Extract from ABC News
They may have been great mates and Liberal comrades, but Craig Laundy and Luke Howarth were at each other's throats the moment they sat down for dinner.
"As soon as I walked in that night, the first thing Craig said to me is, 'You're not part of this madness, are you?'" recalls Howarth. "And then we're on. It was on."
It was Monday August 20, 2018, and the two Liberal MPs were with other Coalition backbenchers at a Thai restaurant in the swanky Canberra suburb of Kingston. They were supposed to be enjoying a nice meal and a few drinks, like they did every Monday night during parliamentary sitting weeks.
But this was no ordinary Monday. It "really was the start of the week from hell", Laundy says.
Yet again, the federal Liberal Party was about to tear itself apart over the leadership. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull feared a coup was about to be launched by one of his most senior ministers, the Liberal arch-conservative Peter Dutton.
In candid interviews for the ABC political docuseries Nemesis, Liberal MPs, cabinet ministers and the prime minister at the centre of what's been dubbed "the week of madness" have revealed how Malcolm Turnbull was torn down in a feverish and ultimately shambolic coup.
"I'm a master of understatement," Turnbull says. "It wasn't a form of madness; it was utterly unadulterated insanity."
"It unleashed a lot of blood and a lot of really bad behaviour," senator Linda Reynolds says. "It unleashed hell on the party."
"Leadership changes, especially in government, are very deeply traumatising and leave serious scar tissue and many people never get over such a thing," says long-time Liberal cabinet minister Christopher Pyne. "Friendships are broken."
'Hey, we got a problem'
Monday August 20, 2018
At Kingston's Chiang Rai restaurant, the Laundy and Howarth friendship was about to be tested. Laundy was a Turnbull confidante. Howarth was a friend of Dutton and a fellow Queenslander. Their duelling loyalties soon boiled over in front of everyone.
"He's a pretty passionate bloke, Luke, and a damn good marginal seat holder," Laundy says. "His seat's very close to Peter Dutton's and they've become very good mates."
"I basically said, 'Look, Turnbull needs to go and I'll be calling him out tomorrow and asking him to step down,'" Howarth recalls. "'[I'll] tell him that he'd failed his own KPIs, 38 losses in the [opinion] polls.' We will lose if we go to the election under Malcolm Turnbull."
"I kept saying to him, 'Mate, if you think Peter Dutton's the answer, you're asking the wrong question. We have to stick with Malcolm,'" Laundy recalls. "He was saying, 'I'm going to go to the party room tomorrow and I'm going to blow this up.'"
The dinner ended with their friendship intact. But that didn't mean valuable intelligence gleaned over a Thai meal should be wasted. "I of course rang Malcolm upon leaving the dinner and said, 'Hey, we got a problem. And the problem could well be Luke Howarth,'" Laundy says.
Turnbull flushes Dutton out
Tuesday August 21, 2018
Armed with Laundy's latest intelligence, Turnbull woke on Tuesday morning knowing he had to quash any coup before it could be launched. The prime minister, ever the enterprising strategist, decided to spring a trap on the plotters.
"My calculation was that I was better to obviate the need for a spill by simply saying, 'Right, this leadership thing has got to be brought to a head,'" recalls Turnbull, "'I'm declaring the leader's position vacant and I'm renominating. Does anyone want to challenge me?' And that, of course, was designed to flush Dutton out."
Turnbull only confided in a couple of colleagues about his plan – his deputy Julie Bishop and Craig Laundy. "The level of indiscretion was so great there that something like that, you really had to keep very, very close," he says.
About 9am, the Liberal party room met, just as it did every Tuesday during sitting weeks. Other than Bishop and Laundy, no-one had a clue what the prime minister was about to do. Then Turnbull stood up.
"He gave quite an agitated speech," recalls Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson. "He was clearly feeling the pressure … I could tell as soon as he started speaking that something was going to happen."
"And Luke Howarth tried to intervene and Malcolm said, 'No, Luke,'" says Pyne. "And I thought, 'Luke, this is not the day for the interventions in the party room.'"
"And Malcolm at the end of his speech … I distinctly remember him saying, 'And this must stop. This must come to an end and that's why I'll be spilling the leadership of the Liberal Party today,'" Paterson says.
Silenced in his seat by the prime minister, Luke Howarth couldn't believe what was happening. "We were probably in a little bit of shock," Howarth says. "And then he said, 'Anyone who wants to challenge, please stand up now.' And it seemed like a long eight to 10 seconds but eventually Peter Dutton stood up."
