The Insider by Christopher Pyne, Hachette Australia, March 31st, 2021
I have previously reviewed two other works by Australian politicians with one by Cory Bernardi and the other by Tony Abbott. It is not a coincidence that these two as well as the subject of this review, are from the Liberal Party of Australia; which is more or/and increasingly less the conservative party in Australia. If you’re among the midwitted chattering classes of Australia, Cory Bernardi and Tony Abbott are as right-wing as you can get before having to resurrect Adolf Hitler. Though as my reviews of those two works demonstrate: they aren’t really all that “right-wing” at all. Christopher Pyne in contrast, is considered by most (and his own words), to be a moderate. As the more genuinely earnest politicians learn by experience, moderates are the ones most likely to leave a metaphorical knife in your back while crossing over to the enemy when you most need them by your side.
Unlike the other two works, I didn’t intend to read this book or even know it existed but it came up in a library search when I was looking for the Michael Mann film of the same name. This might sound like a joke but I am quite serious and though I may now have to search elsewhere for the Mann film, this chance discovery has at least provided ample material for the post that follows.
Given the books title, one might expect it to provide new or just insights into Australian politics over Pyne’s career but there is remarkably little inside information within. It starts off in typically autobiographical fashion but this is commendably brief and this will be one of very few areas of praise I have for the book. Most of the book deals with events during his time as a politician and much of this is from the last days of the Howard government when Pyne first entered cabinet through to Scott Morrison’s re-election in 2019 which was also the year Pyne retired. Annabel Crabb’s description of the book as “outrageous” on the front cover is nonsense even taking into account that she was just trying to spruik it. Almost nothing will be unfamiliar to anyone who closely follows Australian politics and so someone as immersed as Crabb could hardly have found the contents that interesting. Pyne’s perspective is at no point controversial or entertaining which is what is usually implied by the word in this context.
Crabb is right to also describe it as revealing but it’s not in the way she meant as a compliment to Pyne. The reason I carried on and typed out the passages that follow was because of how much it confirmed my own assumptions about politicians in general and about people like Malcolm Turnbull and Pyne himself in particular. One might also describe these assumptions as “prejudices” but I’d be willing to accept that. The early pages helpfully provide a perfect example in revealing why nominally right-wing politicians are willing to appear as impotent foils on the ABC’s Q&A program:
Catnip for politicians is the ABC’s Q&A programme. Every week Q&A needs political talent and for many MPs it’s an easy way to score a national television audience.
This confirms why weaklings like Pyne so readily appear on this program to be hissed at by the audience. There is nothing to be gained except notoriety which it seems, is exactly what he was there for. He then shares an experience on the show he was proud of:
One night on Q&A, I was asked about the perfidiousness of religious institutions and had the temerity to say that the Catholic Church has been the greatest force for good of any institution in world history. The studio audience was so shocked there was an audible gasp, followed by stunned silence.
One might assume given my own beliefs that I would praise Pyne for sharing this sentiment but given how flaky he reveals his adherence to the faith and morals of the church he praises here, I’m afraid I can’t do that. In the early pages of the book he reveals that his wife used IVF to conceive which is absolutely against Catholic teaching and even reveals he wanted to be pope before settling for politics:
The following year, 1982, I read The Making of the President 1960 by Theodore H. White and discovered a new roadmap to follow. The papacy might be closed to me, but the prime ministership of Australia was not. It was to that destination I set my sail. After that, from the age of fifteen, my education and professional life were angled to how they would affect my climb up the political greasy pole. That choice affected the next thirty-seven years of my life.
But is his enthusiasm for what he calls “marriage equality” or what could more accurately be described as “conjugal sodomy” that puts the sincerity of his Catholicism most in doubt. Outside of the chapter devoted to his time in the defence ministry, homogamy is the only political issue he shows any enthusiasm for within the pages of this book. An issue which neatly also brings me to my chosen title and where it comes from for anyone unfamiliar.
Christopher Pyne was one called by the then Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard a “mincing poodle” in parliament which also amusingly means it is recorded in Hansard which may puzzle future historians. This is something I remember at the time as well as the knowing laughs it elicited from many politicians present. Pyne quotes Gillard
‘…in a choice between a Doberman and a poodle, [Turnbull] had chosen the poodle; and finally, in a choice between macho and mincing, he had chosen mincing.’
It was nasty and cutting. It was meant to hurt. I brushed it off.
I was wondering why something like this would hurt at all because it wouldn’t have made any sense if directed against me. But it makes more sense when looking at the definition of ‘mincing‘ in this context which is:
(of the gait, speech, behavior, etc.) affectedly dainty, nice, or elegant.
Her references to AC/DC versus ABBA in the same speech also gets clarification. I’ll avoid making what I suspect explicit but it should be as obvious to readers as it was to the cackling politicians when Gillard uttered it.
