In the wake of today’s extraordinary events in the Coalition party room, Malcolm Turnbull could put to good use the very qualities he’s usually been panned by his right wing colleagues and the commentariat for having – displaying some courage by making an impetuous gamble from a risky position. The fact that neither Wilson Tuckey nor Kevin Andrews were able to orchestrate a spill during or after the protracted on again, off again meeting is telling. If they actually had the numbers to roll Turnbull, it would have been on. Because the split inside the Liberal party is so entrenched, it’s highly likely that Turnbull has about the same base level of support as he had when elected. In other words, whatever Peter Van Onselen and the commentariat may think, Turnbull has the numbers. That’s been proved today.
The denialists want a couple of extra days to try to turn the numbers around. Nick Minchin’s concession in the days leading up to the showdown that the CPRS should be decoupled from the leadership question is not an act of loyalty to Turnbull, but a sign that he knows that while he is able to muster a fair number of crazy Senators to support his die in the ditch attitude, he cannot muster a majority of Liberals to overthrow his leader. Let’s not forget that the Nats, who are firmly in the denialist camp, have no vote for the Liberal leader. Hence also all the veiled threats about leaving the Coalition – it’s the only way they can exercise influence over the Liberal leadership.
Turnbull should follow through on what his numbers folks were up to before the meeting – “put the stick about”, in Francis Urquhart’s memorable phrase, and focus attentions on the long delayed reshuffle. Casting Abbott and Robb overboard would be a plus, and any spill threat could be turned around to include Minchin’s gig as Senate Leader.
There is no future for the Liberal party in playing to a portion of its base which holds antideluvian attitudes on almost every issue in the book. They will not vote Labor in a pink fit, anyway. He has to reach out to the centre, and the best way to do so would be to take on the dinosaurs in his own party and establish firm control.
He might also wish to find a way to stop all the dissenters’ views being immediately recycled in The Australian. It’s quite possible for a leader who wins narrowly, but who can’t be overthrown (and the fact that Andrews is seen as a plausible candidate shows just how risible the right wing putsch is) to start acting like a leader, and become one.
Then, and only then, Kevin Rudd might have a fight on his hands.
Interesting times.
Update: George Brandis on Lateline added further confirmation to the vapid nature of most of the leadership spill talk, by mentioning that Tony Abbott had endorsed Turnbull’s leadership at the meeting, and – significantly – that Turnbull had called for people to indicate their desire for a spill at the end, and no one had. We also know that Liberal party rules don’t mean that a letter from two backbenchers seeking a meeting on the leadership necessarily has any consequences. Brandis also indicated that Turnbull had a large majority of Liberals behind him. As I pointed out, the Nats don’t get a vote on the leadership.
And as Annabel Crabb suggested, the Kevin Andrews candidacy hasn’t exactly sparked massive enthusiasm. Even Bolta’s ardour appears to have cooled as the night’s worn on. Van Onselen was back in default mode of “Liberal sources say, high level discussions behind the scenes…” – which is pretty much what he and his mates have been writing all year. If Turnbull wants to give the commentariat a few more thrills and spills, I suspect they’ll only come from a reshuffle.
Update: Bernard Keane:
Amid all the sound and fury last night, let’s not overlook that Malcolm Turnbull has achieved a truly remarkable feat: drag[ging] his party kicking and screaming to actually support the Government’s CPRS, in an amended form. It is an impressive achievement.And forget about Wilson Tuckey and Dennis Jensen and the denialist bloc within the Liberal Party calling a spill against Turnbull on Thursday. If the spill motion gets up, Turnbull will likely have the numbers, and for that matter won’t even need them [if] Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey don’t stand. I mean, seriously – Kevin Andrews? A man whose ministerial career was marked by both incompetence and malice? He’d be lucky to get his own vote let alone anyone else’s.
Keane goes on to say that Turnbull’s leadership is terminal in any case. That seems to be the conventional Canberra wisdom. I’m not so sure it’s right. We’ll see.
I can’t say that I ever understood Keane’s praise of Robb. His stellar qualities are far from evident to me, and I think he only had the climate change gig in the first place because it was useful to co-opt a skeptic. His public presentation seems to me so somnolent as to render him quite awful as a political communicator.