"I'm sitting there and I'm looking at Dutts and Tony Abbott whacks him on the knee as if, 'Away you go,'" Laundy says. "And I thought, 'Oh, surely not.' And he stood to his feet and I thought, 'Oh wow.'"
Within a few minutes the ballot papers were distributed, marked, collected and counted. Turnbull's ambush worked. He defeated Dutton 48 votes to 35. To many filing out of the party room, however, it was not a decisive victory but merely a stay of execution.
"Malcolm Turnbull blew himself up," Queensland Liberal Karen Andrews says. "Because at that point, he was fatally wounded. He was never going to recover. It was just a matter of time."
Dutton was beaten but emboldened. Shortly after the ballot, Turnbull met with Dutton and then-finance minister Mathias Cormann in his office.
As Turnbull recalls: "I said to Dutton, 'We should just move on for the sake of the government. You don't have to resign. Stay in the cabinet. But we've got to say, OK, you've had a crack, that's it and we are moving on together.' He wasn't prepared to agree to that. He said he was going to keep going."
'Fanciful … delusional'
Wednesday August 22, 2018
By Wednesday morning, Turnbull believed he had seen off his rival. "The steam was definitely coming out of Dutton's challenge," he says.
But then, at 11:45am, Cormann arrived at the prime minister's office. As finance minister and the leader of the government in the Senate, Cormann was one of the most powerful people in Turnbull's inner circle.
The prime minister trusted Cormann but some senior ministers had warned that his confidence in the conservative powerbroker was misplaced.
"The idea that Mathias Cormann, this leading figure of the right wing of the party, would not support his best friend Peter Dutton was fanciful," says former attorney-general George Brandis. "And for Malcolm to think that their personal relationship and mutual regard would stand in the way of that was delusional."
Standing in the PM's office, Cormann delivered a message Turnbull didn't want to hear.
"He said that Dutton had the numbers and I should step aside and hand over the prime ministership to him," Turnbull says. "I said to him, 'Look, he doesn't have the numbers. I mean, he just had a ballot which he lost.' I said, 'You're asking me to give in to the terrorists?' He said, 'You have to give in to the terrorists.' I said, 'Well, I'm not giving in to the terrorists.'"
In a statement for Nemesis , Cormann denies telling Turnbull that he had "to give into the terrorists".
About an hour later, Turnbull and Cormann were side by side again, flanked by Treasurer Scott Morrison, at a press conference to announce the failure of the government to get company tax cuts through the Senate. Almost every question though was about Turnbull's slippery grasp on the leadership.
"This is my leader and I'm ambitious for him," Morrison said when asked about the turmoil, smiling as he placed his arm around the prime minister. Looking back, Turnbull ponders that moment of apparent loyalty.
"I've seen Scott say so many things that are utterly untrue," he says. "He can look you dead in the eye and say something completely opposite to what he's really thinking."
"I think that moment has been misinterpreted unkindly to the genuine friendship we had."
For Turnbull, another blow to his precarious leadership was about to land. At 4pm, Cormann returned to his office, this time with fellow ministers Mitch Fifield and Michaelia Cash in tow.
"We sat down with him and we said to him, 'We need to bring this to a head. The way that you can do this is if you call a partyroom meeting,'" Cash says. "'If you still believe you have the numbers, you will be successful.'"
Turnbull refused to budge. He wouldn't call the meeting.
"Fifield said nothing. He looked shell-shocked," Turnbull recalls. "Cash sat there sobbing and murmuring 'yes' from time to time as though to endorse what Mathias was saying. It was a pretty miserable trio to be honest."
"We did this in sorrow," Cash says. "But no, no, I was not sobbering (sic) and I'm not sure murmuring either."
With his ministers deserting him, and Dutton doing his best impersonation of The Terminator, Turnbull came up with a drastic plan.
"By the Wednesday evening, you know, one option was to just call an election and let the people sort it out," he says.
"This whole thing was an obscene parody, a travesty of democracy … and the papers were all drawn up and ready to go, and I had an appointment booked to see the governor-general, who I'd obviously been in touch with. And if I'd asked him to dissolve parliament, call an election, he absolutely would've done so. I have no doubt about that."
Turnbull decided to sleep on it.
Mutiny in the 'Monkey Pod'
Thursday August 23, 2018
The snap election plan was binned. The 8am appointment with the governor-general was cancelled.
"We came to the view that this wasn't a good idea," Turnbull says. "As everyone reminded me, I'd have to pay for the election campaign again, and probably have to pay for all of it," he adds, referring to the $1.75 million he chipped in for the 2016 Liberal campaign.