Back to the subject of the media, Pyne also shows why the problem with the ABC goes beyond simply getting attention on programs like Q&A:
Many politicians and commentators accuse the ABC of bias. In the cloister of private conversation they might even accuse it of being a ‘fifth column’. I’ve not conducted any research into the voting patterns of ABC presenters or staff, but I would hazard to guess that you’d find a healthy representation of Greens and Labor votes, some Coalition voters but no One Nation supporters. It isn’t a fair representation of the population but that’s the reality. You can’t turn up to the soccer pitch and decide that it’s too lumpy and your team is not going to play. You play on the ground that you are allocated or you forfeit the game.
This is just the conservative concept of “noble surrender” written as a sports metaphor. He is no less forgiving of the Canberra press gallery which he comes to after he opens a chapter with these banalities:
Unlike any other city in Australia, Canberra was created for a sole purpose — to house the national capital, the apparatus of the state, and be the seat of the Australian Parliament. Almost 50% of Canberra’s inhabitants work for the Australian government or the Australian Capital Territory government.
Who reading the book would not be aware of this? Some pages later he describes political leanings of the Canberra press gallery as follows:
A straw poll of the press gallery would yield a heft number of Greens sympathisers, more than the average number of Australians against the Coalition’s border protection policies, very few Trump supporters (if any), and a majority in favour of Australia becoming a republic. The press pack went into a deep sense of mourning when former prime minister Gough Whitlam passed away. There’s nothing wrong with that in as much as Australia is a free country and everyone is entitled to their own opinions and choices, but it speaks to how members of the fourth estate see politics and politicians.
The last sentence gives them a completely undeserved pass as he shows shortly after with a string of examples of the laughably incorrect analyses of the Australian political climate for decades:
Despite Labor’s high-taxing agenda and the unpopularity of Bill Shorten, virtually no one in the press gallery believed Labor could lose the 2019 election. They were astonished that Julia Gillard took Labor into a minority government after only one term. They regarded Tony Abbott as unelectable. They assumed John Howard would win one or two elections at best, certainly not four. They initially rated Mark Latham. They elevated Malcolm Turnbull and couldn’t believe he almost lost in 2016. They worshipped Bob Hawke and idolised Paul Keating. They forget that every election in Australia is decided by the Australian voter’s hip pocket nerve because they are certain we are facing a climate emergency and climate change decides elections . . . I could go on.
Most of these examples are ones that the average Australian who doesn’t follow politics with the devotion of a cricket tragic, could have easily corrected the press gallery on. It is worse than this though as the implication is that the group who act as middlemen between the Australian people and the government are hostile to at least half of Australia’s population. Or, at best, don’t have any idea about what they’re worried or concerned about on any given election year. Pyne doesn’t seem to realise that this is not a matter of choices or differences of opinion among journalists. The reality is they are gatekeepers and people outside of their group are not permitted to have the same access that they have.
That is the reality but because these same people flatter Pyne’s ego from time to time, they get a pass:
Being in the media is like opium to politicians. Every politician adores seeing their columns published in the opinion pages. They even copy the link and send it to their colleagues in the hope that it will impress them. Of course, it infuriates the recipients who wish it was their columns being sent.
With my assumptions about the media being thoroughly confirmed, I want to move on the Malcolm Turnbull and in particular, his role in replacing Tony Abbott after Abbott election victory in 2013. It is not lost on me that Pyne is an unreliable narrator but he is forthright enough with anything he considers uncontroversial that he can be believed. He describes Malcolm Turnbull early in the book when the Coalition was reorganising after the 2007 election loss to Kevin Rudd:
I worked for Turnbull but I was also working on my own numbers. Turnbull tends to do his own work. He likes to know everything about the battlefield and control as much of it as he can. The conservatives backed Nelson. The moderates backed Turnbull. When the vote was held in the same meeting and place on 29 November, Nelson attracted forty-five votes, Turnbull forty-two. It was close. It was reported that Turnbull went to see Nelson directly afterwards to tell him that his rousing speech following his win was anything but. A few weeks later it was reported that he called Nelson’s chief of staff, Peter Hendy (the future Member for Eden-Monaro), to tell him Nelson wasn’t up to the job and should give it up. It’s true. He did. It wasn’t a very auspicious start to their relationship. But Turnbull was in politics to lead.
Pyne’s own words state things plainly: Turnbull was in politics to lead. This is important to keep in mind because the events leading up to and after Turnbull replacing Abbott in the party make him out to be someone who just stepped up when needed and not someone actively trying to undermine Abbott from the beginning.
