Some moments during the Liberal Party leadership crisis were so brutal they are burnt into the memories of MPs, and make a mockery of claims the Morrison government can unite in time for the election.

Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The shock at the top of the Australian government is almost physical when Liberals recount the trauma of their leadership spill, a moment in political history when a frenzied campaign split their party and toppled Malcolm Turnbull. A new Prime Minister now claims his team will “go forward together” after the bitter and bruising week, but Scott Morrison now leads a party that is riven by conflicts over what just happened. Every development is a matter of dispute. Few can agree on how their party gave in to what Turnbull called a “form of madness” – a phrase that will stick. Loading The shock could be heard in the Liberal party room in the moment when Turnbull lost the vote on Friday, August 24, to declare his position vacant. The Liberal Party whip, Nola Marino, told MPs gathered in the party room that the motion to declare the leadership vacant had been carried. But how? A voice called out for the numbers. It was Victorian backbencher Russell Broadbent, insisting the room hear the count. “I want the numbers, please,” said Broadbent. Marino turned him down several times but Broadbent insisted and had vocal support from the room to get his way. It was 40 to 45. The Prime Minister had lost his job by less than a handful of votes and looked stricken. “This is a farce,” he said to those around him.


What was meant to be a tour de force for Peter Dutton, the challenger who thought he had the numbers, turned into a coup de farce instead that installed Morrison as leader and shoved Dutton to the side. Some of the moments were so brutal they are burnt into the memories of all involved. Friendships have been fractured, hatreds inflamed and suspicions deepened among Liberals who are supposed to present a united face to Australian voters at an election due within nine months. How the government recovers depends on how it deals with this history. The party room had been put on alert for a spill one week before that final ballot. Dutton had spent the previous Friday refusing to comment on a report in The Daily Telegraph that claimed he was being urged to run for the leadership. This may be the biggest myth of all from the spill: the idea that Morrison can “heal the wounds” in time for the election. Text messages flew that Friday to try to settle things down. The Finance Minister, Mathias Cormann, became the intermediary to help. Turnbull sent a message to Dutton to confront the obvious: at some point that day, the Prime Minister was certain to be asked whether he had Dutton’s support on leadership and energy policy. He put this to Dutton with a message about what he would say if asked. “Yes mate, those words are fine,” Dutton replied at about 11:30am. There was an assurance of loyalty, but it had only come after a delay and a negotiation of its terms.


To his colleagues, Dutton appeared to enjoy being the subject of intense speculation about his leadership potential without his usual rivals, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Treasurer Scott Morrison, being named in the same story as alternatives. 2GB radio host Ray Hadley, who is close to Dutton, declared at lunchtime he was “100 per cent certain” a leadership challenge would be launched within two weeks. It took until the next morning for Dutton to send out a tweet. “Just to make very clear, the Prime Minister has my support and I support the policies of the government,” he said. It offered no assurance about the future. Whatever the tweet said, Liberals knew the message that really mattered was in Dutton’s 24 hours of public silence. Peter Dutton on the backbench in Question Time. Credit:Dominic Lorrimer These events put the lie to the big myth around the challenge: that it somehow took its own organisers by surprise. Those who backed Dutton now object to being called “plotters” and deny they were up to anything before Turnbull took the biggest gamble of his political career: calling a surprise vote on his own leadership when Liberals assembled on Tuesday, August 21, for a regular meeting. The failure of the Dutton campaign has left its architects denying it was their own work. Asked on Tuesday about what happened the week before, Victorian Liberal Michael Sukkar told Sky News: “All of us, including me, went into last week thinking it would be a perhaps lively but unexceptional week in Parliament, in all honesty.” South Australian MP Tony Pasin, who also backed Dutton, told Sky News this week that he turned up expecting “business as usual” in Parliament on the day before the spill.


It is an astonishing claim – to expect an “unexceptional” week after days of coverage of the leadership question, not least a front page story in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age saying 'Dutton set to strike' because his supporters claimed to hold a majority in the party room. Yet this is the core argument now being made to excuse the shambolic coup: that the Dutton camp were not organising until Turnbull called the vote on the Tuesday. “There’s a lot of rewriting of history going on,” says one Liberal. Another is more blunt: “It’s complete bullshit.” Says a third: “The idea they hit Tuesday from a standing start is fanciful.” Fairfax Media has checked with Liberal MPs who were sounded out by Dutton allies about support for their candidate on the Sunday and the Monday when Parliament resumed. The conversations among Liberals on the Monday of that week were all about when, not if, a challenge would come. One of those who was loyal to Turnbull was told on the Monday, through indirect sources, that Dutton’s supporters intended to keep quiet during the Tuesday meeting and launch a spill at the end of that day or on Thursday.


The same names kept coming up as advocates for Dutton: Sukkar and Pasin along with senator Zed Seselja of the ACT, senator James McGrath from Queensland and Andrew Hastie of Western Australia. Turnbull certainly took his opponents by surprise by calling the vote on the Tuesday morning, but it is wrong to think he would have been safe if he had not done so. Both camps knew that any delay that week would mean a clash in the middle of September. The outcome on the Tuesday, with Turnbull gaining 48 votes and Dutton gaining 35, was so close that a second challenge was inevitable. “You don’t get 35 votes like that without coordination,” one Liberal says. “There was a group of people dedicated to bringing down Malcolm at any cost, no matter what the cost.” Bombarded by questions from the press gallery, Malcolm Turnbull reveals he would resign from Parliament if he lost the Liberal leadership. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen It is a measure of the failure of last week that so many excuses are now offered for the disruption, intimidation, incompetence and deception that took place. The Dutton team used the media relentlessly to exaggerate their numbers, throwing spotlights on their candidate to cast alarming shadows. The Turnbull team found itself chasing the shadows, almost believing the false numbers.

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