For Turnbull, his survival hinged on one person. He knew that if Cormann publicly defected to Dutton, his chances of holding onto the leadership were probably gone. That morning, Cormann, Cash and Fifield appeared at his office once again. This time they resigned from cabinet.
"On the Thursday it became very, very apparent that he wasn't going to call the partyroom meeting and that the only way that we could actually see a solution was if we formally withdrew our support and went and sat on the backbench," Cash says. "Mitch, Mathias and myself walked outside to the waiting media pack. And I remember so many people had said, 'The three of you looked absolutely devastated.' And we were."
"It was Mathias and Michaelia and Mitch flipping that ended up the tipping point where we lost the numbers," says Turnbull confidante Craig Laundy.
With momentum shifting his way, Dutton called on the prime minister to convene another partyroom meeting. By this time, nearly half of Turnbull's cabinet had quit. Running out of options, the prime minister consulted his loyalists.
"Malcolm said, 'What do we do in this situation? You're the oracle, you've been around longer than anybody else.' Which I had," Christopher Pyne says. "And I said, 'Well, I think they should be required to show that they've got a majority of people who want to have a party room. And if they can get a majority of people in the party room saying that they want another party meeting, well then we should have one.'"
The rebels had to get the necessary signatures: 43 names. Dutton's number-crunchers set up a war room in an unremarkable meeting space inside Parliament House named after a tropical hardwood.
"I believe it was called the Monkey Pod because the wooden table [in the room] was taken from a monkey pod tree," says Dutton supporter Andrew Hastie. "We decided to meet [there] … it was between Peter [Dutton's] room and Christopher Pyne's room."
As Hastie and other Dutton supporters crunched the numbers, on the other side of the wall, the enemy was listening in.
"It did surprise me that the plotters had set up in the room next to one of Malcolm Turnbull's chief supporters, which is me," Pyne says. "The walls between my office and the Monkey Pod room are not very thick … I could hear people in the room next door hooting and hollering and laughing and cursing about this person or that person."
"So literally for most of that period, Pyne had his staff members leaning against the wall … to eavesdrop on the plotting and machinations that were happening on the other side," Turnbull supporter Trent Zimmerman says.
"And it gave him some hope because he basically reported back that there was chaos in there."
Pyne's staff soon discovered that Dutton's lieutenants were relying on some "old tech" to tally up the numbers for his leadership putsch.
"They didn't even have a list of the party room," Pyne says, "and they went out and bought a projector, which I thought had gone out of style years ago, but apparently not. So, they had to go and buy a projector to project the names up on the wall."
Andrew Hastie admits the Monkey Pod operation was "unsophisticated", although the newly purchased projector was useful for tracking who was voting for whom.
"Just to put the numbers up on the wall, get a spreadsheet up and track where people were. It sounds ridiculous but it made sense at the time," Hastie says. "[A projector] is old tech. Yeah, it is old tech … but reliable. Did the job."
As the hours ticked by, Turnbull realised he was losing his grip on power.
"My prospects of keeping the show together were essentially gone when Cormann and Fifield and Cash stepped out," he says. "At that point, it was really difficult to see how we could keep the show together."
So Turnbull shifted focus. If he couldn't hang on, he could at least do everything to ensure Dutton was stopped from taking the leadership.
"I thought the chance of Dutton being prime minister was so terrible," Turnbull says. "I thought Dutton would run off to the right. He would be dog whistling. He'd be going on about Muslims and migrants, and any right-wing, hot-button, red-meat issue he could go for, he would go for. And I thought he would do a lot of damage as prime minister of Australia in a short period. Because once people become prime minister, they're off the leash."
There were only two candidates willing to put their hand up to take Dutton on – the foreign minister and moderate Julie Bishop, and the treasurer Scott Morrison. Both decided it was time to declare their candidacy.
"I knew on the Thursday, about lunchtime, that the campaign to save Malcolm was over," Morrison says. "And at that time, I just said, 'Look, I accept your decision but I've got to get busy.'"
Morrison rushed back to his office to gather his friends and half-dozen supporters together to tell them he was running. "There wasn't much time," he says. "There was about 24 hours and I had my ear to a phone for pretty much all of that time."
Meanwhile, Dutton supporters were stalking the corridors in their quest to get 43 signatures on the petition for a partyroom meeting. Their behaviour upset some of their fellow Liberals.
"There were people who overtly supported Peter Dutton and were taking the petition around and people were blackmailed, they were threatened, they were intimidated to sign the petition. It was appalling," Linda Reynolds says.
"There was no bullying," