Creatures Of The Liberal Party – Annabel Crabb

Issue 3 | 14 July 2009

As a regular columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald, Annabel Crabb has become well-known for her incisive and engaging political commentary. In 2005, she published Losing It: The Inside Story of the Labor Party in Opposition, about the demise of Labor’s Mark Latham as  federal Opposition Leader. Her journalistic caeer has included coverinpolitics for the Adelaide Advertiser, The Age , Sunday Age and Sun Herald (in London). Annabel Crabb appears regularly on the ABC TV’s Insiders and in late 2009 appointed to head the ABC’s new online media initiative. Annabel Crabb addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 14 July 2009 after publication of her Quarterly Essay on Liberal Party Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull.

CREATURES OF THE LIBERAL PARTY

ANNABEL CRABB

The Liberal Party has had two genuinely seismic moments in the last two years. Oddly enough, I don’t count the November 2007 election loss or the defeat of John Howard in Bennelong as one of them; nor do I count the election of either Malcolm Turnbull or Brendan Nelson to the leadership. The first two events, by the time they occurred, were almost a foregone conclusion. They weren’t a surprise for the party so much as a dull blow. And as for the second two – well, Malcolm Turnbull was as inevitable as death or taxes. And Brendan Nelson was simply the best chance for those seeking to put Malcolm off just that little bit longer.

Both the events I am thinking of involved Peter Costello. Both of them, in point of fact, were the same event – Costello declaring that he was definitely retiring from politics: first on 25 November 2007 and then again on 15 June 2009.

It speaks volumes for the madness, tension and desperation within the Liberal Party that Peter Costello was able to extract genuine shock value from the same announcement twice. Peter Costello’s avowal, on the day after the 2007 election, that he would not be a candidate for the Liberal leadership, was more seismic than the demise of Howard, because it was genuinely unexpected. And it compounded the loss of Howard mightily because it meant that Plan B wasn’t a plan any more and, with Plan A already gone, that meant trouble. It was devastating because it showed how chimeric the appearance of stability in politics can be.

Was there ever anything more constant-seeming than the triumvirate of Howard, Costello, and Downer, who for eleven years held the three most powerful portfolios the Australian government has to offer and didn’t move a muscle, despite periodic chatter among the troops about an imminent rearrangement? For a decade, these men were the spine of the Liberal Party, and Costello’s announcement was a terrible and graphic demonstration of just how quickly a political party can become an invertebrate. Change had been overdue for some time. And now that it was here, at the wrong time, it was a disaster, instead of a salvation. It’s an interesting question to examine in hindsight: How much change was there over the course of the Howard Government?

Of course, people came and people went: the Peter Reiths, the Robert Hills, the Michael Wooldridges and Dick Alstons moved through portfolios and off – in some cases – into comforting sinecures, the Abbotts and Hockeys and Nelsons and Broughs waxed and waned, largely at the prime ministerial whim. Howard himself changed form prodigiously over the course of that time – he went from a low-spending, small government kind of a guy to the kind of a guy who, when offered eleven big ticket spending options to choose between for a party campaign launch, went ahead and ordered the lot.

But there were only three people who were in the same Cabinet positions at the end of eleven years of the Howard Government as they had been at the beginning. Only three people who didn’t move a muscle. They were John Howard, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer. When people say of Malcolm Turnbull – “he’s not a creature of the Liberal Party”, these three men are the creatures to whom the luckless Turnbull is generally, even if subconsciously, being compared. These are people who provide the authoritative face of the Liberal Party as we have known it over the last decade or so. The people who have defined the party.

John Howard, who joined the party in his teens, was elected to parliament at 34 and spent the 1980s as well as half of the 1990s in a poisonous, internecine death roll with his own party. John Howard eventually emerged victorious, having previously been given up for dead, with his convictions and his robust ideologies more or less intact.

Then there’s Alexander Downer, with his immaculate Liberal pedigree, who bequeathed himself to the party at an early stage and has never had another serious job, really, apart from politics. Whose gracious departure from the party’s leadership in 1994 mercifully outshone his ignoble period in the role, and established the circumstances under which the divisive John Howard could finally be accepted with broad resignation, if not actual peace.

And Peter Costello, who after a brief flirtation with the right wing of the ALP at university, nevertheless chose the other side pretty early on and accomplished some early rites of passage in the university political scene of the mid-1970s, including his memorable thumping by a campus anarchist. All three of these creatures, incidentally, are from what we would call the dry, or conservative wing of the Liberal Party. Howard and Costello fought on the same side in the great, West-Side Story style, ideological dance-off of the afore-mentioned 1980s and 1990s, when the wets and the dries traded atrocities, the dries establishing the HR Nicholls Society and the wets establishing the Black Hand.

