Christopher Pyne: an insider’s view of Turnbull’s downfall
What really happened behind closed doors the week Malcolm Turnbull was torn down? Christopher Pyne reveals the ‘amateur-hour operation’ that destroyed a sitting PM.
To get to Canberra on Sunday, August 19, 2018 I had to catch the early afternoon flight. That annoyed me, as I prefer to take the last flight out so I can spend more time with my family. But the prime minister had called a special cabinet meeting for 7.30pm in order to deal specifically with proposed changes to the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) and the enabling legislation being managed by the Minister for the Environment and Energy, Josh Frydenberg.
Frydenberg is articulate and intelligent and had been doing a tremendous job trying to land the NEG. It was the final piece of the Turnbull government’s energy policy that was designed to reduce power prices, meet our international climate change commitments made in Paris by the Abbott government, and cut carbon emissions. The policy was overwhelmingly supported by the Coalition party room, which wanted energy policy to be dealt with rather than continue as an open conflict within the government. On the other hand, there were several malcontents who, either because they genuinely thought the policy was deleterious to the national interest or because they were using it to damage Turnbull’s standing in the public eye, were working against it. As with many policy debates in the Turnbull government, Turnbull and his supporters lined up on one side and Tony Abbott and his supporters lined up on the other. Frydenberg had the unenviable task of balancing this Scylla-and-Charybdis situation.
When I left Adelaide that afternoon, I expected Turnbull to be prime minister the same time the following week. I had no inkling of the carnage that was to come. If I had, I still wouldn’t have done anything differently. I never shy away from a fight.
When I arrived at Parliament House, I was surprised to learn that the meeting had been delayed by half an hour. I would later find out that Peter Dutton, the minister for immigration, and Steven Ciobo, the minister for trade, had said they couldn’t get a flight to Canberra from Brisbane in time. Turnbull sent a plane from 34 Squadron, the VIP jet arm of the Royal Australian Air Force, to pick them up. That’s serious.
In the lead-up to this week, Turnbull had asked me if I thought anyone was manoeuvring to position themselves to challenge before the end of the year. Apart from the usual crowd of malcontents, I hadn’t picked up any groundswell of opposition. The treasurer Scott Morrison was committed to Turnbull through to the election due in the first half of 2019. Abbott couldn’t abide Turnbull but nor was he a serious challenger. I was sure that Dutton, while harbouring ambitions to be leader in a post-Turnbull era, and seeing Morrison as his most likely competition, would wait. I would only later discover that he had been weighing his options and canvassing colleagues.
The cabinet meeting went ahead with every member present. Frydenberg and Turnbull outlined the latest changes designed to placate the opponents of the NEG. It has already been reported that towards the end of the meeting, I realised there was one cabinet member who had not expressed their opinion, and I asked Dutton what he thought. He indicated that he agreed with the changes proposed and would be prepared to publicly back it. A lot of people have asked me since why I did that. The answer is instinct. The fact that Dutton had been prepared to miss such an important meeting, coupled with not expressing a view about an issue that was clearly critical to the survival of the government, caused me to ensure he said something and was therefore tied to the NEG for the coming sitting week. The cabinet meeting ended. It was late. While it was a sullen affair, it didn’t portend the events that were to come.
Monday brought the usual round of meetings that the Leader of the House is required to attend. Everyone else could play their games, but the business of governing didn’t stop. The leadership group meeting was tense and brief. Dutton and I sat next to each other. In many ways we are different, but we are both political professionals. For that reason, we get along well and understand and respect each other. He hadn’t canvassed me. He knew not to bother.
Canvassing is an interesting dance. Politicians don’t actually contact a colleague and say, “Do you think I should run for the leadership?” The code language is more, “Hey mate, how do you think things are going?” If the response is, “Pretty good in the circumstances”, you know that person is sticking with the leader. If it’s, “Really rubbish, what do you think?” then the conspirator has found a co-conspirator. Seasoned party-room hacks can easily pick the weak wildebeest to focus on. Although, it’s fair to say, the organisers of the challenge that week were about as hopeless and inept as I’ve ever witnessed. Then again there were few, if any, heavy hitters in their corner doing the work needed.
