Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal party feels a dread chill – The Australian Financial Review

It's not just a penchant for larrikin humour that explains former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett's comment that he's so disillusioned by the Liberal Party under Malcolm Turnbull he wants to drink whisky before 9 am.

A creeping chill threatens to paralyse a Party already in crisis. According to one Liberal insider, the position is "unsustainable."

What he means is that a Liberal Party led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is so riven by attacks from Turnbull's predecessor, Tony Abbott, and Turnbull's flat-lining in the polls, there will be a major eruption by Christmas.

If this scenario is born out, the "never again" mantra about another change in the Liberal Party leadership will metastasise into "here we go again."

There are no current plans to topple Turnbull, but plenty of "hypothetical" discussions. Two names that crop up are long-time Party deputy and Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, as leader, and Health Minister, and Victorian MP, Greg Hunt, as Bishop's deputy.

Neither have expressed interest privately or publicly in such a scenario. So at this stage it is no more than talk.

Moreover, Party insiders acknowledge any significant improvement in Turnbull's opinion poll standing over coming months would result in leadership spill talk disappearing as quickly as a Scotch down a thirsty gullet.

But these conversations re-surfaced among Liberal MPs and Party supporters after Malcolm Turnbull's recent London speech. This sparked internal unrest because it included a shaman-like invoking of the name of the Party's founder, Sir Robert Menzies, to support Turnbull's position as a centrist.

The unrest is likely to become pointed during a special NSW Liberal Party "Futures Convention" to be held in Rosehill, Sydney, from July 21-23. It will debate a right wing push to "democratise" pre-selections. This originated in the electorate held by the man Turnbull bulldozed out of the prime ministership Tony Abbott.

The Warringah motion calls for pre-selections in "open" federal and state seats that is, electorates without a sitting Liberal MP, or where he/she is retiring to be done with full plebiscites of Party members.

Through its proximity to Mr Abbott, this push has been identified as a key element in the destabilising proxy war between Abbott and Turnbull. The complication is that Turnbull has also backed the reform bandwagon, with the significant caveat that he will not, in the end, necessarily back the motion from Abbott's Warringah Federal Electorate Council (FEC).

A more likely prospect is a series of 20 motions which in effect support plebiscites, but where respective Federal Electorate Councils (FEC) set the rules governing the conduct of those plebiscites. These will be put to the special State Council meeting by the successful Fox Valley branch of the NSW Liberal Party which lies in the seat of Berowra, held by a leading NSW Liberal moderate, Julian Leeser.

But even if the Fox Valley approach wins through it will not be a comfortable experience for Malcolm Turnbull who will be addressing the "Futures Convention" next Saturday morning. One interested attendee will be Peter King, the onetime Liberal MP for Wentworth until Turnbull toppled him in the mother of all Liberal Party pre-selection battles in 2003.

Mr King also mouths the mantra of Party reform, and is not re-entering federal politics. He has put his own motion forward for the special NSW Liberal Party Convention, but expects the Warringah motion, or the one identified with Tony Abbott, to win through.

No matter which motion emerges from the NSW Liberal Party "Futures Convention", the paradox is that the catalyst for this latest instability is a speech by Turnbull which, despite the spin by opponents, contained nothing exceptional, surprising, original, or even overtly provocative.

Turnbull pointed out that when Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944, he "went to great pains not to call his new political party ... conservative, but rather the Liberal Party, which he firmly anchored in the centre of Australian politics."

"He wanted to stand apart from the big money, business establishment politics of traditional conservative parties of the right, as well as from the socialist tradition of the Australian Labour Party, the political wing of the union movement," Mr Turnbull said when receiving the Disraeli Prize from the influential conservative London think tank, the Policy Exchange.

"The sensible centre was the place to be. It remains the place to be."

Turnbull's London comments broadly accord with the views reflected in a 70-page report prepared for Menzies in 1944 as a political road-map for his new Liberal Party. It was written by the economic adviser to the powerful Institute of Public Affairs, Charles Kemp, father of David Kemp, Education Minister and Environment Minister in the Howard Liberal government.

Called Looking Forward, Charles Kemp's report was, writes Menzies' biographer Allan Martin, "a businessman's argument about the virtues of free enterprise". It was "not hostile to the state, but demanded agreed lines between when governments should attempt to thrust themselves forward and where they were being intrusive. What was essential, it said, was a kind of middle way."

Seventy-three years after Menzies founded the Liberal Party on the basis of that Institute of Public Affairs report, the current head of the IPA, John Roskam, says the "issue is what is his [Turnbull's] definition of what the progressive centre means." He answers that Turnbull's interpretation of the term "centre" means "bigger government" and an "excuse for higher taxes and bigger regulations."

The Turnbull government's economic policy stance contrasts with "everything he said he was going to do before becoming Prime Minister. He spoke about the evils of the mining tax. Now he is embracing something worse than that and that is the bank tax."

"That's how I see it," says Roskam

Historian Ian Hancock, who has written biographies of former Liberal prime minister John Gorton and former Liberal Attorney General Tom Hughes (father of Lucy Turnbull) points out that while Malcolm Turnbull refers to the terms "liberal" and "conservative" in his speech, "he never defines them. "

"He's like all Libs he's going back to Menzies and treating his statements as some kind of Holy Grail. But Menzies delivered" he was Prime Minister for a record 16 and a half years "because he was a pragmatist, not a philosopher."

"Menzies was never consistent" so "various factions of the Liberal Party can find support in various phrases."

Asked if Menzies would like Turnbull, Hancock replied: "If he was in a good mood he would probably say: 'Good luck to him'. He would probably approve that [Turnbull] is someone with a high background and appears to rise above everybody else."

Turnbull is, like Menzies was, a "loner, with few friends in politics. If Menzies was being honest he would probably have a degree of sympathy with someone who people on the backbench didn't like. That's something that Menzies went through himself," Hancock said.

But there are differences. Menzies was a social conservative; Turnbull is more liberal, and has supported same-sex marriage. Above all, Menzies was a devoted monarchist "I did but see her passing by, but I will love her till I die," he once intoned to Queen Elizabeth in a speech in Canberra.

Malcolm Turnbull is, or was, Australia's Mr Republic.

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Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal party feels a dread chill - The Australian Financial Review