The Deves factor was meant to be a campaign masterstroke. It was a disaster

Scott Morrison played a central role in his own downfall. Here is how his government unravelled.See all 4 stories.

Scott Morrison’s chief political adviser, Yaron Finkelstein, had a core piece of guidance for his boss. His trademark advice to the prime minister was that the government’s priority should be to “communicate values” in everything it did. Not achieve results for the country, but communicate values.

Morrison took his advice. But what if the values you’re communicating are out of step with the Australian electorate? So far out that they “made us look like weirdos”, in the words today of one of his own government, Liberal Senator Andrew Bragg.

On justice for women. On corruption. On treatment of transgender Australians.

And, of course, on climate change. Point for point, Morrison successfully communicated that his values were alien to those of most of the people he needed to win over to hold government, and sometimes flat-out hostile. Sometimes this was inadvertent, and sometimes very deliberate. Of the deliberate Morrison misadventures, the choice of Katherine Deves as a “captain’s pick” Liberal candidate was the strangest. It was no accident that the candidate for the Sydney northern beaches seat of Warringah was an activist against the transgender community. The Morrison brains trust thought it was a masterstroke.

Two days after Morrison announced the election would be held on May 21, news.com.au reporter Samantha Maiden revealed that Deves believed transgender children were “surgically mutilated” and she was “triggered” by the sight of the rainbow LGBTQ flag.

Katherine Deves’ controversial opinions on transgender women in sport made Warringah the focal point of a national debate.Credit: Jessica Hromas

Weeks of headlines about Deves’ controversial views followed. Journalists dug into her deleted social media posts, trawled through YouTube videos and Liberals leaked against the controversial candidate whose views on gay people, trans people and more were raked through.

Deves initially apologised for “insensitive” comments, then partially retracted her mea culpa. The Liberal Treasurer of NSW, Matt Kean, called publicly for her to be disendorsed. On the campaign trail, Morrison doggedly defended her.

So how was it supposed to be a masterstroke? A member of the then-prime minister’s inner circle explains the choice of Deves: “She was a lawyer, attractive, and a lightning rod who could rally the base. Katherine in her writing and beliefs is actually quite complex. She’s a TERF – a trans-exclusionary radical feminist.

“On paper it worked but there was a lack of due diligence and it quickly became apparent that it wouldn’t work. Where she went with her comments was absolutely out of line.”

If the choice of candidate was strange, the political logic behind it was stranger still. “Rally the base”? That was not the problem in Warringah. It was the rest of the population the Liberals should have been worried about. Of the 151 electorates in Australia, Warringah is one of the 10 most socially progressive, as revealed by the same-sex marriage vote. It rejected a local former prime minister, Tony Abbott, in 2019. It was not going to embrace a transphobic newcomer.

And “the base” of some 30 per cent of the electorate was never going to be enough to win back the seat from a teal independent, the popular local Zali Steggall, who was returned with an enlarged margin.

Why wasn’t Deves dumped when she had so obviously crossed the line in the past? The operative from the prime minister’s inner circle: “It just wasn’t that easy to cut her off. If we cut her off, there would be internal and external blowback.”

But did the Deves factor help the Liberals in other seats? Did it work as “communicating values”, or dog-whistling, to social conservatives elsewhere? On all the evidence, it helped in none and harmed in some. Bragg, the NSW senator responsible for campaign oversight in seats including Warringah, was strongly of the view Deves was a mistake: “I wasn’t asked about this Katherine Deves idea, neither was the Federal Electorate Council president, the members were steamrolled and the reality is it was a disaster.

“Look at the difference between the Senate and House vote, it was something like 40,000 versus 30,000 votes.”

The discrepancy between the 31,129 primary votes for Deves, or 33.35 per cent, and the 39,019 primary votes for the Coalition in the Senate, or 41.21 per cent, suggests that Deves was a deterrent for up to about 8 per cent of the people prepared to support the Coalition otherwise. It was the biggest House-to-Senate discrepancy in voting pattern the former federal director had ever seen.

“I don’t know whether they were trying to win or trying to lose,” Bragg says. “And of course Deves bled into other seats. I’d assured people like Dave Sharma that it was just a bad joke, a bad dream and it would never happen. I couldn’t believe the lengths they went to to make it happen and the people of Warringah spoke for themselves. We had issues, every government has issues, but we were focused on culture war issues that made us look like weirdos.”

Religion over anti-corruption

Another case in point? Morrison’s decision to abandon the government’s last chance to legislate an anti-corruption commission. Why? So, in the dying days of the 46th parliament, it could try to get a religious discrimination bill passed instead.