When Turnbull took over from Brendan Nelson, Pyne give an absurd defence for his decision to support Turnbull:
Nelson is a thoroughly decent individual. He and I attended the same school. He too is Jesuit trained. Before he was a member for Bradfield he had been president of the Australian Medical Association. My hesitation in voting for him was born out of the fact that he was a member of the Labor Party in Tasmania for twenty years.
This reasoning makes no sense given Turnbull himself was hardly a life-long supporter of the Liberal Party and seems to have only chosen that party as the more expedient for advancing his own personal ambitions. I don’t actually disagree that Nelson needed to be replaced. As Pyne stated, he was not ever likely to have had appeal enough to have become prime minister.
During this time, the lie known as “climate change” was being pushed and Labor was pushing the ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme) which was nothing but a spurious new tax. Pyne as a moderate belittles those who were against it:
For reasons best known to them, a cohort of the Coalition … chose to first fight the idea that the climate was warming and then fight the idea that the human race might have anything to do with it.
…
Meanwhile, advocates for marriage equality reheated the debate now that the Howard government was gone.
And there is “marriage equality” again which will come up again and again. What is important is the cohort he belittles was actually representing the Coalition’s base which both Pyne and Turnbull opposed:
Turnbull’s view was clear: he wanted action on climate change and he was for marriage equality. Abbot was less clear: he was against marriage equality but was a self-described ‘weathervane’ on the ETS, sometimes he was for government intervention, other times he was against it.
Abbott would have done better to have been more consistent but his election win in 2013 owed a lot of his opposition to Gillard’s “carbon tax” no matter what Pyne and Turnbull might claim. This 2013 win was also the most significant since John Howard’s in 2004 and was not repeated by Turnbull or Morrison. Pyne continues:
… while it’s hard to imagine now, there were real climate change deniers in the Coalition, some in very senior positions. They didn’t just dispute the anthropogenic effects, they argued that even if the climate were changing, it had nothing to do with humans.
They were right and in line with their base as once again, Abbott’s victory showed. This is despite him being unelectable according to the dogma of what Pyne calls the ‘Canberra bubble’ which he describes in the last pages of the book as:
… the collection of politicians, staffers, lobbyists, journalists and public servants who are convinced the rest of the nation is focused on them. In fact, the vast majority of Australians are trying to avoid them at all costs.
Referring back to what I quoted earlier, Pyne by his own words, knows the Canberra bubble are only ever reliably wrong but goes along with them more readily than the base in his own party. He actually shows open contempt for them:
Amanda Vanstone introduced me to her mythical characters Bob and Nancy Stringbag. Almost every time I had to make a choice from options available to the party or the government, I would ask myself, ‘What would Bob and Nancy think about that?’
…
They see themselves as fair-minded and take their time to come around to change, but they got there on marriage equality and probably will on a republic when the current monarch is no longer on the throne.
Vanstone is the obese former senator from South Australia and fellow “moderate” who also wrote the foreword to the book. I expect they would both claim that this is the way they show an understanding for “real” Australians but in reality, it just shows they don’t think much of them at all. These Australians (which would include me), have to “come around” to the “right” opinions. That issues like climate change and homosexual monogamy require relentless propaganda where those not in agreement are shamed or ridiculed as indeed Pyne does in the book, is not given consideration.
Next, Pyne shares a fairly solid explanation of Rudd’s political fall which is close to something Abbott said in his own book which was published before Rudd received his political shiv from Gillard:
It was obvious that his colleagues loathed him, his government was leaky and dysfunctional. But if you asked Rudd, he would tell you that he was the greatest prime minister in history. Amazingly, he didn’t see his denouement coming. Even when Gillard was in his office while her henchmen were gathering the numbers against him, he was convinced he had her measure and had come to an agreement for there to be no challenge. His loyal supporter, Anthony Albanese, the Leader of the House and Minister for Infrastructure, had to barge in and blurt out in front of Gillard, ‘While you’re sitting in here wasting time, her people are doing the numbers to get rid of you!’ Rudd apparently told Albanese that it was all sorted out and not to worry. The facts tell a different story. Rudd was gone the next day.
Of further interest in the quote above is the loyalty shown by Albanese and with the hindsight that such loyalty was rewarded. I don’t dislike Albanese personally (I don’t even know him), but I am hostile to almost all his political beliefs. Nonetheless, I would rather Labor keeps getting re-elected than have a weakling like Pyne or Turnbull as prime minister. I would certainly prefer him to a clown like “Sussan” Ley who actually had an ‘s’ added to her first name because of numerology. Albanese at the very least, fits the mould of Labor leader better than any since Kim Beazley and I’m not surprised he has been successful. I recall also around this time that he was one of the few on that side willing to face Andrew Bolt on his television show which probably helped him win over more support long-term.