During the mid to late period of the Howard Government, as party moderates and wets coalesced to become a loose Costello camp, and his acolytes briefed on his differences with Howard in indigenous policy and the Republic, it became harder to remember that Costello was, by natural inclination, as dry as a twig. Order was soon restored when Howard departed the scene after the 2007 election, and Costello became the most influential voice in the party room – albeit from the back bench – militating for a harder line on industrial relations, and a conservative one on climate change. On the face of it, with the three Creatures – Howard, Costello and Downer – holding the same formation over that decade, dominating the three most senior portfolios, the Howard Government, and thus the Liberal Party, seemed a beacon of stability. But a lot about the Liberal Party changed over the years between 1996 and 2007, behind this Mt Rushmore façade of liberalism.

When the Coalition won power in 1996, 36 new Liberal, National Party and Country Liberal MPs won the privilege of heading to Canberra. Of that 36, 28 had won seats from the ALP. Rather surprised new MPs they were too, in some cases. Many of them had been pre-selected under the leadership of Alexander Downer, a difficult stage during which dire predictions were made about the Liberal Party remaining in Opposition for decades. Having lost the unloseable election in 1993, the Liberal Party was not widely fancied to take government in 1996.

So the Liberal pre-selection market was hardly flooded with applications. Warren Entsch, the former crocodile hunter, joined the Liberal Party on the same day he put his form in for pre-selection for the Queensland seat of Leichhardt. Sharman Stone, in order to run as a Liberal in the Victorian seat of Murray (held until 1996 by the Nationals) had to set up a Liberal Party branch just to nominate.

Elizabeth Grace, a Queensland teacher and mother of adult children, was the only applicant for Liberal pre-selection in the seat of Lilley – legend in the Liberal Party has it that she applied for the gig to satisfy the obligation for her Newstart allowance. She won the seat from Wayne Swan with a swing of 6.9 per cent. And Paul Marek, a coalminer who won the Queensland seat of Capricornia for the Liberals, could not be found for days after the election; he had gone back to the mines without even checking the result, assuming there was no way he would be elected. When located and informed that he had achieved a 6.9 per cent swing and was therefore the new Member for Capricornia, Marek was upset about the fact that his new job would involve a substantial pay cut.

Commonly, the Class of 1996 featured small businesspeople with no background in politics, who were angry with Paul Keating. It turned out that voters – on the whole – agreed. Warren Entsch won Leichhardt with a swing of 4.18 per cent. Other, even longer shots came romping home. In 1994, who would have dreamed that the western suburbs Sydney seat of Lindsay, Labor’s by a margin of 10.22 per cent, would fall to the Liberal Party? But Jackie Kelly nabbed it with a swing of nearly twelve per cent. This collection of new Coalition MPs was not a trivial addition to the parliamentary community in 1996 – they made up nearly a quarter of sitting MPs.

Paul A. Pickering’s fascinating academic paper “The Class of 96: A Biographical Analysis of New Government Members of The Australian House of Representatives” describes the cultural and demographic change that these new MPs brought to their own party. Pickering compared the class of 1996 to the similarly-sized influx of Coalition MPs that flooded into Canberra after the rout of the Whitlam Government in 1975.

The Class of 1975 had no women, and its inductees had come to conservative politics through predictable channels. Of the 1975 cohort all but a handful were old boys of one of Australia’s exclusive private schools, for example. Among the “Class of 96″, by contrast, the circumstances are exactly reversed – only a handful went to exclusive schools, and the vast majority were graduates of State and Catholic Secondary Schools.” Twelve of the 96ers were women, and the majority were small business people motivated by business and family issues.

The 1996 election, it is now clear, changed not only the fortunes of the Liberal Party, but also its face. “There is no stereotypical Liberal,” Jackie Kelly told the House of Representatives in her maiden speech:

The people here with me today are from all walks of life – housewives, social workers, businesswomen, people from the military, married, single, childless, people with eight kids, grown up kids, grandkids and kids under five. Whatever the Bell curve in society is, it is reflected here in John Howard’s government.

