Unless you’ve been stuck in an isolation chamber for the last 24 hours, you would have heard by now that Malcom Turnbull challenged Tony Abbott for the leadership of the liberal party last night and won.
Bernard Keane summed it up perfectly on Crikey’s live blog
The overwhelming sense from tonight’s events is that, if Abbott loses, he will have perished in exactly the same way he governed – ineptly, with a tin ear, an overly combative mindset and a near-obsessive reliance on slogans that was at the heart of his inability to provide meaningful leadership beyond stopping and ending things other people had achieved.
Abbott’s gone, hopefully taking with him the inept, tin ear, combative mindset and weird fixation on slogans that has so polluted our political discourse over the last few years.
What we’re now all waiting to find out is what Turnbull will bring to the national discussion. Urbane and suave may play as well as Abbott’s focussed and relentless did in opposition, but there’s no way to tell yet whether Turnbull can turn style into substance.
And he’s got some challenges ahead. The darling of the progressive voters is going to have to decide who will feel the sting of his betrayal: the conservative right of his own party, who threw him out once and then voted against his return, or the disenfranchised Labor voters who expect more of him than they do of Shorten. He can’t govern without the first and can’t win an election without the second. It will be very interesting to see how he resolves that dilemma.
The other problem of course, is what does he do with Abbott and Hockey? It seems very unlikely that they will retire quietly to the backbench, nodding submissively at every Turnbull pronouncement. 44 out of the 99 votes last night were cast for Abbott, presumably by people in the Liberal Party who would rather lose the next general election than see the government take a slight step to the left. It would only take a handful of them, in cahoots with a deeply resentful Abbott/Hockey alliance on the backbench, to run an effective destabilisation campaign against Turnbull.
Katherine Murphy outstanding analysis of how the liberal party machine swallowed Tony Abbott only confirms the likelihood of this scenario.
The coterie around the prime minister brought their conflict addiction, their brittle tribalism and their self-reinforcing insularity into government. The prime minister’s chief of staff stood sentry at the door, and the prime minister wanted the security blanket of the old rituals, like an elite sportsman insisting on his lucky socks.
Turnbull will need to knock up some strong achievements to counter such attacks.
The obvious low hanging fruit is to repair the damage Abbott did to the Liberal parties’ appeal to women. Unfortunately Turnbull doesn’t have a great track record himself on this one.
His Shadow Ministry in 2009 had a grand total of 3 women in a Cabinet of 21 people, 4 of 11 people in the Outer Ministry and 3 out of 15 parliamentary secretaries. There was no portfolio for women even in the outer Ministry, the closes he got was Sophie Mirabella’s (non-cabinet) position as Shadow Minister for Early Childhood Education, Childcare, Women and Youth.
To put that in context, Abbott’s ministry consisted of 2 women in a Cabinet of 19, 3 of 9 people in the Outer Ministry and 3 out of 12 parliamentary secretaries. Abbott had no Minister for Women, but he did at least have an outer ministry portfolio for women.
While male violence, female representation and gender pay gap issues have become much more prominent in public debate over the last few years, it’s not quite enough to excuse Turnbull’s lack of female inclusion in his Shadow Ministry as a sign of the times. The Rudd government at that time was also very heavily male dominated, but he did at least have more women in senior positions than the then Opposition, and Labor maintained a Minister for Women position throughout their tenure.
Turnbull needs time to prove that he can manage the functions as well as the furbelows of government. He will need to develop economic policy, manage reforms to immigration, infrastructure, health and education and do it all while balancing the impossible line between hard right conservatism and progressive social policy. None of that can be, or should be, done quickly or easily.
But he is also going to have to address the national response to the male violence, he is going to need to ensure he significantly improves the representation of women in his government and he is going to need to appoint a strong and effective Minister for Women. These are easy wins, quick gains. It will be telling whether he recognises them as such and acts on it.