This section of the book was leading up to the hung parliament in 2010 where two former nationals turned on their own electorates to keep Gillard in government:
A period of intense negotiations with the crossbench ensued, lasting over fifteen days. I was part of those negotiations every day, but it was clear quite quickly that neither Windsor nor Oakeshott was tacking towards the Coalition. We held a shadow cabinet meeting in the Leader of the Opposition’s dining room in Parliament House and brainstormed everything we could offer them, as well as Wilkie and Katter, by way of policy or projects that might gain their support.
…
The truth was that none of us had expected to do as well as we had, with the possible exception of Abbott. He always had such self-belief — he didn’t sleep the last two nights of the campaign — he didn’t sleep for the last two nights of the campaign — he could be found on the Friday morning at the Sydney Fish Market in the early hours still shaking hands with voters and trying to convince them to give us a go!
Here is more evidence of the perils of believing the media narrative. Abbott was “unelectable” and “had a woman problem” so was never going to win. Both Pyne and Turnbull probably expected Abbott to lose convincingly enough that he could be replaced by Turnbull before the next election. That he all but won wrecked their plans as they couldn’t plausibly replace him after almost bringing down a first term government. This is especially important to keep in mind given how poorly Turnbull did the only time he faced the national electorate as leader of the party.
After Gillard’s survival, Pyne goes into some of the further happenings including his coverage of her “misogyny” speech. I had long suspected this was completely rehearsed and Pyne confirms this:
The day [Peter] Slipper resigned, Gillard faced a parliamentary debate led by Abbott on the subject of her failure to act sooner following the publication of the text messages. It was in this debate that she gave her famous speech on misogyny. It was an impassioned speech from a cornered politician. As a speech it was well delivered and well constructed, with plenty of memorable lines. It was personally vindictive and aimed squarely at taking Abbott down. It was widely reported around the world and well received by feminists. Its flaw was the context in which it was delivered — it was in defence of the government’s inaction, for base political reasons, on the controversies surrounding Slipper. For that reason, it was not universally praised in the Australian media.
Gillard’s office pushed the speech hard in social media. It was viewed millions of times and received astronomical number of likes. As with many things in this period, the Gillard office overplayed their hand. They claimed it was the moment their fortunes would change. They bragged about how clever they had been and even revealed that far from being a spontaneous piece of oratory, such a speech had been planned for some time. As a consequence, its effect was undermined. Yet again, the Gillard operation hurt their own cause.
Notice Pyne thinks “the context in which it was delivered” is the only flaw and doesn’t have any problem with the message or it being ridiculous political theatre from its very conception? He also doesn’t have a problem with the implications of a large segment of the media helping to push it on behalf of the government.
A little further on, Pyne shows further contempt for the Coalition’s base on both immigration and Gillard’s broken promise on the carbon tax:
[Abbott] was egged on by colleagues from the National Party and the Liberal right wing. Some colleagues though it important to let these angry Australians know that we were on their side. My view was that we had them anyway — they were hardly going to vote Labor or Greens — and if they voted One Nation, almost all of them would come back to us as their second preference. Pandering to the baser elements of the political activists might offend the centre right and centre left votes whom we needed to attract, particularly in the populous capital cities. Of course, we pledged to abolish the impost if we formed a government. And we did.
This is a strong argument against preferential voting and the most recent election has arguably demonstrated that Pyne is wrong to assume they’ll always get preferences from crazies like me. Also note that they brought back what they promised to abolish with a different name just a few years later with the full support of Pyne and the “moderates”.
Here are Pyne comments on the damage Gillard’s leadership challenge:
Labor’s bloodletting and their chaotic nature since the coup that replaced Rudd in 2010 had seen on near election loss, the first minority government since 1940, the first non-government Speaker since 1909, a challenge to the prime minister by the Foreign Minister and then a successful political coup in June 2013. All in just three short years.
Meanwhile, on our side of the aisle, we had remarkably kept a lid on internal disquiet and maintained the same leadership group. It hadn’t all been plain sailing, however. The seeds of Abbott’s later difficulties with the issue of marriage equality were sown in this parliament. The broader issue had bubbled away in Australia ever since the Howard government had passed a bill to declare that marriage could only be defined as being between a man and a woman. Since 2007, many countries had recognised same-sex marriages as legal constructions. The debate had vexed the Labor Party for some time and in the Coalition, while it was a burr under the saddle, it had not yet become the major open sore that it did in the Abbott government.
There is a lot to unpack in the above. His witnessing what happened to the opposition and then being part of the faction that did almost exactly the same thing is one. And once again his enthusiasm for normalising sodomy while claiming to be a Catholic. For a married man with four children, Pyne shows a curious interest in formalised sodomy. John Howard was a popular prime minister and was not only against “gay marriage” but was re-elected multiple times while holding that position. Shouldn’t this mean the public had already spoken on the issue? The truth is, people value leaders and not followers and allowing Abbott to stand on the issue was all they needed to do. Finally this is once again, people like Pyne putting the opinions of those in the political and media class ahead of their own voters.