Howard himself told me that the Class of ’96 was memorable for bringing a new strain to the Liberal Party: “They had some association with the Liberal Party, but they were almost a breed apart,” he said. The new arrivals changed the culture of the party, too, in a way which complemented Howard’s own instincts and prejudices. The first Budget’s deep cuts to the university sector established a settled bitterness toward Howard in those parts, and he reciprocated by promoting vocational education and encouraging youngsters to undertake apprenticeships. Over time, it became a popular mantra within the parliamentary party that university education was not all that it was cracked up to be.

“Minister Rates Trade As Valuable As Degree”, read the headline on a Courier Mail news story on 25 November 2004. The article reported on some comments from the employment and training minister, the ’96er Gary Hardgrave MP, talking about the fact that skills shortages had enhanced the desirability of a trade qualification. “People with trade skills have all the power in the economy these days,” he told the paper. “Unfortunately the psychology of the day is that if you haven’t got a degree you must be a dud. But the shortages mean that a trade qualification is as good as a PhD and would probably earn you more.” George Brandis, an Oxford-educated barrister, rose in the party room not long after the article appeared and questioned Howard directly on it. He was all in support of trade qualifications, he said, but was it really now the government’s position that a hairdressing certificate was as good as a Ph D?

As he asked his question, Brandis was heckled by some of his colleagues, who jeered that people with degrees weren’t as smart as they thought they were. “He was howled down, of course. It was frightening,” recalls one (university-educated) MP who was present. “They were a mob by that stage. You couldn’t just get up and say things like that. It was like the French revolution.” Howard himself, recalls another Liberal present, made it clear where his sympathies lay. “He just gave out this big laugh, and said: ‘Oh, George. At least you have more chance of making some money with a hairdressing certificate’.” What caused this cultural shift within the Liberal Party?

The eye goes where it is drawn; Howard brought the Class of ’96 into parliament and they cleaved to him. It must be about Howard, you’d think. But many of the ’96ers were – as discussed above – pre-selected under Alexander Downer. If we return to the maiden speeches of those inductees, a common theme emerges; a common motivation that drove this disparate band to down tools, pencils and, in one case actual crocodiles, to join the Liberal Party and seek political office. Is it possible that the cultural change within the Liberal Party of Australia could be Paul Keating’s doing? Whatever caused it, this cultural change within the Liberal Party had huge consequences for John Howard.

Howard never missed an opportunity to trumpet the defection of blue-collar Australia from Labor to the Coalition, and the classmates of ’96 were an excellent demonstration of his point. These MPs owed their political careers to Howard, and their fortunes felt inextricably entwined with his. Many of them learned everything they knew about politics from their leader. Perhaps it’s most useful to think of them as political ducklings; hatching out into the world of politics, they bonded with the first parental figure they saw – John Howard.

As Howard prevailed, again and again, through political crises, their respect for him only grew, and few of them entertained any thoughts of another leader. And the Class of 1996 proved to be political stayers of some tenacity. At the 1998 election, eleven of them fell, but three of those – Don Randall, Bob Baldwin and Russell Broadbent – clawed their way back in subsequent elections. By 2007, eleven years after their arrival in Canberra, a healthy 23 of the original 36 remained. Of all these MPs, (discounting, of course, the Nationals), only a handful would have voted for Peter Costello in a party room spill: Joe Hockey, Phil Barresi, Andrew Southcott and possibly Sharman Stone.

In political terms, the Class of 1996 functioned as an effective Praetorian guard for John Howard for more than eleven years – quite a marvel. While they did not account for more than 50 per cent of the Coalition party room, there were enough of them to offer substantial resistance to Peter Costello, or anyone else with pretensions to the throne. To be fair, Costello did not try especially hard to woo them. He thought many of the ’96ers were fools – an opinion of which they were sharply aware. Whereas Howard duchessed these MPs, made regular and tender solicitations of their opinions and staged an annual dinner in their honour, Costello avoided them.

Just as it became vogueish within the Liberal Party to decry university education, it became an accepted orthodoxy that political professionals – people who had worked as staff members or officials within the party – made for less desirable MPs than “ordinary people” who had knocked around a bit. “It was a land where the non-politician was king,” recalls one MP. “Where the Bob Baldwins and the Jackie Kellys were regarded as the smart people, because they could win seats. And the political hacks were the idiots, because they didn’t understand how ordinary people thought.”

Howard’s version of events is necessarily more moderate:

I would never have denigrated the role of political professionals. But I did not want parliament to be full of people whose previous experience had been as political staffers. I had a very strong concern that we would end up with politics on both sides being dominated by people whose whole careers had been in politics. Political astuteness is not measured by the length of time you’ve worked in politics. I think the best combination for the Liberal Party – and that was why I wanted to see Turnbull come in – I wanted to see people whose life experiences had been a mix of politics from an early age but who had spent a dozen or so years doing something else.

The optimum experience he describes here, consciously or unconsciously, is very precisely his own; Howard was involved in the Liberal Party from an early age, then practised as a solicitor for twelve years before entering parliament. By and large, Howard got his wish; a party room richly supplied with real people, who had a pleasing additional tendency to agree with everything he said.

Of course, no such stability would have been possible without Howard’s own deep policy convictions, which became the policy convictions of the government. After all, as the Bible reminds readers in Corinthians: “If the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” But there is no doubt that the compliance of his star struck party room was invaluable to the stability and durability of John Howard’s government – for a while.

The downsides to unhesitating adulation are never immediately apparent to its subject. That’s the difficulty with sycophants – they’re handy, and the chances are that at some point in the cycle they were even right about your genius. But you can’t just go on believing them for ever, and for John Howard, you could fairly say that the Class of ’96 was incredibly helpful right up to the point at which it became incredibly unhelpful. This tipping point came at about the time at which it would have been useful for John Howard and the Liberal Party to effect a sensible leadership transition.

Now that Howard is gone, moreover, I think the party is paying for the lack of deeper thought and planning that might have carried it more easily through this period in opposition. Leadership is such a difficult thing. You need to be bloody-minded enough, and convinced enough of your own ideas to be able to survive the daily slings and arrows.

Without bloody mindedness and self belief, how could John Howard ever have survived the 1980s? How could he ever have survived “Mr 18 per cent, Why Does This Man Bother?” The tricky thing is that at the same time as being incredibly thick-skinned, you have to be sensitive enough to catch the moment when the mood changes. I always think that leaving leadership at the right time – knowing when to abdicate – is sort of like telling your kids about the birds and the bees. Everyone thinks that when the time comes for them to do it, they’ll be dignified and gracious and everything will go like clockwork. And then when it actually happens, of course, it’s an embarrassing disaster for everyone concerned.

So, where does all this leave Malcolm Turnbull? Well – it leaves him in charge of an outfit which in many ways is still moulded around John Howard, and is accustomed to Howard’s ways, and you can sense it sometimes – an outfit that still wakes up surprised some mornings to find that he is gone. Malcolm Turnbull is a very different person and a very different politician from John Howard. A very different Liberal. Now this obviously creates some difficulties in terms of just slipping into that tracksuit and taking up where Howard left off, but that’s not all such a bad thing.

Malcolm Turnbull’s differences from John Howard can be useful in that they create a way for the party to distance itself from elements of the Howard legacy without delivering a direct insult to him – and that is quite important. Not just for the party at large, which still hugely reveres John Howard. This is the Liberal Party, remember, so it will probably be – oh, at least ten years until they turn on him, and start hissing at him in the street. But also for the Australian electorate, which I think tossed John Howard out while retaining an element of respect – even fondness for him.

It wasn’t baseball bats which John Howard found waiting for him, in my opinion, in 2007 – more the polite but firm instruction that it was time – past time. The ALP knew this, too – that’s why they didn’t run outright attack ads. “I’m sorry Mr Howard. Nothing personal, but it’s time to go,” said the actress in one of the highest-rotation TV ads.

But Malcolm Turnbull has other differences from John Howard, of course. The principal difference I think is that Malcolm Turnbull is memorable for his own personality, his own story, his charisma, his ambition, his outrageousness and his extraordinary adventures over a life richly lived. John Howard, a man of relatively dull plumage personally, was fascinating because of the vigour of his beliefs, and the tenacity and energy with which he pursued them. “I am not an ideological person,” Malcolm Turnbull told Fran Kelly in that famous interview, conducted one day before he went down in the leadership ballot to Brendan Nelson. And it’s true that he has nowhere near the ideological drive of Howard.

Malcolm Turnbull is by nature a classic libertarian, an advocate of hands-off government. This is a perfectly respectable Liberal approach, historically speaking. It doesn’t match with John Howard, who by the time he handed in his badge was a fairly hands-on sort of prime minister.

And I’m not sure it matches the Zeitgeist at the moment, either. As we glance around at a world occupied with getting itself through this financial crisis, we notice that Western governments are full of people with their hands on levers. Intervention has never been so popular. The times, in other words, do not suit Malcolm Turnbull especially. Of additional concern for him is the suspicion with which certain party colleagues still view him. There are a lot of reasons for this suspicion.

