Anyone remember Ian Campbell?
Campbell was a senator from Western Australia and an up-and-coming minister in the Howard government. He was made Human Services minister in early 2007, when the Coalition was desperately searching for angles of attack on an unstoppable Kevin Rudd.
Then John Howard thought he’d found the perfect weapon to derail Kevin ’07: Rudd had met with former WA Labor premier, sometime jail inmate and lobbyist Brian Burke, a man for whom the political adjective “disgraced” seemed to have been coined. The government went all out on Rudd about it, thinking it had a winner. Anyone who met with Burke, Peter Costello thundered in Parliament, was compromised.
Anyone. Compromised. Got that?
Alas, it turned out Campbell had met with Burke too. Burke met a lot of people in WA in the course of his lobbying career. So, Campbell had to go. His period as Human Services minister lasted just a couple of months, his promising career wrecked on the shoals of a failed campaign to politically kill Rudd.
I thought of Campbell recently, when the Coalition, from Scott Morrison down, and much of the press gallery were in confected high dudgeon about Kimberley Kitching, her purported “bullying” at the hands of factional opponents and other female Labor senators, and Anthony Albanese’s supposed failure to deal with it. I wondered if the whole business might blow up on Scott Morrison, Campbell-style.
Well, boom.
NSW right-wing senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, who got knifed in the NSW Coalition Senate ticket preselections on the weekend, let fly at 9.20pm last night, as the government was an hour into its hard budget sell. Fierravanti-Wells’ assessment wasn’t about other senators, or about nameless factional opponents, but about Scott Morrison himself: according to her, he’s a bully with no moral compass, an autocrat, a backstabber, a racist and a fake Christian, who, with “his consigliere, Alex Hawke, have deliberately contrived a crisis in New South Wales”.
Morrison and Hawke have emerged as victors in that crisis, created by Hawke refusing to allow preselections to proceed out of fear he will lose his own seat. As a result, the federal party has intervened, and Morrison, along with NSW premier Dominic Perrottet and their nominees, will dictate preselections.
Meantime, Liberals in seats like crucial electorates like Eden-Monaro, Parramatta and North Sydney are still waiting for candidates.
Fierravanti-Wells goes further than Morrison in her critique. She takes aim at her factional enemies in the NSW Liberals, the moderates led by Matt Kean, as well as Perrottet. Morrison and Hawke’s people did a deal with both Perrottet and the moderates to oust her, she says, because they couldn’t do it legitimately.
In Fierravanti’s aggrieved telling, “there is a putrid stench of corruption emanating from the New South Wales Division of the Liberal Party… the fish stinks from the head. Morrison and Hawke have ruined the Liberal Party in New South Wales by trampling its constitution”.
A comparison with the Victorian Labor Party, another major party branch riddled with corruption, misconduct, misuse of public resources and factional and subfactional warfare, may seem apt, particularly given the lies invented about Kitching’s treatment. But the NSW Liberal Party crisis is less about a fundamentally corrupt branch than a branch where the prime minister has engrossed himself in factional warfare to help his own minions, generating a crisis that has left the branch deeply divided and without candidates in key seats just days from the calling of the election. This is a mess peculiarly of Morrison’s making, and Hawke’s.
A lot like how the Burke business in 2007 was a mess created by Howard and Costello.
Meantime, there’s a fascinating test for the press gallery ahead. The gallery has worked hard to churn out more than 370 articles about Kimberley Kitching since her tragic passing — or about 19 a day. On that basis, we should be swimming in a sea of tens of thousands of words about Fierravanti-Wells and Morrison for weeks to come — her revelations about how Morrison and his cronies engineered the overturning of Michael Towke’s preselection in Cook, his alleged racist views about Towke’s background, the briefing of journalists (later the basis for successful law suits by Towke) using material supplied, Fierravanti-Wells says, by Labor’s Sam Dasytari, and the whole saga of Morrison’s attempts to halt rank-and-file preselections in the NSW Liberal Party.
Plenty of material to work with there, you’d think.