Turnbull will no doubt he hoping that he will reap some benefit from what Keane calls an “impressive victory” in the polls. Indeed, in his press conference he pointedly referred to public opinion. Yet Keane, and the rest of the commentariat, are focused solely, it would seem, on the ins and outs of the Liberals’ byzantine internal politics. It’s odd that for a crew who normally talk so much about polls, when the chips are down, the nation shrinks to one room in Canberra (and a few back rooms). Turnbull is obviously appealling over the head of his own right wing to the public, and hoping for a dividend for dragging them kicking and screaming into acquiescence in his view (which, as I’ve emphasised, they really must do unless they’re prepared to topple him). But apparently the view from the Parliamentary press gallery is different. Certainly the claims about how his press conference would be received seem premised on a mistaken belief that his only audience was his fellow MPs and a bunch of journos.
If I were Turnbull, I’d be out there tomorrow taking my case directly to the public. Do a few radio and tv interviews. He’s bound to be more persuasive than Kevin Andrews or Andrew Robb, and he may well cut through all the intricacies and manoeuvrings the journos and commentators love to recount. He will certainly believe he now has a clear and saleable message to communicate. He also still has a more authoritative platform from which to speak – as the Opposition Leader – than a bunch of has beens and never has beens. The advantages of having won his fight, and of the position he occupies, shouldn’t be underestimated. That’s not to say he’ll automatically prevail, but I expect he’ll give it the now proverbial ‘red hot go’.
Update: The contest between Turnbull and Kevin Andrews for the Liberal leadership will be decided today. New thread here.
Penberthy thinks Turnbull is doomed.
Linked text
It’s an interesting dilemma for Turnbull.
Dumping the deniers en masse might recover some ALP vote back to the Libs, which should cover any Lower House vote lost to Independents or just lost to intentional informals. The Lib denialist/anti-mitigationist Senate vote would go over to the Nats.
Yes, I was thinking the same on the other thread. He really cant go on like this – he’s got to chop some frontbench heads off: Minchin, Abbott, Robb. Use the crisis to his advantage – the moderates will soon realise this is the only tenable way to maintain unity is the face of Rudd’s uber-wedge. They’ve got to log the old growth.
Not that I care if they stagger on like they are!
@1, Penberthy and the rest of the commentariat are on auto pilot, Terry. This could be a game changer. All they ever do is listen to each other and the hard right Liberal MPs muttering about Turnbull being doomed.
It would certainly be interesting if the skeptics won outright power within the Coalition, and we had a double-dissolution election in which the meaning of Climategate was a fundamental issue. Australia could become a world leader in popular epistemo-climatology.
Terry, Penberthy is an idiot.
I know a couple of young blokes who were at uni with him, and they reckon he’s an idiot, too.
@2, Baraholka, I don’t see that Turnbull has any other option. He just can’t take up the “lead the denialist party” option or do some sort of backflip, both bits of advice that his enemies have helpfully given him. He’s got to come down hard on these characters, or he may as well resign with a bit of honour intact. There’s no middle way, and those really are his only two viable choices. He would know that he wouldn’t have a chance of winning, or even surviving an election loss, if he goes with what the right want him to do. He’d just be their sacrificial lamb, to be tossed aside after Rudd romps it in, and blamed.
So the opposition is going to go into the election boasting that it managed to force the government into giving $7 billion to the big polluters? After all the fuss about the government’s cash splash and future debt? And how convincing is the opposition going to be when it it claims to be rock solid on supporting climate change action?
The opposition would have been smarter to have abstained from the CPRS vote, claimed that it was a strong supporter of climate action but that CPRS was fundamentally flawed and come up with a real alternative in time for the election campaign.
It would have been even smarter if it had stopped wasting energy supporting the climate skeptic argument and had a hard think about the alternatives to ETS.
I’ve been watching “Yes Minister” DVDs in the last few days.
This is better.
The twitter coverage of this tonight was absolutely brilliant. Professional journos and not so professional political junkies all throwing their 140 characters into the mix. It was exciting and hilarious even if the end was anti-climatic.
So, does anyone know who the leader is?
“HIS voice hoarse and breaking from arguing his case over 12 hours of solid meetings, a haggard Malcolm Turnbull declared “I’m the leader” six times tonight at a defiant but probably futile press conference aimed at asserting his authority over a political party which is split almost exactly in half.”
So Terry @ 1 Was David Penberthy watching the same press conference we all saw this evening?