With all this, here is the reality of the 2013 election with the “unelectable” Abbott in Pyne’s own words:
At the election on 7 September 2013, the Coalition achieved a two-party preferred swing to it of 3.65 per cent. Labor’s primary vote was 33.38 per cent, its lowest in a hundred years. The overall two-party-preferred vote was Coalition 53.45 per cent to Labor’s 46.55 per cent. The Coalition held ninety seats to Labor’s fifty-five, with the rest held by independents and minor parties. It was a personal triumph for Abbott and Credlin. Most of the credit should go to them. Rudd resigned. Gillard was gone. Abbott was prime minister. Thanks be to God, the horror that was the 43rd Parliament was over.
This is much better than I could have put it and in the twelve years since, the Coaltion has not come close to an election victory like this. Both Turnbull and Morrison performed much worse than this though being preferable to Pyne. His way of coping with this reality is to blame these poor performances on what Abbott did in the few years he actually served. Here we have the first example:
But the Abbott government started with a hiccup. His initial cabinet included only one woman: the deputy leader Julie Bishop. The cabinet was twenty-one ministers — twenty men and one woman. In response to criticism, Abbot said the cabinet was appointed strictly on merit. While a fair response, it’s almost never true. Many factors are weighed — state balances; ideological balance; the numbers to ensure the leader is never rolled; experience versus exuberance; friendships and gender, to name just a few. Quite apart from offending all the other women in the liberal party room, it simply led to a barrage of stories and columns comparing those men inside the cabinet with the talented women outside it.
I find discussing left/right politics tiresome but this is exactly why most politicians that are nominally on the right are so useless. It is because they accept nonsense like this as a problem that means they feel cabinets must now include more women to make it look good for the media. What Abbott should have done in response is removed Bishop from the cabinet. It seems to me that Australia was a much better place when most people in leadership were male. If it worked for most of history, why is it a problem now? You simply refuse to accept the premise and the electorate will follow. Thanks to weaklings like Pyne, they’re stuck with “Sussan” who short of the Labor party self-sabotaging in a particularly spectacular way — will never win an election.
Pyne remains generally negative about Abbott throughout the narrative of this period but has some difficulty detailing actual problems with his prime ministership. The worst thing Pyne could claim about Abbott after pointing out he had abolished the carbon tax and secured the borders from illegal immigration among other things the public had voted for was Abbott making Prince Phillip a Knight in the order of Australia on Australia Day in 2015. I remember this at the time and being a little surprised but I didn’t think it was a big deal either way. Pyne however tells the reader:
I was in shock. I realised what should have been a great day of national celebration had been turned to custard. Most people I spoke to that day who could bring themselves to raise it regarded the issue as a joke. People were scathing of Abbott. I also realised that every other one of my colleagues was experiencing the same same hideous reaction.
So not rorting, union corruption or anything that had been brought against both Rudd and Gillard. It was just a questionable pick for Australia Day honours which considering the kinds of people that have received the gong previously — is a long-term problem. I also have to question whether Pyne was really so unaware of who Abbott had picked. I would guess that the cabinet at least was aware and so chose not to interrupt their enemy making a mistake. Turnbull at least, was certainly sly enough to know what his friends in the media would make of it. I’d love to ask Abbott the truth about the above as I expect it would differ from Pyne’s account in important ways. What is most relevant here though is that it was this and not anything else that brought Abbott’s leadership into question. What should have been at most a storm in a teacup was used as an opportunity to remove him by people within his own party:
Talk of leadership change, fuelled by Abbott’s opponents in the party room and feverishly reported by the media, began apace after the Australia Day fiasco.
And naturally, opinion polls don’t matter unless they’re useful and then weren’t when the boot was on the other foot:
Early in February, a Fairfax/Ipsos poll showed Abbott’s approval rating was 29 per cent and his disapproval stood at 67 per cent. In the preferred prime minister test, Shorten led Abbott fifty to thirty-four. The real problem for Abbott was that his colleagues knew in their water how unpopular Shorten was among the voters; for him to be besting Abbott was a dire situation.
All I can say, is I doubt this would have followed through to the election if Abbott was allowed to fight it and more importantly, had the whole support of his party. Despite Pyne trying to portray himself as outside all of this, it was in this sense at least that he was an insider. There are further examples that follow that make this all the clearer. When the first leadership spill happened Pyne claims:
Turnbull had stayed out of the ballot. He had not at any point indicated that he would be a challenger or that he would be available should the spill be successful.
