Australia has a new Prime Minister. Malcolm Turnbull defeated Tony Abbott 54-44 in the just-finished (Monday night) Liberal Party room meeting.
Back in February when Abbott faced his first leadership spill, I said that he would probably survive it.
First because it usually takes two or three blows to bring down a very powerful man, and secondly because it would seem rather ungracious of the Liberals to dump a leader so soon after he had won an election for them.
At that time I also publicly reassured friends that Tony Abbott would not survive past October, a prediction I repeated in an article a month ago.
There was no question that Abbott would lose, because Julie Bishop – the Liberals’ new Deputy Leader who massively defeated Kevin Andrews for the role – had already asked him to go.
One imagines a scene reminiscent of the scene in Oliver Stone’s Nixon where Alexander Haig tells Nixon that he must resign. It is not advice that Abbott would take. He would wish to be remembered as going down swinging.
Today’s challenge came on faster than anyone had expected. It was prompted by the fact that parliament was in recess until after the Canning by-election. There had been speculation that Abbott might call a snap early election during this period, rather than be fired.
Yesterday he moved to reassure the party that he would not call such an election and, quite obviously, he was not believed. A snap election now would cost at least fifteen backbenchers their seats.
And despite Jeff Kennett screeching and tearing out his chest hair on Twitter, the change is well overdue.
We should not underestimate the anger and sense of betrayal within the party: the last election victory that should have ensured two or three terms, wasted within – what was it? two months before the polls turned permanently against them? Even Joe Hockey will be remembering that he was once a quite popular man.
Abbot’s other tactic was to strike early, before the opponent is ready. This is what he did in February. But this time he has been forestalled. It is the others who were ready, who came into this session of parliament prepared and who struck sooner than anyone had anticipated.
Like other watchers of politics, I have observed Tony Abbott’s career for seventeen years. No political journalist believed that this man could ever become Prime Minister.
It was too obvious that, like Basil Fawlty, he did not have the temperament for it. An uncompromising, ideologically-driven fighter with a quite astonishing talent for getting things wrong and tripping over his own feet, he always performed well as an underdog but, once he had won, could not hold on to victory. Above all he was a loner.
Tony Abbott presents himself as strong, and I accept his definition on his terms. In wider terms, he is not strong. As John Stuart Mill once said of Thoreau, a person that cannot tolerate dissent, or love vigorous debate that challenges his views, is not strong. To be uncompromising is not strength. Tony Abbott too often chose not to tackle his opponents head-on, but to promote legal prosecutions by others. He went after his political opponents using the law, and that is not a sign of confidence or of strength. Those who watched him for a long time regarded him as a follower, not a leader. A leader knows how to bring people with him.
The reason Tony Abbott became Prime Minister was because the party knew that he loves fighting as an underdog, at a time of terrible defeat, and because there was a leadership vacuum, with Turnbull at that time too inexperienced.
That he succeeded in bringing the party back so quickly will be his great achievement. And to be honest, it wasn’t clear to me that Turnbull would be Abbott’s successor.
But he will be a better Prime Minister.
He is a compassionate man who genuinely does care about Aussie workers, battlers, the poor, and the disadvantaged. I am on his mailing list (I am on many mailing lists), and when in winter 2014 he advised that he would be sleeping a night on the streets, as he does every year in solidarity with the disadvantaged, I advised him not to. As a member of a cabinet that had just passed one of the harshest budgets ever in Australian history for the poor and disadvantaged, his sincerity would not save him from the perception of hypocrisy.
Now Labor has a problem. Although Labor supporters will undoubtedly celebrate, the party number crunchers will now be faced with a problem. They would much rather have faced Abbott at the next election. That is one reason they have put almost nothing into winning Canning, why they decided to de-fang , not overthrow, the Royal Commission. Now they have about four months to decide whether to keep Shorten.
Turnbull is unlikely to call an early election. He will be trying to conciliate and keep a smooth, effective government.
The problem with Shorten is that although he appears to have been very effective in the back room and offstage, he has not won the public heart and it seems unlikely that he ever will. Labor will be watching the polls very carefully over the next four months and trying to guess the trend: whether Abbott’s damage will cling. Bill Shorten is a man with many tricks and connections up his sleeve and more than his fair share of luck, and he will be trying to convince the party that he has enough to bring down Turnbull.
It ‘s possible he may have an uphill battle. The party may choose to keep Shorten. The possibility of a one-term Liberal government, of a win in 2016, always seemed like a magical gift, pie in the sky. They may prefer to play it safe and hang onto their money for 2019. Or, with the taste of blood in their mouths, they may select Anthony Albanese, the only candidate in sight who may beat Turnbull.
This one I won’t predict. It’s going to be interesting.
Pic: Bronwen Manger
*Tom Kent is now semi-retired after a lifetime of Public Service and media work. A well-known internationally-published poet and composer in Melbourne who works with the band My Melbourne Down and classical musicians, he continues to take an interest in human rights issues, having especially worked with Asian and African migrant communities.
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