I thought that Turnbull looked better than he had for days. I found him convincing in the sense that he had made up his mind how to play this, in exactly the the way Mark advocates – “by making an impetuous gamble from a risky position.”
His memoirs will be interesting one day.
Mark has a point: considering for the last four months he’s been caught between the Fossil Gang and Rudd actively using the ETS as an instrument of his destruction it’s somewhat amazing Turnbull’s still there.
Ahhh… There’s not enough information right now to accurately judge what’s going to happen in the morning. There will be a lot of hushed, harried conversations over 12 hours since breaking the party room up, and not a lot of sleep.
Either Malcolm will “carry the day” and get this ETS pushed through with shadow cabinet – and Minchin’s – tacit support, or, more unlikely, he will be spilled and spend the next twelve months in political wilderness, and emerge after the next election as the Liberal messiah – the new triple-bypass man – to offer a serious challenge to Kevin Rudd in 2013.
What’s more likely is that Malcolm will be the Liberal’s Kim Beazley – the man the party turns to when there’s noone else to choose, but the man the public doesn’t think is convincing enough to be PM.
I don’t think the next Liberal PM of Australia is currently in parliament.
Hockey is the guy I pinged as their Beazley but that could just be their relative size talking – in any case he seems desperate to avoid the poison chalice right now but he could be a handy interim after 2010.
I don’t know where I wrote it, but the first thing Turnbull should have done when he took over was to go upstairs and drive a stake through Nick Minchin’s heart and put his head on a post to warn the others, and then take the centre.
I have however been enjoying the constant blood-letting ever since JWH got the boot; a purely partisan pleasure, but possibly Turnbull who only came into Parliament for the last term of Howard’s Govt in 2004, has been under the illusion that he was the Chairman of the Board with a majority of shares in his portfolio.
Malcolm has only got the gig cause Tip left the building and all the other leadership candidates would need to have their heads surgically sown together to present any decent alternative, (altho Brendo did ten months or so, with only Minchin’s hand up his rear end.)
Interesting to speculate what a Costello led Opposition would have come up with on the ETS firstly, and how solidly the Libs would have lined up behind it. This is in an alternative universe where Costello had just 1/3 of the character that his long suffering supporters believed he had.
Malcolm however maybe be the lead man in the ultimate Oz political tragedy even if he regains control of his party in the short term, that is by not only losing the next election by a landslide, but if the ALP parachute in a Maxine-like super candidate to knock him off at the same time in Wentworth.
…the nation that broke a man’s heart..
Update: George Brandis on Lateline added further confirmation to the vapid nature of most of the leadership spill talk, by mentioning that Tony Abbott had endorsed Turnbull’s leadership at the meeting, and – significantly – that Turnbull had called for people to indicate their desire for a spill at the end, and no one had. We also know that Liberal party rules don’t mean that a letter from two backbenchers seeking a meeting on the leadership necessarily has any consequences. Brandis also indicated that Turnbull had a large majority of Liberals behind him. As I pointed out, the Nats don’t get a vote on the leadership.
And as Annabel Crabb suggested, the Kevin Andrews candidacy hasn’t exactly sparked massive enthusiasm. Even Bolta’s ardour appears to have cooled as the night’s worn on. Van Onselen was back in default mode of “Liberal sources say, high level discussions behind the scenes…” – which is pretty much what he and his mates have been writing all year. If Turnbull wants to give the commentariat a few more thrills and spills, I suspect they’ll only come from a reshuffle.
Update: Bernard Keane:
Keane goes on to say that Turnbull’s leadership is terminal in any case. That seems to be the conventional Canberra wisdom. I’m not so sure it’s right. We’ll see.
I can’t say that I ever understood Keane’s praise of Robb. His stellar qualities are far from evident to me, and I think he only had the climate change gig in the first place because it was useful to co-opt a skeptic. His public presentation seems to me so somnolent as to render him quite awful as a political communicator.
Turnbull will no doubt he hoping that he will reap some benefit from what Keane calls an “impressive victory” in the polls. Indeed, in his press conference he pointedly referred to public opinion. Yet Keane, and the rest of the commentariat, are focused solely, it would seem, on the ins and outs of the Liberals’ byzantine internal politics. It’s odd that for a crew who normally talk so much about polls, when the chips are down, the nation shrinks to one room in Canberra (and a few back rooms). Turnbull is obviously appealling over the head of his own right wing to the public, and hoping for a dividend for dragging them kicking and screaming into acquiescence in his view (which, as I’ve emphasised, they really must do unless they’re prepared to topple him). But apparently the view from the Parliamentary press gallery is different. Certainly the claims about how his press conference would be received seem premised on a mistaken belief that his only audience was his fellow MPs and a bunch of journos.
