PLOTS AND PRAYERS Niki Savva is one of the most senior correspondents in the Canberra Press Gallery. She was twice political correspondent on The Australian, and headed up the Canberra bureaus of both The Herald Sun and The Age. When family tragedy forced a career change, she became Peter Costello’s press secretary for six years and was then on John Howard’s staff for three years. Her work has brought her into intimate contact with Australia’s major political players for more than 35 years. She is a regular columnist for The Australian, and often appears on ABC TV’s Insiders. In March 2017, the Melbourne Press Club bestowed a lifetime achievement award upon Niki for her ‘outstanding coverage of Australian politics as a reporter, columnist and author’. Her previous book, The Road to Ruin, was a major bestseller, and won the 2017 General Nonfiction Book of the Year Award at the Australian Book Industry Awards. Scribe Publications 18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia 2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom 3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409, USA First published by Scribe 2019 Reprinted 2019 Copyright © Niki Savva 2019 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book. 9781925849189 (Australian edition) 9781912854646 (UK edition) 9781925693836 (e-book) Catalogue records for this book are available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library scribepublications.com.au scribepublications.co.uk scribepublications.com From beginning to end, for Steven and Vincent Contents Prologue 1 A unique coup 2 Whine and whispers 3 Barnaby’s doodle 4 A waste of energy 5 Days of madness 6 Prayers, plots, and plans 7 My learned friend 8 Oh, Mathias 9 Politically right, personally wrong 10 A touch of the Keatings 11 Queensland: perfect one day, shitty the next 12 Bullies and Co. 13 The spillover effects 14 Getting to know Scomo 15 In God’s hands Acknowledgements Prologue The religious overtones were constant and unmissable. They were there before Scott Morrison ascended to the leadership, then continued all the way through to his stunning election victory on 18 May 2019, which he described as a miracle. Months before that, Malcolm Turnbull was taken aback by a passage in Greg Sheridan’s book God Is Good for You, which he had launched in early August 2018, only three weeks before his colleagues passed their judgement on him. The passage began with the question, ‘And will we face judgement?’ The answer that followed came from Tony Abbott, ‘Yes, we will be judged, but I think we will be judged benignly. I think there would be very few people, only people who consistently choose evil, who would find themselves in hell. Maybe only Hitler or Stalin.’ Turnbull was gobsmacked by the morality, or rather what he considered to be the amorality, of the thinking behind Abbott’s response. To me, it showed how Abbott had justified his behaviour over the three years since he’d lost the leadership. At his final press conference as prime minister, Abbott had pledged there would be no wrecking, sniping, or undermining, and had then spent every day thereafter doing almost exactly that. And if he didn’t do it personally, others did it on his behalf. Whenever his words were thrown back at him, he would say he had never leaked or briefed – which nobody really believed anyway – but said what he had to say publicly. So backstabbing was sinful, while frontstabbing was acceptable. Or forgivable. Abbott’s destructive path helped demolish Turnbull’s prime ministership. The sense of chaos, the instability he created and fuelled, became constant companions. Abbott created the environment that enabled an increasingly frustrated Peter Dutton to make his move. On 22 August 2018, the day after 35 Liberals MPs cast their vote against Turnbull – enough to spell doom for his leadership – Dutton was making a pitch to Melbourne radio listeners as part of his bid to replace Turnbull. Dutton was asked by Triple M host Wil Anderson to name his favourite AC/DC song. Pleading that he had only had one-and-a-half hours’ sleep, Dutton said he couldn’t think of one. As soon as I heard the question, it was obvious – to me, at least – what the answer was: ‘Highway to Hell’. That seemed to be where the Liberals were headed. I was not alone in thinking this. So did almost every Liberal MP that day, including Scott Morrison, as he pleaded with Mathias Cormann not to terminate the government. Everything pointed to Armageddon. Abbott’s destabilisation campaign, helped along by his media mates, the betrayals, and the rise of the religious right, who never accepted Turnbull and could not accept the vote on same-sex marriage that he enabled, all contributed to Turnbull’s downfall. So did Turnbull’s own poor political judgement. He was a good prime minister and a terrible politician. The good bits of Malcolm were ultimately not enough to make up for the bad Malcolm and the mistakes he made. The sheer brutality of his removal horrified many Liberals. MPs were traumatised or humiliated by eight days of madness. Men and women cried from the sheer anguish of it. They went to hell, and feared when it was over they would not make it back, and nor would the Liberal Party. But, sustained by his deep faith, fortified by his enormous self-belief, Morrison hoped and prayed that God had other plans. Turnbull’s road ended in disaster, as it was always bound to, and as he always knew it would, as he predicted to me a scant three years before it happened, in a rather wistful, sad way, when I spoke to him for The Road to Ruin. Back then, he had felt sorry for Abbott. But when his end came, when he began the agonising trip down his own Highway to Hell, he could not bear to let go. And then when it was over, he was defiant, fragile – and, yes, at times vengeful. Based on dozens of interviews, many of them conducted only days or weeks after the coup, Plots and Prayers explores the events leading up to Turnbull’s demise, the disaster that was the 2016 election, the soap opera surrounding the Nationals leader and deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, the debacle of the energy debate, the chaos of the coup itself, and Scott Morrison’s elevation, and then delves in detail into the actions, the motives, the character, and the relationships of those at the centre of the days of madness that led to three prime ministers in three years and the ‘miracle’ that was Morrison’s victory. CHAPTER ONE A unique coup Malcolm Turnbull does not believe that Scott Morrison’s stunning election victory vindicated the coup against him. Turnbull remains confident he could have won in 2019, and besides, the revolt by the right was designed to install Peter Dutton, not Morrison, as prime minister. The last person Dutton and his backers wanted to lead the party was Turnbull; the second- last was Morrison. Turnbull also firmly believes that by holding out against the insurgents during coup week, by delaying a second ballot, he gave Morrison precious time to gather the numbers to triumph over Dutton. If there was any consolation for Turnbull, this was it, particularly as he and those closest to him had warned the plotters that if they persisted, the week would end with Morrison – whom they disliked – being sworn in as prime minister. It was only a part of Turnbull’s strategy that Morrison should succeed. The other part – the primary objective, of course – was to save himself. Morrison, the most astute conservative politician of his generation, did need the extra time that Turnbull bought him, but the plotting and planning by his lieutenants was already well advanced. It is impossible to get to where he got in 24 hours, which is what he later wanted people to believe. Morrison had done what he could to save Turnbull from himself. He knew he would be damaged if people thought he had ascended to the Liberal leadership by being disloyal or if he had blood on his hands. The image of him as a cleanskin was vital to his success. This did not stop some of his backers from talking about how it happened, nor his enemies from trying to sully his reputation. He would not allow any of this to distract him from his singular objective of winning an election already deemed lost through the disunity and the despair that had embedded itself in Liberal ranks after the knifing of two prime ministers. Morrison, who turned 51 five days before the 2019 election, is a complex mix of political cunning and religious conviction who burnishes his image as a daggy dad who loves his beer, loves his footy, and understands what ordinary Australian families need. He is a social conservative with a social conscience. He boosted funding to fight mental-health problems confronting young Australians, and he called royal commissions into the treatment of the aged and the disabled. He has friendships across political and religious divides, including in the Muslim community. He argued in cabinet that the seat-by-seat breakdown of the same-sex marriage vote should not be made public, advocated during the plebiscite for legislation to expand religious freedom, and then abstained from the vote when his own electorate of Cook voted in favour of marriage equality.