It was another disastrous exercise in deliberate “values communication”. To be fair, both were election promises. But, faced with a choice of trying to gratify a small section of the “base” or win an election, Morrison chose the base.

Religious discrimination was a boutique issue; anti-corruption was a mass retail one, among Liberal voters too. “Centre-right voters believe in integrity and law and order,” remarks Michael Kroger, the former president of the Victorian branch of the Liberals, who campaigned actively on the streets of the Melbourne electorate of Higgins, lost by the Liberals’ Katie Allen to Labor’s Michelle Ananda-Rajah.

“They read about the behaviour of politicians and they are appalled,” Kroger argues. “The fact is that many of the people who voted teal have been law-abiding and taxpaying people who are appalled that the politicians make the rules for me but not for themselves – it’s a natural tendency for centre-right voters to support an integrity bill.

The former Liberal member for Higgins, Katie Allen.Credit: Jason South

“I don’t underrate the federal ICAC as an issue that won the teals a lot of votes.” It was one of the top three priorities among all the teal candidates. Morrison not only chose to use the final moments of his term to pursue a religious discrimination bill, he pursued it with a ham fist.

Five Liberals crossed the floor to vote against the bill. It was defeated.

Bragg blames the prime minister’s office: “I was surprised that when they needed colleagues’ support for the RDB that they just expected people to be steamrolled. I was surprised at the management style. If they had said, ‘Look I really want to get this anti-discrimination law through to protect Sikhs, Jews, Muslims, to protect them from being sacked for wearing a head covering’, for example, they could have got that through. But there was no interest in engaging.”

The women problem

Time and again, Morrison was presented with serious moments about the treatment of women. Every time, his first reaction appeared to range from incomprehension to indifference. And when the Justice4Women protest marches erupted across Australia’s cities, Morrison only inflamed the situation. Refusing to address the thousands assembled outside Parliament House, he addressed the House instead. He welcomed the demonstration, he said: “Not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets, but not here in this country.”

Again, the implication was women’s rights were somehow conditional. It was not his intention but it was his effect. Morrison made a number of efforts to address some of the underlying problems of discrimination and injustice against women, including extra funding for programs to prevent violence against women. But ultimately his efforts were seen to be incomplete, insincere or unserious.

He commissioned the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, to conduct a review into the parliamentary workplace, but failed to implement all its findings. He commissioned the then secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, to conduct an inquiry into the government’s handling of the Brittany Higgins complaint, but no results emerged.

Gaetjens, considered by Labor to be a political operative rather than an impartial public servant, resigned the moment Morrison lost power rather than wait to be sacked. The government’s implicit attitude to women seemed to be that they were some kind of special interest rather than half, or a little more than half, the electorate.

Morrison once described the minister for women, Marise Payne, as “the prime minister for women”, implying women were not part of his brief as head of government. In any case, Payne remained largely silent and inert on justice for women.

The unconscious bias against women was affirmed by a recording leaked from a meeting of all Coalition staff with the prime minister and deputy prime minister in which Morrison acknowledged women who worked in the building had had to put up with “absolute rubbish”. The deputy prime minister Michael McCormack said sorry three times in a five-minute speech.

Even then, the government missed the point – no women addressed the room in a meeting of staff about sexism and bullying. The government swung into damage control. A cabinet task force on women’s equality, safety, economic security and health and wellbeing was announced on March 29.

But after the scramble to address its “women problem”, and billions of extra funding in the budget to tackle domestic violence, childcare and health care, the task force was largely sidelined. It met only three times, with the first meeting held the day after the announcement.

And according to participants, it wasn’t clear that it had any influence. “Whatever it decided still had to go through the Expenditure Review Committee. It was frustrating,” one member recalls.

The individual cases of prime ministerial misjudgment – his treatment of Christine Holgate, his government’s handling of Brittany Higgins’ complaint, Rachelle Miller’s complaint against Alan Tudge and the late Kate’s allegation against Christian Porter, as well as his comments
about the demonstrators – culminated in women’s voting decisions on election day.

“Menzies with the support of Dame Elizabeth Couchman founded the Liberal party as the progressive party for women, which until 2001 was the party over 50 per cent of Australian women voted for,” Liberal senator Linda Reynolds told the first meeting of the Liberal party room after the 2022 election. “Today it is around 30 per cent. We cannot win majority government again without regaining the trust and electoral support of women of all ages.”