If I were Turnbull, I’d be out there tomorrow taking my case directly to the public. Do a few radio and tv interviews. He’s bound to be more persuasive than Kevin Andrews or Andrew Robb, and he may well cut through all the intricacies and manoeuvrings the journos and commentators love to recount. He will certainly believe he now has a clear and saleable message to communicate. He also still has a more authoritative platform from which to speak – as the Opposition Leader – than a bunch of has beens and never has beens. The advantages of having won his fight, and of the position he occupies, shouldn’t be underestimated. That’s not to say he’ll automatically prevail, but I expect he’ll give it the now proverbial ‘red hot go’.
I too have never understood the praise of Robb. He makes Ruddock appear lively and I’ll never forget how hysterical his attacks were on Gillard & Labor in the lead up to the ‘07 election. In his then regular appearances on Sky News he was the one bleeting the loudest about how the union’s were going to turn off the lights, throw bosses of the premises and in general destroy the economy.
During that election campaign I mentioned on here a few times that he came across as a boozed up rambling drunk on Sky. As it turns out his illness may have played a part in all that but I still have absolutely no respect for him.
What next that good ol’ Joe Hockey ain’t so bad even though five minutes after the election he declared he never realised how extreme WorkChoices was despite being the minister handling it, these people have no credibility.
This is the end of The Party that Ratty Made.
It is important to recall how Ratty made his party — by means of back-stabbing and faction-driven branch-stacking. Standing on a pile of political corpses, Howard bragged “I am the most conservative leader in the history of the Liberal Party.”
Howard created a party that is out of touch with the sentiments of Australia’s marginal voters.
Malcolm Turnbull has fought back for Australian values by means of open debate over an important policy issue. Most Liberals, either out of conviction or out of enlightened self interest, have rejected Howardism.
Turnbull’s enemies in the Liberal Party hanker after Howard’s good ol’ days when the stilletto was the weapon of choice.
Turnbull owes it to Australia to hang tough.
Ruddco must be loving this. Carry on I think would be their hope.
Robb is an awful media performer, always has been. I have no idea why he’s been given the profile he has. Not only that, he’s clearly been disloyal, deceptive and dishonest about his views on climate change and the ETS. After the bombshell he dropped yesterday here’s hoping he goes back to his hole and gets back on the Prozac.
I really feel sorry for Turnbull. He’s a liberal trying to lead the Liberal Party to a sane position on climate change. The reality is he’s leading a Big ‘C’ conservative party infested with denialists and extremists, who will never see sense.
The Turnbull bashing I read at LP annoys me intensely. The guy has a near impossible job of dragging the Coalition beyond its Howard era denialism, and has put his leadership on the line several times over this issue. If he crashes through and survives we will all be better off — we will finally have bipartisanship on climate change like they have in the UK and most of Europe. The alternative is an openly denialist opposition which will only give the skeptics credibility and media oxygen. Expect much more regular media appearances from Bolt, Blair, Carter, Plimer and the rest of the merry gang of denialist nutters.
The next Newspoll should be interesting. Labor will be well north of 60%. As Bob Hawke said, if you can’t govern yourselves, you can’t govern the country and the voters traditionally agree.
Hockey will leader by Christmas and the Liberal Taliban will devour him too. Why? Because they can.
Katz is partly right that this is down to Howard. He created a party in his own image. There was nothing else. With him gone, there is nothing at all.
But give some credit to Rudd as well. The little nerd has wedged the opposition to near death.
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Turnbull was behind the Kevin Andrews candidacy.
Abbott doesn’t want to stand. Hockey doesn’t want the job. Costello isn’t even in Parliament any more. So the one man who IS standing is the most preposterous candidate out there — Mr Workchoices, Mr Haneef, Mr Sudan. He looks like the half-deflated muppet from hell. He’s probably one of the few people in the partyroom who Turnbull, even on a bad day, can be counted on to beat like an egg.
