Power shifts as Liberals sandbag leader into place

Prime Minister Scott Morrison during Question Time. Picture Gary Ramage

The Liberal Party, under extreme duress, has admitted its guilt. The parliamentary party on Monday night at Scott Morrison’s initiative settled on a historic change to strengthen the position of Liberal prime ministers and reform our political and media culture.

This was a successful event for the Prime Minister — the partyroom consensus was essential. With Malcolm Turnbull engaged in an extraordinary and unjustified assault on Morrison, it shows a party coming together behind the incumbent as its last and only hope at this point.

Under the new rules, Turnbull would have remained prime minister last August and led the governme­nt to the election. Tony Abbott would have remained prime minister in September 2015 and led the government to the following year’s election. John Gorton would have remained prime minister in March 1971 and led the government into the December 1972 election against Gough Whitlam.

And if Morrison becomes a miracle worker and wins the May election, he will remain prime minister for the full term. This rule change is about power.

Acknowledging the fusion betwee­n stability and self-interest, Morrison said of the coming election: “If you elect the Liberal Party, I will be the Prime Minister, I will remain as Prime Minister.” That’s true whether his performance is good, bad or indifferent.

This change has arisen for an elemental reason — because the parliamentary Liberal Party has abused its power during this ­period of Coalition government. It has been impatient, irresponsible and imprudent. Removing leaders is only the most spectacular part of the story.

Our parliamentary cultur­e has been corrupted becaus­e too many MPs, when the polls turn south, when the political temperature rises, instinctively target the leadership — they speculate, lobby, brief the media, entrench leadership tensions, conspire and then resort to the knife.

It has been a conspiracy of corrosio­n between disenchanted MPs and the media. The system is in dysfunction. A dysfunctional system does not always produce a bad leadership result but it brings government, parliament and polit­ics into disrepute. It also brings a nation into disrepute — witness the puzzlement of G20 leaders from Donald Trump to Angela Merkel at the recent summit towards yet another Australian PM.

Leadership instability never stands alone — it invades and corrup­ts the decision-making. The abject decline in the quality of ­public policy, the prime exhibit being energy policy and climate change, is closely tied to chronic leadership instability.

Many people will agree with one or both of the prime ministerial executions during the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison era. But this misses the point and overlooks the far bigger proposition — the institutionalisation of leadership instability, the inevitable yet never assessed transaction negatives associa­ted with the political assassination of prime ministers and the public’s abject distaste for the process have created a debauched model that demanded reform.

Morrison said the Liberal parliamenta­ry party was “acknow­ledg­ing that its own conduct over this period of time needs to be changed”. Deputy leader Josh Frydenber­g was even more direct: “The change in Australian prime ministers over the last decade has diminished the parliament and its representatives in the eyes of the public.”

In short, Morrison, by this rule change, seeks to alter the political and media culture, a complex task at any time. For the record, Australia has seen six changes of prime minister in the past 11 years.

Only two of these changes came from the public vote at election­s; the other four came from partyroom revolts, two under Labor and two under the Liberals. Morrison sold the change as a genuflection before public ­opinion.

There are two basic changes in power — from the parliamentary party to the leader, and from the parliamentary party to the people. Because the PM’s position is effect­ively entrenched, it is only the people at elections who can depos­e the prime minister.

Morrison said the Liberals were recognising that the people “should be the ones” to determine whether prime ministers continue in office.

He argued that lifting the threshold vote in the partyroom from a majority to two-thirds to remov­e a Liberal PM meant, in effec­t, that because such numbers are “rarely, if ever, achieved”, a Liberal PM henceforth would be removed only by the public at a general election, not by the party during the term.

Limiting the “life and death” power the partyroom holds over the leadership constitutes a seriou­s modification of the Westminster parliamentary system as it has operated in this country. Morrison called it “the biggest change to how our party deals with these matters since Robert Menzies first established the party 74 years ago”. It is no surprise the rule change has been supported by John Howard, Abbott and Turnbull.

Yet the proposal also retains continuity with Westminster practice. Indeed, it shows the Libera­ls are a traditional party compared with growing inter­national practice. Howard argues the parliamentary party must stay sovereign — that parliament­arians must have exclusive control over the leadership decision, unlik­e the British Conservative Party and unlike the ALP, which responded to its own traumas by outsourcing the leader’s election to a 50-50 power-sharing between the parliamentary wing and the rank-and-file membership.

Morrison rang Howard before the party meeting on Monday night and won his support for the change. He called Howard “governor of the conventions of what occur­s in the Liberal Party” and said he shared his view the Liberal leadership must remain “the gift of the parliamentary party”. As Morriso­n comes under assault from Turnbull he hugs close to Howard, and Howard, in turn, is resolute in support of Morrison.

But Morrison exaggerated the meaning of the change. He said it was returning to the people the power to decide “who elects the prime minister”. No. The people do not directly elect the PM. The party elects the leader and the peopl­e decide which party leader becomes PM. Australia remains a representative system, not a direct­-elect presidential system. The real aim is to restore integrity to the representative system.

Will Morrison’s initiative change the culture? It will help. Many more reforms are essential but this step, for the Liberals, is significan­t. A truly hopeless leader who alienates more than two-thirds of the party can be liquid­ated. But history shows most such contests are close, and those contest­s will now become much less likely. The alternative view, however, cannot be dismissed — what future does a PM have anyway once they have lost 50 per cent of support from the parliamentary party?

Morrison, with Howard’s authority, has tried to introduce a new concept: a Liberal PM has a legitimacy based in the people’s vote at the election and the parliamentary party should honour that legitimacy, not abuse it. This principle, obviously, does not apply to an oppositi­on leader, who has no endorsem­ent from the public.

Because the new rule has no operation in opposition, the threshold to remove a Liberal opposi­tion leader remains at 50 per cent-plus. This would be a point of high direct sensitivity for Morrison, who faces no serious threat as PM before the election but could face an uncertain situation in opposition after a defeat. Morrison, meanwhile, presented the rule change as evidence of his ability to solve problems. “If I see a problem, I seek to fix it,” he said.