There is no way this is true. Turnbull may prefer the narrative where he was the man for the hour that could step in and fix all the problems that Abbott had made. It is obvious he sought to undermine Abbott from the very beginning and continued to undermine the party when he was removed just a few years later after a series of bad polls and a near election loss. Pure cope, as the kids say.
The spill failed and Pyne tells us:
The main change in Abbott was a shift to the right. He hardened up. He appeared to believe that one of the reasons the rebels had emanated from the conservative side of the party was because he was too generous to the moderates. This had its most public manifestation in his approach to the issue of marriage equality. During 2015, even that bastion of Catholicism the Republic of Ireland had held a referendum in which 62 per cent of voters had supported marriage equality.
Reading between the lines, it is obvious that the moderate Liberals were a much bigger problem for Abbott than anything else. And we have yet another mention of ceremonial sodomy. Pyne should know that the Republic of Ireland’s support for it only confirms it was then no longer the bastion of Catholicism it once was and nothing more.
As we know, Turnbull did pull a “Gillard” on Abbott with full knowledge of what happened to the opposition. Pyne needs to reframe the very same treacherous act as something inevitable before arriving at it in the narrative:
The Abbott brigade now blame Turnbull for months of undermining, leaking and counting of numbers. That’s not what I saw. The Abbott urgers were largely responsible for their own demise. I didn’t see any great evidence of Turnbull actively campaigning for the leadership. Sure, everyone knew he wanted to be leader again. He wasn’t going to have to be asked twice. But he wasn’t soliciting commitments.
Would Gillard and the people backing her have claimed anything so different? Notice here that Pyne has separated himself and the moderate wing of the party from the group that had actually won the election. He also contradicts what he said about Turnbull just a little bit earlier. Turnbull apparently never indicated he wanted to be leader again but but everyone still knew he did. Right. At best, Turnbull knew his name would be put forward by the moderates and so didn’t need to say anything publicly.
After Turnbull announced his leadership challenge mostly based on polling (though he had never polled well himself), Pyne claims:
I locked the door of my private office. I neither lobbied nor was lobbied. It was depressing and troubling that the government was repeating the cycle created by the Rudd-Gillard challenge in early 2013 and its repeated in mid-2013. I wanted no part in it.
The above makes no sense with what he states just a little earlier about Abbott and his supporters bringing it on themselves. I don’t believe Pyne wasn’t involved in all of this given how much obvious disdain he has for the party’s right as well as its base. And if he really thought all this internal discord was so awful, he certainly had enough influence at this point in his career to have done something about it. It is more likely he wanted to protect his position in the cabinet whatever was to come of it all.
As Pyne himself states at two points in the book, “discretion is the better part of valour”. This actually fits with his behaviour here (and not elsewhere), in rationalising his cowardice. The source of this often misused quote by Australian politicians is the character Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV who in context, is doing precisely the same thing.
After Turnbull unseated Abbott by fifty-four to forty-four votes Pyne shares one of the very few “insider” takes though even this might have been reported at the time:
Short speeches were given by the victors and the vanquished. It was unhappy meeting but the memorable moments of that night were not yet over. While I meediaely departed and left for Deakin, the Abbot office threw a wild party that made the news. A marble table was broken and my colleague, Member for Mayo Jamie Briggs, was crash-tackled and had the cartilage in his knee damaged. Worse, as Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull were traversing the corridor outside the ministerial wing, an Abbott staffer yelled out, ‘You’re a c★★★, Malcolm!’
Although I don’t much appreciate the language, I can hardly blame the staffer here given what Turnbull had just done. He certainly deserved worse. Pyne surely only reports this because he imagines it shows how awful Abbott’s people are and thus justifies all the treachery just a few years after a massive election win. This is also shows another contradiction within as Pyne later recounts an episode where he said, “See you next Tuesday” to a Labor politician on national television. For those that don’t know, this is a euphemism for what the staffer called Malcolm. Only Pyne makes a big deal about this one, wondering within his prose whether a child would read this when most would know exactly what the three letters he cuts out above are.
Immediately after Turnbull’s political backstabbing, Pyne writes:
The press gallery detested Abbott and were glad to see him gone. Commentators from the centre left wrote of a future Turnbull government stretching into the 2020s. Many couldn’t see what Labor would do to answer the attraction of a Liberal prime minister from the centre of the political spectrum. John Warhurst in The Canberra Times wrote, ‘The aura surrounding Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull has been almost Kennedy-esque and Australia has been painted a s modern-day Camelot. The honeymoon … has been almost overwhelming.’