So Andrews stands up as the strawman to get beaten up by Turnbull, who, by vanquishing his only challenger, gets to look strong for a while.
The problem here is that Turnbull is being supported by people who have no intention of voting Liberal, so garnering that form of support is somewhat moot to his future as a leader.
He may yet get out of the woods – he came across well on Sunrise this morning, and Brandis on Lateline was actually sounding half convincing, but the problems he faces are massive:
a) Much of the Liberal Party membership and support base has now defined itself around climate change scepticism, as a clear point of differentiation from teh ALP and the Greens;
b) This is a tax, and when people start paying higher electricity bills, Turnbull will get the blame in the same way as Meg Lees kept getting blamed for the GST, even among people who voted Liberal knowing they planned to introduce a GST;
c) There is now a significant wing of the Liberal Party – and their various cheer squads and support bases – who have given up the next election, and see the real battle as being with Turnbull as much or more than it is with Rudd and the ALP;
d) That faction tend to hold safer seats – compare margins for Tuckey, Andrews and Bronwyn Bishop to those for Turnbull, Pyne and Hockey – or be in the Senate;
e) Turnbull’s model for turning a reactionary party around to social liberalism, David Cameron in the UK, was only able to do so after two thumping defeats for the Tories in 2001 and 2005;
f) The polls will continue to be dire for the Liberals, and business disinterest in funding them will remain high as all expect the ALP to continue to govern, and Turnbull will continue to be blamed for all of that.
If he survives all of that, good on him. But I don’t think doubts about his future are springing idly from the Murdoch press apparatus.
I like bits of Turnbull which is sad but I do think he’s trying his heart out to do what has to be the hardest job. Its a pity he’s a lib, he would be right at home in this labor government. Fair dinkum if the Libs don’t recognise he’s their best public face right now, they deserve whatever dark and dingy hole Abbott, Minchin and Hockey can dig. I would only ask that they take Wilson Tuckey with them so I never have to listen to him ever again. Robb who?
You could be right Mark, he might just call the show and kick some butt. The only thing that counts against that is it’s always very hard to actually know who is really running the show for the libs and Malcolm doesn’t always seem to be one of the party machine’s darlings. I might watch the news today…
“I really feel sorry for Turnbull. He’s a liberal trying to lead the Liberal Party to a sane position on climate change.”
Mal may look like Andre Rieu, Carbonsink, but spare us the violins. Any reasonable consideration of the policy positions that Turnbull has adopted since he became leader would suggest he is far from a “liberal”. His play on asylumn seekers, for instance, has been no better than Howard at his worst.
It’s worth remembering, as well, that a good part of his fortune came from logging in the Solomon Islands. He has actually played a not insignificant part in creating the problem he now pretends to be concerned about.
Carbon sink@21 said:
Well you’ve certainly changed your tune. From being an out there go hard on mitigation proponent you’re now a backer of the Turnbull-MacFarlane porkbarrell? Gosh!
I have no sympathy at all for the narcissistic opportunist careerist Turnbull. He knew what kind of party he was joining when he joined it and he didn’t care as long as it gave him the chance to add PM to his resume.
If his overweening ambition had been conquered by a modicum of sense then he’d have waited until the dust settled and the Liberals had been purged of their core ratbags and deadwood before making a bid for the top job. He could have sat on the back bench outlining his vision for a party that was liberal in policy terms rather than Liberal in name only, because let’s face it, the chances of the ALP screwing up enough to be a one-term government were very poor. The party could have immolated and lost most of its nutbags in the next election. He could have set about authoring new preselection processes which would favour more contemporary candidates. He could have lost the Nationals. He could have used his wit to be the author of a better alternative party. Instead, he has acted like Howard-lite.
And the ETS? Let them block it. The bill was unsupportable in its original form the destruction of the deniers and trogs in the next election would have been a bonus. Turnbull from the backbench could have proposed a stronger bill than the government and wedged them to their left. Wouldn’t that have been fun?
Instead, we have Abbott on this morning wailing about government handouts when the extra 7 billion in the amended bill was at their insistence. How absurd.
Thanks joe2 above for reminding those bleeding hearts what this is all about which is not a Liberal party spill (something Tony Jones apparantly forgot entirely last night on Lateline – real issue coverage: 30 seconds; George Brandis braying on: 347 minutes) but the ecological conditions of life on the planet. The media coverage has been pathetic. A reasonable survey of policy options, one that canvasses why an ETS is likely to be a failure, is available on R.N’s ‘Rear View’ as of today.
