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February 1 - February 14, 2016
He got a call from a journalist, who was in another room on the same floor. Come and join us for a drink, the journalist said. O’Leary walked across. There, he found a celebration of the broader Abbott family, select journalists, including conservative writers Piers Akerman, Miranda Devine, Greg Sheridan and Dennis Shanahan, and dignitaries such as Max Moore-Wilton, a former head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Howard.
Think about this for a moment.
In 2010, on the ABC’s 7.30 program, he made the bizarre qualification that what he said spontaneously couldn’t be taken as his formal position: ‘In the heat of discussion you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark. Which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth [are] those carefully prepared, scripted remarks.’ In a comment that wasn’t off-the-cuff, Abbott was exempting himself from being held to his own words – a privilege he never gave prime minister Julia Gillard.
Bronwyn Bishop, the shadow minister for seniors, was appointed speaker of the House of Representatives, a well-paid but undemanding job that would gratify her love of state-supplied perks without risking her questionable judgement on a government department.
She did his make-up, tied his ties, adjusted his hair. Credlin was simultaneously his political adviser, office administrator, groomer and host.
I'd noticed his tie knots improved after becoming leader. Didn't realise nanny was doing it for him.
On a flight back from Afghanistan, where he’d been visiting Australian soldiers, Abbott said something indiscreet to Channel Seven correspondent Mark Riley – and Credlin kicked him in the shin. Another time she placed her hand in front of his mouth, mid-sentence, to stop him giving away something to a reporter.
Credlin’s veto over ministerial staff was particularly hated. Ministers were offended, their senior staff insulted and journalists gleeful at the bad feeling it created among the party apparatchiks – all of which led to leaks about more serious matters.
In 2015 one of the most powerful jobs in the bureaucracy, that of cabinet secretary, went to a public relations executive, Matthew Stafford, who thus had access to cabinet meetings.
To make his point, Jensen had come armed with a simple question: which minister was responsible for Australia’s thirty-five Cooperative Research Centres, organisations that had been given $4 billion by the government to do research sought by the private sector? Abbott admitted that he didn’t know. ‘I should know this,’ he said. ‘Therein lies the problem,’ Jensen replied.
Alarm bells rang early with the lack of a science minister.
Abbott, Credlin and Hockey had grossly overestimated their ability to convince Australians to accept short-term pain for long-term benefit. The government would never fully recover from the political damage of the 2014 budget. Most cabinet ministers quickly appreciated that the budget hadn’t gone down well, but they had no idea how seriously it would undermine the government’s reputation. If Australians knew what was going on inside, the damage would have been far worse.
Credlin had imposed a rule that ministers hated: they were restricted to one adviser on overseas trips. That meant they usually had to choose between a policy adviser and a press secretary. When Johnston and Stranger flew to Afghanistan for the closure of the Australian army base at Tarin Kot in Uruzgan province, they were stunned when Credlin and Abbott arrived with four or five staff, including Credlin’s personal assistant. It was another example of one rule for Credlin and another for everyone else.
Dupont had a long history of analysing Australia’s position in the world. He was also a pioneer in the study of links between climate change and international security, an area that few defence experts had explored. In 2006 he asserted in an article, written with Graeme Pearman, that the security implications of climate change had been largely ignored by public policy experts, academics and journalists. ‘Climate change is fast emerging as the security issue of the 21st century,’ he wrote, ‘overshadowing terrorism and even the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the threat most likely to
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‘During the dinner, the pair broke away for a private conversation,’ journalist Phillip Coorey reported, ‘during which Mr Murdoch complained to Mr Abbott that the government’s communications strategy was poor and was failing to sell the right messages, and that he had “the wrong people” in the job. Similar criticisms were being made by columnists and editorials in the Murdoch press.’
Similar criticisms were being made in the Murdoch press? Well I AM surprised!
