Radio Australia Today Editorial

November 27, 2009. The day the Liberals Implode

27 November 2009

I have written that being in Opposition in Australia is a nightmare. You have no power and even less to do.

Party unity is a rarity and leadership plotting is a pastime.

After he avoided a leadership challenge on Wednesday the Opposition leader here in Australia, Malcolm Turnbull had every right to think that his leadership was safe for a week at least.

Try twenty-four hours. For that was how long it took for his opponents in the party to start defecting from him. And when Liberals defect they do it very loudly. There they are all over the media this morning, almost gleefully telling the world why, regretfully, they can’t support the leader, even though they lost a party room vote to oust him.

All this is may be unedifying to casual onlookers, but there is a very serious side to it too.

That serious side is global warming. The future of Australia’s Emissions Trading Scheme rests on Malcolm Turnbull’s survival as leader.

The government is putting pressure on Turnbull too. It has specified that it wants the emissions laws to be passed by 3.45 today.

It probably won’t happen then, and if it does happen, few politicians will celebrate. Secretly the government would probably being in mixed emotions. A failure to pass the bill will give it the legal and moral right to call an early election, and that’s an election that even Malcolm Turnbull acknowledged this morning would decimate his party. The government would mostly likely become dominant in the parliament and the Opposition destroyed.

Stay tuned. The next three days will be the most extraordinary in the Australian parliament ever since the sacking of the Whitlam government in 1975.

- Phil Kafcaloudes