher was down on leadership switches again, blaming Abbott’s “visceral, vengeful rage” for “tormenting” and “destroying” Turnbull. Black hats versus white hats.
The gallery zeitgeist has ridiculed the latest coup as a failure, misunderstanding its aims and origins. It was not a methodical, well-planned insurrection involving leaks and subversion but a policy-driven push by a growing number of MPs convinced the party was drifting too far from mainstream conservatism. At the end, their view was confirmed by Turnbull, who described his administration as a “progressive government, a progressive Liberal Coalition government”. Some people will like that concept, others not, but the point is that it is anathema to what many Liberal MPs and voters thought they had enlisted.
Unlike most leadership challenges (but similar to the Liberal knifing of Turnbull in 2009), this had policy at its heart. The prime aim of the conservative challengers was not to install Dutton but to change direction on climate and energy, call time on a drift to the Left, depose Turnbull to do so, reclaim the party on behalf of a mainstream membership and elect Dutton as the man prepared to deliver. For the drawn-out shambles it became, largely attributable to Turnbull’s delaying tactics, the plotters achieved four-fifths of their goals. They expect the government will now do better in Queensland, the regions and western Sydney. They may be right, or wrong, but that is what happened and why. Some observers either don’t realise this or don’t want to know.
From the party’s perspective the outcome is perhaps a little better than expected because Morrison is a more well-rounded and saleable leader than Dutton, certainly outside of Queensland, and he has been elevated without blood on his hands. How well the party unites will be crucial, of course, as will next steps on energy. Angus Taylor is a smart appointment. Barnaby Joyce has taken up his drought envoy role with gusto and Abbott last night accepted his indigenous affairs role.
Still, recriminations are likely. The most opaque and worrisome outcome might be that Morrison’s rise through the middle could have further empowered the lobbyist and factional powerbroker Michael Photios, whose patronage and power is the unexplained and unresolved flaw in the NSW Liberal Party. If his influence has entrenched itself in Canberra, the foundations of the Coalition could be undercut.