One of the Coalition policies most resented by Nationals backbenchers proposed that companies would be paid to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions. With a budget of $2.55 billion over four years, the ‘Direct Action’ scheme was widely seen as a second-rate compromise that allowed the government to assert that it was fighting global warming while it abolished Labor’s emissions trading scheme. ‘That’s not going to change the temperature of the globe but it’s a lot of money at the moment,’ one Nationals MP said.
The Nationals, though, were frustrated by the protocols of Coalition government. They had limited scope to oppose Abbott and his ministers publicly, and so they felt ignored and taken for granted. ‘If you don’t throw a rock through the window, you won’t get heard,’ one Nationals MP said. ‘We don’t want to become an arm of the Liberal Party.’
I think that ship sailed at least as far back as the Howard govt, probably earlier.
The decision stood: the borders were closed to dead lions. Wood and Hunt were asked to speak at a ceremony celebrating the decision held at Federation Square in central Melbourne. An international conservationist appeared by video link from South Africa. As a semi-affectionate joke, Canavan bought a soft toy lion, ripped the head off, mounted it on a piece of wood and offered it to Hunt’s office, which declined the gift. The lion now sits in the National Party’s whip’s office, where it is named ‘Cecil’, in honour of a famous lion killed in Zimbabwe by an American hunter with a bow and arrow in
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Still complete dicks, some Nats opposed banning the importation of lion body parts.
Business leaders, who by and large desperately wanted the new government to succeed, were upset and offended that it would seek retribution from them because of its dislike of Labor. ‘It confirms that the PM and his office are consumed with some kind of medieval notion of reprisal, or that they think that the world is comprised only of allies and enemies and that anyone who appears to be a friend of their enemy must be an enemy,’ Kohler wrote.
As far as Credlin was concerned, making an enemy of Sinodinos may have been the single stupidest thing she ever did.
In 1990, when Shorten was twenty-three, the Young Labor group he led, Network, decided to take over the Australian Theatrical & Amusement Employees Association, a left-wing union. It represented employees at entertainment venues around the state, from the Arts Centre to the Ballarat Greyhound Racing Track. Network’s plan was to put ‘sleeper’ operatives into jobs that allowed them to become union members. They would surprise the union’s elected officials by standing against them at an election in twelve months’ time. The union would become Network’s powerbase, and eventually help it take
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Ultimately, the takeover failed. The members didn’t want to be the tools of a group of would-be politicians.
The scheme was a fascinating mix of traditionalism, elitism, feminism and socialism.
A deflated Turnbull felt political greatness slipping from his grasp. He believed Abbott had chosen the wrong man to run the economy, passing him over because he was threatened by Turnbull’s popularity with the business community, which had never taken Abbott seriously. Turnbull believed he could have been a great ally of Abbott’s as treasurer, guiding the economy and freeing Abbott to concentrate on his passions. They could have been like Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, or Peter Costello and John Howard. Instead, Abbott left Turnbull on the periphery of the cabinet, which was full of his cronies
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A new leader emerged from the failed spill: more consultative, more willing to reach out to opponents and more politically realistic.
Um... No.
Ruddock was the only person in the party held accountable for the failures that had almost removed Abbott and Credlin after less than eighteen months in office. According to Queensland MP Andrew Laming, ‘It was like the farmer shooting the sheep dog because he left the gate open and the sheep ran out.’
Unbeknown to the public, Abbott had agreed to four major policy changes to keep the backbench happy. All four policies were unpopular with voters but considered necessary by the government, either to return the budget to surplus or to stimulate the economy. The policies the backbench demanded had to go were: a $7 (later $5) charge to see the doctor; limiting pay rises in the Department of Defence and the defence forces to 1.5 per cent; increasing pensions by the inflation rate instead of average wages, which rose more quickly; and possibly reducing penalty rates for people who worked evenings
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Many Australians spent part of their Saturday morning wondering if their prime minister’s admiration for Winston Churchill extended to military follies.