Monday passed unexceptionally. The building was alive with rumour and claims of bastardry. In other words, situation normal. Turnbull was obviously privy to conversations that I was not because on Tuesday he called out the challengers in that morning’s meeting. Did he ask my opinion about this move? No. Did I have any inkling? Vaguely. I’ve been trained from years of living in the political jungle to pick up nuances, small differences from the normal. Like a creature of the jungle listens for a breaking twig or the slightest movement.
If Turnbull had asked me about his plan, I would have advised him against it. It isn’t the job of prime ministers to put their position on the line. If a challenger wants to seize power, it’s their job to come and take it. Power should never be given away, it can only be wrenched out of the hands of the person who has it. I would have told Turnbull that a third of the party room will always vote against the leader in the ballot. There are at least that many who were either in a better position before the current regime (definitely in this party room); philosophically opposed to the current leader (hello?); see an opportunity for advancement under a different leader (always); close friends with the challenger (even in politics everyone has one friend – well, maybe not everyone); or want change because they know that change brings exits and exits mean vacancies and a vacancy means they might get to move up the greasy pole (politicians get more joy out of seeing their colleagues go under the chariot wheels than viewers of the chariot race scene in Ben-Hur).
Turnbull was always going to have at least a third voting against him for those reasons alone. On top of that, there was an insurrection that had been in various stages of underground and not-so-underground activity for three years.
At the meeting Turnbull announced that he would be declaring his position as leader vacant and would recontest. He invited anyone else who wished to be a candidate to indicate that was their wish. It was completely unemotional. Dutton stood up. No one else did. There was almost complete silence. Turnbull was re-elected with 48 votes to Dutton’s 35. There was the standard round of applause. Other than that, there was little reaction.
I sat next to Marise Payne, one of my best friends both in and out of politics. I whispered to her, “Thirteen votes, it may be enough.” She looked at me with an expression of great sadness. I knew how she felt. It wasn’t enough. The plotters were briefing the media by text that it was the end of Turnbull before the meeting had even broken up. I’ve always thought it extraordinary how colleagues, ostensibly on the same team, can sit in a room together and despite knowing that leaking from the party meeting is verboten, take out their mobile phone and text a message to a journalist without any sense of conscience. I imagine they are the same calibre of person who thinks it’s clever to short-change an unsuspecting customer, or swerve to hit a small creature crossing the road. Low people.
After the meeting I walked back to my office. By chance, Dutton and I ran into each other in the corridor. I said to him, “Peter, you should stay in the cabinet and help put the show back together.” He said, “No, mate, it’s the beginning of the end for Malcolm.” I felt despair. We could have been a great team if we had all just played to our positions.
We limped through Tuesday and into Wednesday. The Dutton camp was preparing siege engines for another assault. The Turnbull camp was somewhat dazed but repairing the defensive walls. We knew another attack would come; it was just a matter of time. Eventually, the Dutton coup leaders settled on demanding another party meeting and another spill. Two in one week! Because they hadn’t been ready for the first one. Really? This was the pattern of the week for those who used Dutton to destroy Turnbull. They were an amateur-hour operation. It was like open mic at the “Graham Richardson School of Whatever it Takes” karaoke night. They made so many rookie errors. At some point, one of their number left the building to buy an overhead projector for number-counting purposes. An overhead projector? Didn’t they go out of production in the 1980s?
The Dutton camp operated from the “Monkey Pod” room next to my office, so called because the central table is made from monkey pod timber, a gift from the Northern Territory government. This is where the plotters plotted. Unbeknown to the McHale’s Navy-like operation in situ in that room, two walls of their bunker formed one wall of my private office and one wall of my chief of staff Hannah March’s office. We could hear them hooting, hollering and arguing and could even make out the names every now and then of colleagues they thought were wavering. When that happened, we would despatch an emissary to that person’s office to track them down and see if they could be convinced to stick with us.
