Less Abbott meant more Payne for the Libs

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

Poor fellow my country. What a dismal prospect Australian politics offers. We are apparently about to embark on our sixth prime ministership in 10 years, or our seventh in 11 years if you like the statistics. Although our nation continues to motor along on the basis of its own momentum, our politics is failing at all levels.

Structurally, the Senate has rendered it impossible for any government to implement a coherent policy. Culturally, digital media and the collapse of belief have hollowed out all civic conventions. And tactically, the Turnbull government has not managed an admittedly very difficult situation well.

How bitter and fragile are the relationships within each side of politics. Had the recent by-elections gone badly for Labor, Bill Shorten would be fighting for his life against a challenge from Anthony Albanese.

Tactically, this period resembles the government of John Grey Gorton at the end of the 1960s, though Malcolm Turnbull personally certainly does not resemble Gorton. But politically there are eerie echoes. Gorton was the popular small-L liberal of his day. At first he was much liked. He decided to move away from all the main structures of Coalition support that had maintained Robert Menzies in office so long — the strong commitment to the US alliance, a broad social conservatism that embraced change but cautiously and incrementally, a special relationship with non-government schools that Labor had opposed, and so on.

The problem was, having abandoned a long successful political structure, he didn’t put anything effective in its place, so he lost support among key Coalition constituencies at a huge rate.

Let’s examine three big tactical mistakes of the Turnbull government. The first was the refusal to bring Tony Abbott back to the cabinet after the last election. Every political leader needs to unite their party, or at least secure the tacit acceptance of its main components. We also now have a lot of experience of leadership coups. One clear lesson is that you must have a strategy for dealing with the PM you banish. Abbott would have joined the cabinet in 2016 had he been invited.

Now, Abbott has one particular personality trait. He is like the Energiser bunny. He never stops. Give him a big job, such as Defence, and he would be fully engaged. Then give him a second big job — attacking the Opposition Leader every day. The Turnbull cabinet has been politically inept and had very little cut-through. Abbott would have helped the government at every level.

Of course this would have had its dangers. But it was a significant element of Abbott’s success that he brought Turnbull back to the frontbench. Just hoping the leader you knock off goes away is not a strategy. Abbott may have lost standing with colleagues, but a quarter of the population loves him. And that quarter all votes ­Coalition.

Second, Education Minister Simon Birmingham’s decision to spend billions upon billions of additional dollars on education but at the same time to disadvantage the Catholic school sector ranks surely as one of the single most insanely counterproductive political decisions in our modern history. Pro-Turnbull cabinet ministers are beside themselves that Birmingham has decided to go to war with Catholic education.

Indeed, there is a sheer, unrelenting idiocy to the way Birmingham has conducted the politics of his portfolio. Victorian Liberal education spokesman Tim Smith was charitable and used more polite language than many cabinet ministers when he described Birmingham’s performance as an “omnishambles”.

Birmingham seems never to have properly understood how the Catholic education system works or the importance of its parents as Coalition voters. People who will spend a substantial part of limited family incomes to get their kids a faith-based education are the sort of people who, whatever their income level, may be socially conservative enough to consider voting Coalition. Given the historic role of the Liberal Party in pioneering state aid to non-government schools, this is one of the few structural advan­tages the Coalition has traditionally had over Labor. But Birmingham, as a South Australian small-L liberal, presumably deprecates social conservatives.

He never seemed to understand that parents at Catholic schools in affluent areas typically have much lower incomes than the postcodes of those areas would imply and therefore the funding model he first proposed significantly disadvantaged Catholic schools. Birmingham’s defence is that he was going to give them more money, but it would be much less additional money than the other sectors.

The extreme high point of Birmingham’s almost epic political incompetence came when he accused Catholic education authorities of “taking 30 pieces of silver” because they preferred Labor’s policies. So you disagree with Birmo and you’re the moral equivalent of Judas betraying Jesus. This is the sort of gross, genuinely offensive language that the whole political system would reject if it were used against any minority other than Christians.

In the end, the government will give the Catholic schools the money, but only after having made bitter enemies of former friends and enduring almost 18 months of utterly needless and grievously damaging political pain. If there is one single person who has doomed the Turnbull government, it is Birmingham.

There were other big tactical errors that arose from not understanding, or consciously deciding to ignore, the basic structure of Australian conservative politics.

One of the most serious was the decision to appoint Marise Payne as Defence Minister. She was a bizarre appointment, with no serious relevant experience, initially appointing few staff to her personal office who had national security competence and behaving, in her first months in the portfolio, like a rabbit caught in the headlights of an approaching vehicle.

But she is a competent and diligent person who has worked her way administratively into the portfolio. However, from her first day in Defence until today she has made no serious contribution to any strategic debate. This is almost literally insane. In pure political terms it would be like a Labor prime minister deciding to appoint a health minister who was in perpetual hiding and therefore unable to prosecute one of Labor’s key areas of political advantage. Can you imagine any Labor leader doing that?

Turnbull himself has been good on national security and foreign affairs. Appointing Christopher Pyne as Defence Industry Minister is an acknowledgment of Payne’s political hopelessness. It’s a workaround appointment. But why on earth would any government so critically and needlessly handicap itself in such a centrally important area, and one of very few areas where conservatives have an enduring advantage?

Your guess is as good as mine.