The ‘Team Australia’ line was another sign of Abbott’s intellectual disconnect from regular Australians. He was a staunch monarchist who had campaigned against an Australian head of state, and now he was playing to nationalist sentiment? Most Australians, hoping their political leaders would deliver peace, prosperity and the occasional inspiring speech, had never thought of their nationality as a kind of sporting membership.
The PM’s nationalist fetish – setting up Team Australia, proposed invasions, denouncing Scottish independence – is no different from his hang-ups about sex, in that its genesis is a drastic oversupply of testosterone: winking at Jon Faine while talking to an elderly phone sex worker, proclaiming colleague Fiona Scott’s ‘sex appeal’, talking about his daughters’ virginities or his discomfiture around gay people or even just getting around in his banana hammock. And a Catholic monarchist – how does that even work?
From the progressive website of the Guardian to the conservative columns of the Australian, Shorten was urged, pushed and bullied to become the politician that people say they admire: principled, visionary, eloquent. He resisted the pressure.
It didn’t help that pro-Abbott media outlets would attack individual journalists and commentators who criticised the government, often calling into question their professionalism or honesty. Reporters are human, and the government’s behaviour may have created, or exacerbated, a bias against Abbott. When he made mistakes, those journalists may have written their articles with more relish. Reportage became a test of political allegiances rather than simple coverage of the government’s decisions.
Labor’s fear gave Abbott an incentive to push policies that were more and more draconian, to see if the opposition would reach a point where it could agree with him no more.
Barnaby Joyce, the deputy leader of the National Party, was concerned about the lack of proof, the lack of a trial and the absence of a jury to consider depriving someone of a basic human right. ‘Isn’t that what we have courts for?’ he said. ‘If you don’t have enough evidence to charge them in a court, how can you have enough evidence to take away their citizenship?’
Conservative commentators attacked Turnbull and the other cabinet dissenters for challenging Abbott’s fight against terrorism. ‘The leak – or leaks – actually backfired so spectacularly, by rallying the backbench firmly behind Abbott,’ Andrew Bolt wrote.
It was a Pyrrhic victory. Liberal Party figures saw the lawsuit as a personal indulgence by an emotionally vulnerable politician. Instead of ignoring a story that would have faded away within days, Hockey prolonged its life for a year.
Once again Abbott was using a surrogate to do his dirty work.
Abbott was out of touch with the electorate. The problem was that he didn’t care. He was speaking to his own people: conservative Anglos who, like him, loved the Queen, the flag and tradition.
Abbott didn’t seem to realise that he was treating voters like fools.
Labor’s bloody leadership battles had taught Turnbull he needed clean hands. His role was being obscured.
Abbott’s pledge to ‘make this change as easy as I can’ was hollow.
Frydenberg had worked for under two years at Deutsche Bank, where the size of his confidence-to-competence ratio had impressed.
The conversation with Ray Hadley on a top Sydney AM radio station, 2GB, was an example of the danger of cultivating ideologically driven media figures who count their audiences in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
The Bible was never sworn on, which may have been lucky for Hadley. A few days later, the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out that it was an offence, under a law enacted in 1900, to ‘administer or cause or allow to be received any oath’ unless the person’s profession had been approved by parliament. Journalists weren’t covered. The maximum penalty was two years’ jail.
There are a number of important lessons for Australian public life from the Abbott government. Voters will punish politicians who break promises. The solution: stop making promises you can’t or don’t intend to keep.
Abbott was unable to lead modern Australia because, in outlook and values, he wasn’t a modern Australian. Even though he surfed, fought bushfires and walked like he’d just got off a horse, Abbott’s political consciousness and personal values stemmed from 1950s England, the country and era of his birth. In effect, Australia was led by a foreigner: a man out of sync with the nation’s aspirations, values and sense of place in the world.
Getting rid of the mining and carbon taxes fulfilled his campaign promises but did nothing to improve the lives of ordinary people, make Australia a more prosperous or inclusive society, or present an inspiring vision for the future. Boasting about them made Abbott sound complacent.