Reynolds had a close view of the problem. She was the minister employing Higgins at the time of the alleged rape. (The rape has been denied.) The teal independents had their favoured trifecta to wield against Morrison – climate change, a national anti-corruption agency and justice for women. At almost every turn, Morrison stoked the teal campaign. When he announced the Commonwealth would spend up to $600 million to build a new gas-fired power plant at Kurri Kurri in the NSW Hunter Valley as part of his “gas-led recovery”, he pushed Kylea Tink over the edge.

The new member for North Sydney, Kylea Tink.Credit: James Brickwood

“My head exploded,” said the businesswoman, who was working as chief executive of the McGrath Foundation, a breast cancer charity, at the time. “I decided it couldn’t go on.” It was the moment she decided to stand for parliament.

Her resolve only hardened when she heard Morrison utter the words “not far from here, such marches, even now, are being met with bullets”. Until then, Tink says, she was prepared to overlook his other “gaffes” about women, but that was “unforgivable”.

Standing as a teal independent, Tink won the seat of North Sydney with a swing of 14 per cent against the Liberal incumbent, Trent Zimmerman.

Like all the other teals, she was living a full and successful life with no intention of entering politics. It was Morrison who goaded each one into standing, unwittingly daring them into taking six traditional Liberal seats at a single election.

If the earlier independent MPs Cathy McGowan and Zali Steggall were the mothers of the teal movement, Morrison was its father. The teal candidates wouldn’t and couldn’t have done it without him.

Labor, too, was deeply indebted to Morrison’s tin ear and ham fist: “Their attitude to gender was reactionary,” says Anthony Albanese. “It was an obvious weakness of theirs early on, which is why I announced our childcare policy in my first budget reply. The Liberals don’t get childcare. They think it’s babysitting. Childcare is a workforce participation issue, a productivity issue, it’s part of fixing the gender pay gap. It was part of our framework for talking about the future – climate change, gender, the future economy. They had nothing to say about it.”

One of the Morrison government’s most important achievements was negotiating the AUKUS agreement with the US and UK. They would help Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines as well as cutting-edge technologies of military value. But in breaking the pre-existing contract to buy submarines from France, Morrison wounded French pride.

The then Europe correspondent for this masthead, Bevan Shields, asked President Emmanuel Macron if he thought Morrison had lied to him. “I don’t think, I know,” replied the French leader. It was an international affirmation of a Labor accusation that Morrison had a chronic problem with the truth.

The moment missed

Despite all of this, a Morrison victory was still possible. If he’d called the election for November 2021, he might have profited from the sweet spot between COVID-19 outbreaks.

This was the calm moment before Omicron, before the shortage of rapid antigen tests, before the Solomon Islands signed its security agreement with China, before the Reserve Bank started raising interest rates. Instead, Morrison had to confront the consequences of all four.

The delay also gave the teals vital time to put their campaigns together. “If we had gone in November people would have said, ‘What’s a teal?’” says a former Morrison minister. Instead, by May 2022, voters knew exactly who the teals were and elected six into former Liberal heartland seats.

However, the delay did give the government the opportunity to bring down another federal budget. It was Morrison’s last big chance to change the conversation about the government. He wasted it. There was $1.3 billion to get more apprentices trained, $4.1 billion in expanded tax offsets for families, money for infrastructure, another $1.3 billion for support services for women facing domestic violence and temporary 22.1 cents per litre cut to the fuel excise among a raft of measures.

It made only a negligible difference to the polls. “It didn’t have a narrative,” complains a former member of the government, “It didn’t say anything about why people should vote for us. It didn’t play to our strengths and it was a just a whole bunch of line items bundled together. There were measures here and there but it had no philosophical underpinnings to it.”

Nor did the Liberals help themselves by indulging in an extraordinarily unprofessional faction war in NSW over pre-selecting candidates. It went all the way to the High Court and was only resolved by the court two days before Morrison called the election.

Morrison and his factional apparatchik Alex Hawke blocked the NSW division’s choice of candidates and took control over the vociferous resistance of the NSW executive. A former Morrison adviser justified the intervention as necessary to save key incumbents including Sussan Ley: “If a senior female cabinet minister, Sussan, had been rolled imagine how Morrison would have been pilloried. It would have been worse.”

‘A game of chicken where no one flinched’

But of the nine candidates imposed in seats the party had to win, just one, Jenny Ware in Hughes, secured victory. It was, said Dave Sharma, “a game of chicken where no one flinched”. So everyone got smashed. Morrison’s unpopularity couldn’t be concealed during the campaign. He didn’t dare campaign in the seats being contested by teals because he would only drive the Liberal vote down.