Why are supposed left-wingers attempting to provide counsel to the open party of the bosses?
Shaun @10:
“It was exciting and hilarious even if the end was anti-climatic. “
Fran Barlow @ 27:
Not at all. My personal views on climate change mitigation are more aligned with the Greens, but politics is the art of the possible, and even a timid ETS will be damn near impossible to get up in the Coalition party room … and good on Malcolm for putting his leadership on the line over it.
I don’t think Australia will be well served by a denialist opposition. Do you? I think we’re better off having an opposition that accepts the science, and begrudgingly supports an ETS in some form.
The reality is, at some point in the future the Coalition will be in government again. God forbid that government still supports a denialist view because that means what little progress Rudd makes will be undone.
joe2 @ 26:
Sure, Turnbull’s line on asylum seekers is pure populism and no better than Howard, but the easiest thing in the world for Turnbull to do now is roll over and adopt a denialist position on climate change. It would save his leadership instantly and he could go back to banging on about Rudd being soft on boat people.
Ask yourself this: Why is he pushing so hard to support something the Liberal Party base clearly doesn’t? Will it serve Australia well in the long term, if Turnbull gets rolled and denialism becomes entrenched in the Coalition?
O.K.,Carbonsink, are you now about to document the brave new elements of small “l” liberalism that Turnbull has introduced since he took on the top job apart, of course, his super mellow ETS plan?
If so, how do you explain that a majority of the parliamentary party supports Turnbull?
Liberal parliamentarians have decided, no doubt for a variety of reasons, that the ETS conflict provides the opportunity to repudiate Howard’s legacy.
They understand that Howardism will consign the Libs to political irrelevancy and that the survival of the party as a credible alternative government requires the destruction of Howardism.
And they are correct.
Crossed, Carbonsink, but I agree it is probably best for the country that the opposition moves on from the maddo position. Mind you, a split might have it’s advantages, as well.
A new grouping-say, “Real Liberal Party”- would be out of government for a while but able to set up without the old fart factor continuing to gain all the press headlines.
Katz, I would describe it as “moving on”. Especially when a great deal of swinging voters don’t see Howard and Rudd as being that different, explaining why they voted for both of them.
The problem is that the Minchins of the world are better at internal Liberal Party politics than the Turnbulls. I wrote as much last week on my blog (Malcolm, it’s over, link on my web moniker). It’ll be hard to move the Minchins and B Bishops and Tuckeys on, and then replace them with deep policy thinkers who see the world in shades of grey rather than black and white.
This is undoubtedly true, Sam.
Moreover, Rudd’s willingness to compromise on ETS has maximised divisions within the Liberal Party.
Undoubtedly, Rudd has provided plenty of ammunition. However, it was up to the two Liberal factions to decide whether and how they would go to war with each other.
I agree. This has just strengthened Malcolm’s leadership.
If he lasts the week.
Chav asked:
All the parties are open parties of the bosses, as I’ve made clear on a number of occasions. Few doubt that though some pretend the ALP still has something to do with the independent mobilisation of the workers. What is more interesting is why an ostensible Cliffite would be adopting the Grantist line on parties of the class.
My commentary in relation to the Turnbull was not counsel. It was an observation about what he, oeprating entirely within his paradigm, might have done as an alternative to the course he followed. It was a kind of socio-political counterfactual. I would not have advocated support for him if he’d followed this course, though I’d have found him somewhat less apparently irrational. I very much doubt Turnbull reads this blog, and even if he did, think it even less likely that he’d seize upon my advice in order to fashion the tools to disempower the workers. he’d have to move the ALP aside first in order to do that.
This is getting better and better….
“The announcement by the leader last night was about as dodgy as a Zimbabwean election organised by Robert Mugabe,” Mr Slipper told reporters in Canberra.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/liberal-mp-compares-turnbull-to-mugabe-20091125-jp7a.html
Julie Bishop should head the Liberal party. To take on Rudd on the ETS scam that will put everything up.
It’s on.
1 pm today, Turnbull v Andrews.
A spill is on for today at 1.00.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/turnbull-calls-leadership-spill-20091125-jp30.html?autostart=1
I didn’t say I predict he will, David, but that I think he should and it just might work for him.