Pyne wrote this years later and has given a string of further examples of the press gallery’s laughably incorrect assessment of Turnbull. As I’ll come to shortly, it was a delusion to believe Malcolm Turnbull would ever have made a good prime minister. He had no popular support in the Coalition and only had any prominence because he was considered the “least worst” by journalists and the chattering class. I could have told anyone that at least as far back as 2007 when he was became a contender for leader while in opposition. Yet, enough within the Liberal party believed the nonsense above to remove a successful leader.
Here is also another unsubtle insult to a large section that favours the Liberal party:
[Turnbull] represented Wentworth, a sophisticated, educated and affluent electorate whose voters regarded the three-word slogan as beneath contempt. That’s the sort of voter Turnbull had to deal with, not the single mum pushing her trolley around the supermarket in Ipswich with three bubs in tow. She couldn’t care less about the intricacies of what a negative interest rate means for the world economy. She just wanted to know that when she went through the checkout her card wasn’t going to be declined!
This example woman would almost certainly vote Labor and live within the electorate of Blair which has been held by the Labor party since 2007. And the kind of voters Turnbull attracts don’t represent enough of the country to matter. And even in Wentworth, a politician like Turnbull struggles to hold on as will be seen shortly.
Turnbull’s election turned out about as good as could be hoped:
Election day was carnage and the Coalition lost a net fourteen seats. Neither Turnbull nor Shorten could claim victory. It took a week for the government to re-form with the support of crossbenchers Bob Katter in Kennedy, Cathy McGowan in Indie and Andrew Wilkie in Denison. Once all the votes had been counted, the Coalition had won seventy-six seats. A bare majority in a 150-seat House. It was the closest election win for an incumbent government since Menzies was re-elected in 1961. But we had won.
By as good as could be hopped, I mean her retained power. This result alone puts a lie to everything claimed about Abbott. Despite polling a few years earlier, I very much doubt he would have done worse than Turnbull — especially if he had the full support of his party that he should have. One of the few compliments Pyne pays to Abbott is just how good at campaigning he was and Turnbull frankly, would never have become prime minister had Abbott not won the election for him. Given he went for a double dissolution and judging by Turnbull’s ego, he probably saw himself controlling both houses at the end. Yet I could have more accurately predicted this and I’m almost nowhere near politics. This was no more a win than Gillard’s “win” was and had he not faced Bill Shorten, he could well of lost. Pyne realising all this while reporting it, offers a laughable cope:
Would we have done better under Abbott? I doubt it. In fact, I think we would have lost.
I think both Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott would have been comfortably returned, though likely with a reduced majority had they been able to face the people before the end of their first terms. I also think most Australians would agree with this than what Pyne claims above.
Remembering how many times Pyne has claimed to not be part of any malicious factions within the party, he does reveal late in the book that he was indeed part of one:
The name ‘Black Hand’ is very much said with tongue firmly planted in one’s cheek. It was a dinner party group that started meeting at a restaurant in Hindley Street, Adelaide during the first iteration of John Howard as leader of the Liberal Party. The first conspirators were the moderate Liberals in the federal party who felt somewhat persecuted by the Howard camp.
He tries to massage this by pretending it is just a fun group of like-minded people which quite obviously isn’t the case as he reveals soon after in the speech he made at the above dinner which was leaked to Andrew Bolt:
I referred to two things that seemed the gravamen of the issue. First, I said that the moderates could fairly be described as being in ‘the winner’s circle’ (a hors racing reference). Second, I suggested that marriage equality (something many in the room had been arguing in favour of for years), might not be ‘as far away as some people might think’.
How they could claim to be in ‘the winner’s circle’ after very nearly losing is interesting. Also, a reminder that when detailing the removal of Tony Abbott, that he had wanted no part in it. This could be an example of how liars have trouble keeping anything they say consistent — apparently even when it is written down and overseen by at least one editor. Then there is yet another reference to homo matrimony and I promise you I have not included every mention of it. As Bolt would have noticed, now that Abbott was gone, Turnbull and the moderates could focus on issues nobody voted for. Turnbull did this through a plebiscite that was successful as decades of propaganda had eroded public opposition to it. This was largely through methods of shame and ridicule and is becoming increasingly punitive. I will note that no Australian government has offered a similar plebiscite on restricting immigration for example. They well know what the result would be.
There isn’t much more to say on Turnbull’s failed prime ministership when it was his turn to be rolled. It seems the great Australian Camelot promised by the razor-sharp analysis of those brilliant minds in the press gallery ended with little spectacle according to Pyne:
The party meeting broke up with little fanfare. No one gave speeches of thanks to Turnbull. Or anyone, for that matter. Everyone wanted to be out of there, including Turnbull.
Unlike with Turnbull, Pyne does acknowledge he pushed for Scott Morrison over Peter Dutton:
I resolved that Morrison should be supported by as many moderates as I could muster. I contacted the other moderate numbers people and hastily convened a meeting in my office.
