It was August 2018, but the anger of the coup against Abbott in September 2015 was still live and raw. Like the Labor Party before it, the Liberals found themselves in a long and demented cycle of vengeance
Hi Tony, it's Julie Bishop," began the call. Long silence. Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership was collapsing. Bishop had decided to run for the leadership. She was making every call herself, even the difficult ones, to ask for support. No intermediaries, no numbers men.It was as far as she got. Abbott cut her off. "What about you do me the courtesy of being a loyal deputy?" He was still fuming about the collapse of his own prime ministership three years earlier.
"Malcolm declined to engage on the issue," he has told colleagues "He thought he'd win on his merits. And Tony didn't really want to try for a resolution either. Both put themselves ahead of the party." In the parliamentary corridors outside the prime minister's suite, the conservatives who had barely tolerated Turnbull for three years were going office to office gathering the ammunition, the signatures on a petition, to end his leadership. "You can't give in to terrorists."Cormann, the Leader of the Government in the Senate and the man he regarded as his most constant confidante and counsellor, had come to give Turnbull the hard news.
"You can't install Dutton," said Turnbull. Dutton's wife's childcare business received a federal government subsidy, and Dutton was a director of her company. MPs and senators can be ineligible if they are in any business relationship with the Commonwealth. But Cormann's view was that the longer the government continued with an injured PM, the worse the situation would get. He wanted certainty for the party, the government and the country. By the end of the week.Turnbull told colleagues that he was thinking of calling an early election, perhaps the Friday of that week. Anything might have happened.
When he took the leadership of the parliamentary party, Tony Nutt replaced Brian Loughnane as the leader of the organisational wing only to discover that the Liberal party was broke. Dutton couldn't be sure he could win an election, but as the party increasingly lost confidence in Turnbull, the conservatives decided that Turnbull had no political judgement, that the polls would never recover and that they had nothing to lose by changing to Dutton. "At least we'll go down on our own terms," one conservative said.
The Longman byelection on July 28 was a threshold moment. It was one of five byelections on so-called Super Saturday. The seat just north of Brisbane was held by Labor's Susan Lamb, forced to resign by the High Court when it ruled that as a British citizen she was ineligible to sit in Parliament. The Liberal National Party ran hard to win the seat. And, for a moment, there was a prospect that it would.
Turnbull and his energy minister Josh Frydenberg did a painstaking job of crafting an energy policy, the National Energy Guarantee, as a fragile compromise between all parts of the Coalition. Turnbull and Frydenberg even managed to have it negotiated through the party room. Eight MPs had spoken against it, but if party discipline had held it very likely would have made it into law.
But, in truth, the core of disgruntled conservatives was not to be appeased and not to be dissuaded. "There was probably nothing Malcolm could have done to hold the right at bay," one prominent conservative said after the event.Third, Turnbull chose the timing. With the conservative movement rallying around Dutton as its champion, Turnbull decided to pre-empt the coming challenge.
Cormann felt wounded that he'd been excluded from this momentous decision. After working as Turnbull's confidential consigliere, conservative praetorian guard and Senate manager, he felt that he'd earned the right to be consulted. And if he had been? He would have urged Turnbull not to do it. Dutton declined. It was not viable for him to stay in Turnbull's cabinet, he said. It was the next day, Wednesday, that Cormann threw his weight behind Dutton and Turnbull lost his last conservative bulwark. He was finished.
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