Katz @34
These numbers are premised upon Malcolm Turnbull’s maths i.e. that the whole of the Shadow Cabinet supports the position, because they are obligated by Cabinet solidarity to do so.
There are some brave assumptions there about Tony Abbott, let alone Nick Minchin.
Kevin Andrews!
He’s strapped on his explosive vest. Shouting “God is great!” he will enter the caucus room and smite the infidel.
Today Kevin Andrews will enter paradise as a holy martyr.
I wrote yesterday that Turnbull should sack the disloyal Robb.
Of course he can’t, because Robb is already a backbencher, having taken a long leave of absence because of his depression.
And meanwhile, a la Billy Hughes when he was the leader of the UAP in 1941-3 Malcolm will not call a party meeting for a spill tomorrow.Billy did hold on for a long time without a party meeting,but in the end it did him no good at all. Malcolm, history shows this tactic won’t work. It will just delay the inevitable.
Prediction: Not long before the election is called or immediately after the election is called Abbott or Hockey will challenge. Malcolm will lose the leadership. The then incumbent will fight the election, go down in flames, but remain leader after a disastrous conservative electoral loss, with all the blame being sheeted home to Malcolm. He shouldna have challenged Nelson.
At least in his retirement he can re-read Shakespeare’s Macbeth to see where he went wrong.
Andrews will get 20 votes at best.
The sad thing here is that we have both Labor and Liberal fighting to see who can best trash the public interest and our collective futures while handing over cash to our worst and richest polluters in what Garnaut correctly called the biggest policy failure in Australian history. Im appalled about the commentary focusing on the ridiculous sideshow within the coalition. Frankly in the end who cares, its about the environment and liveability on this planet, stupid. I hope the coalition does block it then we have a double dissolution, then labor just might have to deal with the Greens and be forced to look at really cutting emissions. This ETS will lock in a huge load of no abatement for 20 years. Its clearly a political device to wedge the opposition, whose undies have clearly been supremely hoiked and has no focus on the real task at hand. Can the media/commentariat get over the who’s up who’s down today bollocks and actually get back to the reality of what we are dealing with? The failure of the media generally on this issue makes them culpable. Its time they stopped believing their own crap about being the fearless seekers of truth and started getting back to the facts. Any old deal is not a victory for any of us, we need to start cutting emissions and this ETS won’t do it.
@46 – that might be so on the ETS bill, Terry but not on the leadership.
The Nats don’t have a vote for that, and Brandis was very pointed in emphasising that Turnbull had a larger majority among *Liberals*.
Those who want to chuck Turnbull out had the opportunity to do so last night, and didn’t take it? Why? Because he has a majority of the Liberal party behind him as leader. That will become clear when he defeats Andrews today.
Parliament rises for the year on Friday.
How, exactly, is he going to be toppled? By a strongly worded Wilson Tuckey email?
All this media stuff about the “killing fields of December” is all well and good, but they don’t decide the leadership on the basis of counting op/eds but by a vote of their parliamentary party.
I’ll repeat the point I made several times in the post. Turnbull now has the power to reward and punish, and the reporting of the lobbying before the meeting made it clear that his numbers people were concentrating dissidents’ minds about the long delayed reshuffled.
The Libs might of course be insane enough to topple him this afternoon, but if not, he’s got til February to re-establish his leadership, and has some weapons with which to do that.
The commentariat appear to be following the “doomed leader” script. What about the “strong leader stands up to dinosaurs in his own party and gains extra kudos” script? Or what about recognising that politics is more complex and unpredictable than a menu of ‘media narratives’ might suggest?
Why in god’s name would anyone in their right mind want the Liberal leadership at the moment? They can’t honestly think that they have a chance of winning the election (unless Labor manages to really fuck up over the next year). Surely any prospective leaders would be far better off letting Turnbull lose this election, and then taking up the leadership when the Liberals actually have a better chance of winning.
Though the hilarious prospect of Kevin Andrews as leader does kind of make me hope he does win.
Jim @ 51, the future of the planet will actually turn on what gets agreed internationally and what the US, China and India decide to do. Our climate policies will make a non zero contribution, and perhaps we can influence international outcomes if we are seen to be making an effort, but some perspective is required.
I’ve put up a new thread on the leadership challenge. Please direct future comments there:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/11/25/kevin-andrews-to-challenge-malcolm-turnbull/