As Morrison was narrowly but safely re-elected in 2019, this was now safe to admit. I will say that Pyne was certainly right that Dutton was not a good choice for leader as the most recent Federal election has decisively shown. So credit where credit is due here but this is another bit of info I could have shared with them at the time with no insider knowledge of my own.
I will not give Pyne much credit for how soft he is on Malcolm Turnbull’s disgraceful behaviour going out:
At this meeting in Turnbull’s private office, the prime minister also repeated to this moderate leadership group that if the spill motion was successful, he would not contest the leadership and he would resign from parliament. That would entail a by-election his safe seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
…
Turnbull wasn’t going to sit in the House with the very people who had white-anted him for the last three years! He had some pride left
This confirms what I had long assumed about Turnbull’s true character. It is obvious he was trying to tank the government on his way out by doing this. Tony Abbott was expected to cop what Turnbull did to him and although it is implied, there is zero evidence presented of Abbott doing anything to undermine Turnbull’s prime ministership.
It actually gets worse when we are told:
[Wentworth] is home to the highest concentration of Australians of Jewish faith.
And David Sharma (who is Jewish) stood for the bi-election in Wentworth to replace Turnbull but he would do nothing to help:
The Liberal party wanted a letter from Turnbull urging a vote for Sharma that could be sent to every elector. Morrison asked him. I asked him. Julie Bishop asked him. I imagine countless others did too. He chose not to provide a letter. His view was that writing to the electors of Wentworth asking them to vote for his successor would simply remind them of the coup that had ousted him from office. He should have written it. Sharma lost by 1850 votes. If 926 votes had changed, he would have won.
Oy vey, how petty!
Pyne’s political career ended after the 2019 election and as they were still in government when the book was published, it was something of a triumphant way to end. He offers a reason for Scott Morrison’s success:
It’s the sense among religious Australians — whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or others — that the Labor Party doesn’t represent them. Many people on the left of the political spectrum are not religious. Some are even hostile to religion.
Here Pyne is close to understanding but has still fallen short. He feels the need to list other religions and not just Christianity as if they have any significance in Australia’s short history. How many Muslims actually vote for the Coalition? Even the miniscule (but somehow still important), Jewish vote would only get the most hardcore Zionists voting for the Liberals because they’re more hawkish on defending Israel. Immigrants by and large vote for the party that will bring more of their own people in and whom they can derive the most economic benefits from. That is usually the Labor Party if not one more extreme that will still send preferences Labor’s way. What is made all the more clear from this is that no party really supports Australians and especially not the dwindling numbers of Christians.
Pyne’s final attack on Tony Abbott if only to leave no doubt of the disdain he held for the most successful leader since John Howard:
Unsurprisingly, Tony Abbott lost his seat of Warringah to former Olympic skier and independent, Zali Steggall. Abbott had been sailing close to the wind for quite some time by expressing deeply held opinions on subjects that sometimes placed him at odd with the majority of his constituents. For example, most voters in Warringah had voted in favour of marriage equality in the 2017 plebiscite ad also yes to a republic in the 1999 referendum. Abbott’s views diverged diametrically from those of voters in his seat on both issues.
This could have just as easily been written by someone in the Labor Party. I detect some resentment towards Abbott given he entered politics shortly after Pyne and was elevated to the cabinet much faster than Pyne and though only for a short time, made it all the way to the top. Pyne admits within the pages that he had the same ambition. This poodle can by quite catty.
There are some additional comments I want to add about the work in general. I haven’t quote much of it above but there is constant hyperbole throughout as well as simplistic comparisons with television shows, films including a few based on books or plays I’m certain he’s never read. As well as this are the constant violent metaphors such as backstabbing and bloodbath and references to famous historical events like the Battle of Waterloo and the War of the Roses. The violent metaphors are so frequent that I’ve found it hard to avoid using them myself. To be fair, this is also often the way both print and television media describe these events but I don’t understand why they can’t think of anything better. Like the majority of politicians, Christopher Pyne isn’t a warrior — he’s a twerp in suit.
All of the above as well as the contents of the book tell me that this man not only isn’t very sophisticated but that he doesn’t really stand for or really believe much at all. As I’ve shown ad nauseam, the only issue he is enthusiastic about is gay marriage. Even in his chapter length coverage of his time in defence, he shows more enthusiasm for the things he got to do, the people he got to meet and the places he travelled. This is the major difference with what is written in both Cory Bernardi’s The Conservative Revolution and Tony Abbott’s Battlelines. For all the criticism I had of those books, they did at least have genuine beliefs and a desire to serve their nation as politicians.
I have had little faith in Australia’s political system for well over a decade for a number of reasons. The only other point of praise I have is for Pyne’s self-serving but candid demonstration that I am quite right to feel this way.