Sometimes when a political party is in its death throes within a particular cycle, it engages in extravagant acts of self-mutilation. Internally, the war of all against all is unleashed. There is simultaneously a blood lust and a determination to grab hold of whatever you can lay your hands on.
It is difficult not to see elements of these syndromes at work in the barking mad decision of the NSW Liberal Party to throw out of parliament the most capable, the best-known and the most impressive backbench senator in Australia, Major General (retired) Jim Molan.
Let me give you a few tiny snapshots of Molan.
Earlier this week, 16 colonels from the Indonesian Army visited Canberra. In the scheme of things, these are people worth knowing, people worth investing something in for our future.
Molan conducted the formal meeting with them at Parliament House, in the Indonesian language.
Why would the Liberal Party think someone like that was worth having in the parliament?
Molan has put his life on the line for Australia and Australians on many occasions. In 2004 he was the chief of operations of the US-led force in Iraq, sent there by John Howard. Molan was the most senior Australian officer in any allied force in combat since at least the Vietnam War. He was under fire in Iraq many times.
Dozing once on a helicopter flight, he opened his eyes to see a 23mm anti-aircraft gun pointed directly at him. Luckily, it missed. John Negroponte, later the US deputy secretary of state, wrote to Howard to thank him for Molan’s service. Negroponte wrote: “Molan made history and helped reshape the Middle East.” As well as the Order of Australia and the Distinguished Service Cross from Australia, Molan was awarded the Legion of Merit by the US.
Why would the Liberal Party have any use for a man like that?
As defence attache in Indonesia in 1998, Molan put his life at risk to get out among the demonstrators during the fall of Suharto, so that Canberra could know what was happening.
Later, on one ferocious night in East Timor when the murderous militias were running riot, Molan made the critical phone call to John Howard telling him it was credible and achievable for Australia to put a peacekeeping force into East Timor. Later again, driving the vehicle himself and in acute danger, Molan evacuated Australian civilians, Filipino nuns and others from East Timor. He also saved Bishop Carlos Belo in an airport confrontation when the militias had vowed to kill Belo.
But what contribution could a man like that possibly make to the contemporary Liberal Party, overwhelmed as its parliamentary ranks are with big personalities, high achievers, community leaders, all of them popular figures with broad public profiles?
Before he entered politics, Molan designed and to some extent led Operation Sovereign Borders, an operation of the sort which Kevin Rudd had claimed the military had told him could not be done. It secured Australia’s borders and saved us from the kind of illegal immigration crisis which is destroying European politics. What use could the Liberal Party have for a man like that?
Second only to prime ministers and former prime ministers, Molan is the best-known federal Liberal politician from NSW. And certainly, within the Liberal Party, the most popular. He has particular appeal to our fastest-growing demographic, the over-65s, and our 280,000 military veterans. If the Liberal Party does not dominate in those demographics, it has no chance at any level of politics.
But Molan’s appeal is much broader than that.
And yet he finds himself relegated to third position on the NSW Senate ticket behind Hollie Hughes and Andrew Bragg. Until the recent preselection controversies came up, I had never heard of either of them. And I am a professional political journalist.
The ability of the Liberal Party to choose identikit nonentities for Senate positions is of course notorious. This preselection was a factional outcome. Molan will go on the ticket behind Bragg and Hughes — names to conjure with, surely, in Australian politics — and also behind the first-ranked Nat, so he has been given an unwinnable spot.
Something similar to Molan’s fate happened to Penny Wong once in the South Australian Labor Party. But Labor rightly recognised that Wong was major-league talent and reversed the preselection so she was at No 1. Molan is the only sitting senator in the NSW Coalition running for re-election.
The factions in the NSW Liberal Party are poisonous. They have thoroughly frustrated party democratisation efforts supported by John Howard, Tony Abbott, Mike Baird and, with some qualifications, Malcolm Turnbull.
Molan’s preselection was not a plebiscite of all Liberal Party members, which he would have won handsomely. It was essentially a NSW Liberal Party state council affair. No provision was made for country members to vote electronically or at all. It was about as democratic as anything factionalism normally produces in a party in a death spiral gripped by festering internal hostilities.
A single example of this factionalism tells us everything. A few weeks ago a NSW Liberal state MP, Damien Tudehope, gave up his lower-house seat to accommodate a cabinet minister. By agreement, he was to move into a vacant upper-house seat.
On the night of the formal preselection, his factional opponents voted against him so that he was beaten by an empty chair. He was preselected anyway by the state executive on the instructions of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. So what was the point of the factional humiliation at the formal preselection? Your guess is as good as mine, but nowadays it’s hard to see the point of almost anything the organisational Liberal Party does.
It is extremely rare in Australian history to have an army general serve in the federal parliament. This is mostly because generals don’t want to sully their reputations with politics. They might instead, like Sir Peter Cosgrove, become Governor-General. Some people would very much have liked our greatest general, John Monash, to have entered politics. But he was too big a figure, too unifying a national icon, to do that.
The last army general in politics before Molan was William Glasgow, a divisional commander on the Western Front in World War I. The US, by contrast, has had former generals become president: Ulysses S. Grant after the Civil War, and Dwight Eisenhower in the 1950s, both great men and deeply devoted, as presidents, to the cause of peace.
Molan looks and sounds like a regular Australian. He is a great figure in our national life, not that I agree with him on everything, but his departure from parliament would be a huge loss of national security experience and capability.
But what would the Liberal Party want with a man like that?
Comfortable shoes
One of the unavoidable shocks of growing older is the way you look in photographs.
A manifesto for a dark age
Brenton Tarrant’s writing betrays a threatened and desperate version of masculinity, and a mirror of the archetypal IS terrorist.