Correspondent's Notebook

Turbulent time for Turnbull

27 November 2009

Radio Australia’s Linda Mottram takes a look at a week where political brinkmanship over climate change triggered political drama in the Australian opposition Liberal Party. 

It threw them this week into a state of revolution indeed with front-benchers resigning in numbers, would-be alternative leaders declaring their intentions and the embattled leader, Malcolm Turnbull, holding out, insisting any modern party without a policy on climate change would be annihilated at the polls.

Mr Turnbull is a former barrister and merchant banker. He’s always been a very public figure and his achievements are not inconsiderable. He also previously led the Australian Republican Movement, during a failed referendum on the issue ten years ago.

That modern view of what Australia should be was among the reasons that for years there was speculation that once Mr Turnbull chose, inevitably, to enter politics, it would be on the Labor side where the republican view is strongest. His business instincts though eventually took him to the Liberal party, and fourteen months ago to its leadership.

But while his equally modern and pragmatic view on climate change could be a thing to help take the party forward, the issue and his handling of it may be his undoing.

The wider context of course is that after long years in government, the Liberals have been in that place of great uncertainty for political parties: a place where the landscape has changed so dramatically that none of the familiar landmarks remain and where players with ambition — and some just with a mind to cause trouble — flex their muscle in the battle to define a new direction or to salvage an old one.

For the Liberals, and their rural based National Party coalition partner, this is an especially sharp divide. The National Party has led a very vocal anti-climate change campaign. And in a surprise development at a joint meeting of the parties earlier this week, it transpired that some key Liberals were with them. On that occasion, Mr Turnbull carried the day but only amid claims he’d misrepresented the outcome of the meeting, further fuelling the very dissent he’d been trying to quell.

The new landscape of climate change was forced on the Liberals and Nationals. John Howard had lately in his Prime Ministership begun to acknowledge it. But it was the election of the Rudd government two years ago, on a pledge to act on the issue that put it into political play. And there’s been one key complication: the Senate, where the government doesn’t have enough of its own party members to pass any legislation. It is always a deal. And on climate change, having lost once in the Senate, the government decided against the Greens and independents, and turned instead to the Liberals and Malcolm Turnbull delivered up Liberal party agreement to good faith negotiations.

They took five long weeks. But earlier this week, the agreement was unveiled. The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, amended after give and take on both sides, would pass the Senate this week. Kevin Rudd would have in his hand in time for Copenhagen Australian laws setting up a carbon trading scheme and mandating national carbon pollution cut targets.

But that too appeared to unravel, when the Liberal internal chaos saw even those in the party who support the legislation saying they wouldn’t pass it amid the turmoil over who would be their leader.

At week’s end, it looked grim for Mr Turnbull, though he’s not one to walk away from a fight. But there was one more potential implication too.

Legislation rejected twice by the Senate can become a trigger for an Australian government to call an early election. Amid continuing uncertainty about the fate of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a race to the polls hovers as a possibility where Mr Turnbull could be proved right about political parties with a do nothing policy on climate change. If so, the doubters, the sceptics, the Turnbull haters may find they’ve sacrificed a leader, and gone nowhere in the bid to find a way out of that place with no landmarks.