In the once-safe seat of Goldstein in Melbourne, the Liberal incumbent Tim Wilson talked to voters but frequently met a response along these lines: “Tim, I think you’ve done a good job but you are standing in the way of getting rid of Morrison and we have to get rid of him.” In North Sydney, the Liberals’ Trent Zimmerman found women, in particular, had made up their minds to remove Morrison and the subject was not open to debate.

In Higgins, Kroger says when he campaigned for Allen, “quite a lot of people said ‘I would vote for Katie but I can’t vote for Morrison’.”

The government’s prospects looked bleak when Morrison called the election, but hope flared the very next day. Albanese faltered, badly, right on schedule. The Liberals had been complaining privately for months that the media had been too soft on Albanese. He’d wilt under full campaign pressure, they postulated.

When Sky News’ Andrew Clennell posed two gotcha questions to Albanese on day one of the campaign, they served their purpose. They got him. The unemployment rate? “The national unemployment rate at the moment is, I think, it’s 5.4 … I’m not sure what it is,” Albanese fumbled. He was way off. It was 4 per cent. The alternative prime minister didn’t know the Reserve Bank’s cash rate, either.

Electricity crackled through the Coalition. It was soon grounded. Albanese quickly fronted the media again and turned his embarrassment to advantage: “Earlier today I made a mistake. I’m human. But when I make a mistake, I’ll fess up to it, and I’ll set about correcting that mistake. I won’t blame someone else, I’ll accept responsibility. That’s what leaders do.”

Labor convened focus groups that night and tested voter reactions. “They said he’s a pollie who’s human, he owned up to his mistake. No one said ‘I won’t vote for him because of that’. It went to character. So it helped in a weird kind of way.”

Scott Morrison described himself as “a bit of a bulldozer”.Credit: Dionne Gain

Morrison tried to bargain with imminent political death. Just eight days from the polls, a reporter asked Morrison whether he should be listening to Australians, rather than just telling them what they should know. “I know Australians know that I can be a bit of a bulldozer when it comes to issues and I suspect you guys know that too,” he replied. “I know there are things that are going to have to change with the way I do things, because we’re moving into a different time.”

No one was persuaded. Decoded, his message was: “I will change if you just give me one more chance.” The opposition leader pounced: “A bulldozer wrecks things. A bulldozer knocks things over. I’m a builder.”

In Labor’s nightly track polling, Morrison’s approval rating hit its nadir of a net minus 25 per cent in the final survey before election day. On the same night, it found Albanese’s approval rating at 40 per cent and disapproval at 41. In other words, neutral. He was not a strong asset but neither was he a liability.

The essential flaw of the Liberal campaign was simple, Peter Dutton told colleagues: “Morrison’s formula is, ‘I’m better than the other guy, and people will flock to me’.” There was nothing positive to vote for.

Albanese describes it as an “arrogant” Liberal strategy that was essentially a repeat of his 2019 campaign. It depended on the Labor candidate being the issue, and Albanese’s entire three-year plan had been designed to avoid that trap. Morrison was the issue and was allowed to be judged on his own terms.

On election day, Albanese quit campaigning and went home to watch the results come in with his partner, Jodie Haydon, his son Nathan, some staff and one of his closest friends in politics, Labor’s leader in the Senate, Penny Wong.

He’d always insisted it was a long-term strategy and he didn’t sweat the final hours, palm-pumping till poll closing, as leaders usually do. He went home mid-afternoon. A crowd of supportive locals started to gather outside his unassuming cottage in inner-western Sydney’s Marrickville. His address was well known; he’d lived in the same house for 16 years.

He called for home delivery pizza. He was overruled. How would it look for the Labor leader to take delivery from the gig workers his party had been describing as exploited all these years? The chastened leader made pasta for everyone instead.

The early results were ambiguous. “Some people were getting nervous but Anthony was calm and quietly confident,” Wong says. “He worked out pretty early on that we were the only ones who could form government.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on election night with Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong and Albanese’s partner Jodie Haydon.Credit: Janie Barrett

When it was beyond doubt, Albanese and Wong embraced spontaneously. “They had a moment,” says an observer. He hugged Jodie and Nathan next. They opened the front door to acknowledge the crowd and were met with cheers.

Back from the dead

Albanese had kept an old newspaper poster hanging on his office wall for years as a totem of hope and proxy political prayer. It announced some footy news dear to all fans of the South Sydney Rabbitohs: “Back from the dead,” said The Sydney Morning Herald headline.

The framed poster accompanied him to the prime minister’s office but, job done, prayer answered, it’s been retired to a concealed sideroom.

What became of Morrison’s political adviser, Yaron Finkelstein? He’s been hired to advise NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet in the approach to the state election.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.