On Wednesday afternoon senators Mathias Cormann, Mitch Fifield and Michaelia Cash went to see Turnbull to argue that he should retire and hand over to Dutton in an orderly transition. Naturally, Turnbull didn’t quite see that as an option. Cormann, Cash and Fifield had all supported Turnbull on the Tuesday. It was a bad omen. Wednesday also saw Labor release advice from Bret Walker SC that questioned Dutton’s eligibility to sit in the 45th Parliament. It was an obvious act of bastardry and the cause of much ill feeling that week between Dutton and Turnbull. However, I doubt the question affected how any colleagues voted in the leadership ballot on the Friday. Indeed, after the ballot, the matter flamed out.
Abbott was out in the media on that and other issues, feeding the public brawl and casting aspersions over the motivations for the raising of this matter at this particular time. Quite apart from the efficacy of his media statements, just being seen to be such a strong supporter of Dutton did not help Dutton’s cause. Quite the opposite. Everyone wanted the Turnbull/Abbott feud to be a thing of the past, not an ongoing grudge match. For some colleagues, the prospect of Abbott being brought back into the cabinet by Dutton, in the event that he was successful, was a serious negative for the Dutton cause. I asked Dutton about this and he told me that he was not a cat’s paw for Abbott and nor would he be bringing him back into the cabinet.
By late Wednesday afternoon, Dutton’s supporters were circulating a petition to request another party meeting before the House rose on Thursday at 5pm. A steady drumbeat of resignations from the junior ministry and ranks of parliamentary secretaries began. I was spending much of my time in Turnbull’s office working with him, Lucy Turnbull and others. It felt like the tent of either the House of York or the House of Lancaster in the medieval Wars of the Roses.
Turnbull indicated to the leadership group on the Thursday morning that if the petitioners were able to secure the 43 signatures to force another party meeting, he would put a spill motion to that meeting. If the spill motion was carried, he would regard that as a vote of no confidence and immediately step down. He turned to Morrison and his deputy Julie Bishop: “So you two need to work out what you want to do.” The meeting broke up. I was gutted. But the show must go on.
It took me about 90 seconds to walk from the prime minister’s office to my Leader of the House’s office. In that time, I made the calculation that there would be another ballot, probably that day, that we had only hours to choose a candidate and elect a new leader, that the realpolitik was that while Bishop was a moderate, she couldn’t beat Dutton, and that Morrison was acceptable to the moderates and could bring enough votes with him from the centre and the conservative wings of the party to win. I resolved that Morrison should be supported by as many moderates as I could muster. I contacted the other moderate numbers people and hastily convened a meeting in my office.
Thursday morning was like the centre of a battlefield. Ministers were resigning left, right and centre. I reached the point where I could count almost as many ministers who would be sitting on the backbench in Question Time as would be sitting on the front bench. I convinced Turnbull it would be better to adjourn the House early to avoid the humiliating spectre of a slimmed-down frontbench. He agreed.
Not long after Dutton came to see me to talk through the process of what was happening that day and maybe the next. It speaks volumes that even in the midst of this tumult, two colleagues and erstwhile friends could still discuss the order of the day without rancour. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for some of the people who had attached themselves to his bandwagon.
In the midst of this conversation, Morrison entered. We’d enjoyed an easy relationship since he arrived in Canberra in 2007 and he was used to dropping into my office unannounced. This time it was awkward. But he sat down and I explained the same process to him that I had to Dutton. There followed a half-hearted attempt by both men to suggest to the other that they should be each other’s deputy. It was quaint. But neither was going for the second prize. It was too late for that.