One is that he hasn’t been in politics for very long, and the Liberal Party tends to like a long apprenticeship. Another is that Turnbull’s history is full of close associations with the Labor party; a close lifelong friendship with Neville Wran, for example, and past associations with Bob Carr and the WA former premier Peter Dowding. When Turnbull was a university student, he didn’t march in pro-Kerr, anti-Whitlam rallies like Tony Abbott or Peter Costello – he was up visiting the ancient and bile-filled former Labor premier Jack Lang, with a view to writing a musical about Lang’s life with his good fried Bob Ellis. The musical, most unfortunately, is lost to history. But you can understand why the more staid denizens of the Liberal jungle have their reservations.

The Liberal Party of today wears Malcolm Turnbull like a borrowed suit. The suit looks fine – it’s a lovely suit, it’s not that. But the wearer is forever tugging and fretting, and worrying that it’s overdressed. And wondering what people will think, and thinking very frequently of its old suit – the one that was thrown out – and its second-best suit, which went to the dry-cleaners’ some time ago and hasn’t yet come back. The suit, in the manner of suits, does its best to give where it can, but there’s a limit to how much it can change, and anyway it doesn’t really see the problem. It’s a suit, and it is what it is. The question is this: After fifteen years in Roger David, can the Liberal Party ever get comfortable in borrowed Brioni?

There are reservations about him, certainly. But Turnbull himself is not one to spend much time on the reservations of others. If there is anything at all to be drawn from his past life in business and politics, it’s that Malcolm Turnbull backs himself very strongly in any situation; he views life as a meritocracy and himself as – happily – full of merit. His success in business is based on a good brain, utter fearlessness, and the preparedness to take risks. He has – in addition – a tiny sparkling silver thread of luck running through his life, on which he has relied with great success from time to time. Some of these characteristics transfer well to politics. I think in the past few weeks we have seen a rather graphic demonstration of what can happen when the luck runs out.

Now, Opposition is a dark time for any party. Ask anyone in the Australian Labor Party who was around just five years ago, when the way ahead was dim, and lit only sporadically by another bit of Mark Latham catching fire. Opposition is no fun at all, but one of its few recommendations is that it provides an opportunity for regeneration and public debate which is unavailable to parties in government. Unfortunately, most oppositions tend to be too depressed and traumatised to realise this right away. Like all the recently bereaved, they need to go through the formal stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Which pretty much sums up where Tony Abbott’s been for the last 18 months.

Governments spend their time trying to cut off opportunities for oppositions. Of course they do. But they create opportunities too. There are two opportunities for the Coalition, I believe, created by the Rudd Government as it is presently composed. One of them is an economic management argument, created by the Rudd Government’s decision to commit Australia to extensive public debt, and to err on the side of excess in its liberal application of stimulus to the economy. This is a prime argument for the Coalition. It deals with an area of traditional strength for them, and unlike some of the other major issues before the Australian parliament today, like climate change or the regulation of industrial relations, the Coalition is capable of reaching an agreement on it without having to kill Wilson Tuckey. Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey are already, as you will undoubtedly have noticed, making much of this opportunity.

The second opportunity is more oblique, but full of potential nonetheless. The story of the Rudd Government so far is a fascinating one, remarkable in many ways for what hasn’t gone wrong. Kevin Rudd has demonstrated himself to be a master of politics, an impresario who is expert at appealing to the audience in front of which he finds himself. To a domestic audience, he serves up snags with a fair shake of the sauce bottle. For sophisticated foreign audiences, he will deliver detailed programmatic specificities. Now, this is working for him. But I wonder if it will forever. And Kevin Rudd’s disciples in the parliamentary Labor Party, who are as surprised as anyone that their resident nerd has overnight become the most popular Australian prime minister in recent memory, tend nevertheless to fall in with his style – relentlessly on message, tightly controlled.

Ministers have become experts at mastering the message, their television interviews generally long and successful experiments in question avoidance. In this atmosphere, I think there is a small but appreciable market for authenticity in politics, and it’s growing every day. I think the times will suit, for example, people like Tony Abbott, who are geared towards candour in their public pronouncements – in Abbott’s case, it’s something of a compulsion. Turnbull, too, is in a position to capitalise on his natural tendency to disclose his views.

There is much work to be done in the Liberal Party, as there always is for parties in their first term of Opposition. The Creatures who ran the show for years are not long gone, and the Creatures of the future are still creating themselves. It’s a long road, but not necessarily a dispiriting one.