Only days ago, the minister watched conservatives bury his signature energy policy. Now he’s their deputy leader

How Josh Frydenberg went from ignominy to victory in a week

A few years ago, a young skydiver survived a 4,000-metre fall after his parachute failed and he landed on soft ground.

Lying in hospital afterwards, with a broken back, he said the freak experience wasn’t pleasant but he was “trying to focus on the positives”.

That man’s political equivalent in Australia could well be Josh Frydenberg.

Only days ago the environment and energy minister had watched on as his signature energy policy, the national energy guarantee, was utterly rejected by his Coalition colleagues, like a parachute ripped apart by wind.

It had left him with little except mounting pressure on another front – the controversy swirling around the government’s $443m grant to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

For the ambitious Frydenberg, the ignominy was real.

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He had worked incredibly hard for months to design an energy policy that could provide certainty for the business community while appeasing the anti-Paris crowd in the Coalition. He knew the stakes were Himalayan, given the antipathy some of his colleagues felt for his project.

But his conservative colleagues in the Liberal party rejected it anyway. They used it as an excuse to try to topple their leader, Malcolm Turnbull, complaining Turnbull was dragging the party too far to the left. Frydenberg, by implication, was dragging the party to the left too. If the conservatives in the party were now in the ascendancy, surely that didn’t bode well for his ambitions.

Well, on Friday, Frydenberg hit soft ground and bounced. From failure to bruised winner in a week.

He emerged from a special party-room meeting as the Liberals’ new deputy leader, having won a surprise ballot with Scott Morrison, who was running for leader – and prime minister – against Peter Dutton.

He is now more senior than his conservative colleagues, and he had the luxury of choosing his own portfolio. He chose treasury.

That’s quite a positive to ruminate.