Mid-morning, a number of senior moderates came together in Turnbull’s private office – Turnbull, Bishop, Payne, Anne Ruston, Simon Birmingham, Paul Fletcher, Craig Laundy and me. At that impromptu meeting I indicated that some of the senior moderates had met and determined that Bishop couldn’t beat Dutton but Morrison could. Payne said, “I agree with that.” I backed this up when Bishop called me early afternoon to canvass for my support. Fletcher was in my office with me. I said to her, “If we vote for you, then Peter will win because there are Pentecostals who will vote for Scott but not transfer to you over Peter.” Later that afternoon, I texted Bishop and suggested she run for deputy again in a contest with Hunt, who was nominating as Dutton’s running mate. She didn’t do so.
None of those exchanges fits with the notion that I kept from Bishop the news that the moderates were campaigning for Morrison. Indeed, the next day, on what is now a highly publicised WhatsApp group, in response to the query from a colleague that “someone should tell Julie [about our support for Morrison]”, I responded, “I have, very respectfully.” Because I had.
I arrived in Turnbull’s private office to find Morrison there. He made the perfectly sensible point that now that the House was adjourned, we were quite within our rights to let colleagues know that they could go home to their electorates. He suggested that two weeks in their seats would cure a fair number of the notion that the voters wanted to see the leadership change again and would give them a dose of reality far from the Canberra bubble, where reality was often inverted. Morrison was still hoping Turnbull could be saved. He wasn’t plotting Turnbull’s demise. Quite the opposite.
While all of this was going on, the Dutton camp were gathering signatures and having a hard time of it. That night, while Morrison was still working the telephone lines garnering support in the event of a ballot on Friday, the Dutton urgers were twisting arms, threatening the preselection future of senators and members, and generally offending their colleagues. The same colleagues who they wanted to vote for their candidate the next day!
Some of my colleagues signed the petition on the Friday morning to end what had become the worst hatchet job on any leader in living memory. It was now obvious to everyone that the amateurs who had run the operation were trying to bludgeon Turnbull to death with nothing but a garden stake. Later that morning, Dutton visited Turnbull and presented the petition with the 43 required names. A message was sent by text and then email convening a Liberal Party meeting at 12.30pm. It was on.
The Liberal Party members and senators filed into the party room looking like survivors of the Valentine’s Day Massacre. It had been a gruelling few days. Many relationships were irreparably damaged. The result was 45 in favour of declaring the leadership vacant, 40 against. There was barely a sound. I audibly said, “Wow!” I wanted to convey that after the blood lust, viciousness and iconoclasm, all Turnbull’s enemies could muster was a win by three votes. That spelled the end of Turnbull as leader and prime minister. Morrison was elected leader of the Liberal Parliamentary Party, 45 votes to 40 for Dutton. Turnbull shook Morrison’s hand. Morrison assumed the leader’s seat in the middle of the top table. He spoke and he spoke well. He talked about healing the wounds of the week but importantly he talked about focusing on defeating our real opponents in the Labor Party. He confidently proclaimed that, “If you play your part, and you let me get on with it, I can do it.” He was right. He did.
Countless commentators, journalists and writers have since written about that week in Australian politics and the tearing down of Turnbull. Most are mystified as to why a prime minister, who was heading a competent government, leading in the more reliable internal party polling and who was well liked by the public – certainly in comparison to the alternative – should have been removed. Sure, he had his shortcomings, but who doesn’t?
From the moment he replaced Abbott in a party room coup in 2015, Turnbull faced the internal insurgency that arises out of such events. It’s a shame but it’s the reality. Those displaced don’t say “thank you”; they bide their time and wait for their chance to exact a price for their own denouement. John Howard gave us the answer to the question of “why”. He said Turnbull was removed out of “revenge and hostility”. Simple as that.
Edited extract from The Insider – The Scoops, The Scandals And The Serious Business Within The Canberra Bubble, by Christopher Pyne (Hachette, $34.99), out June 30.
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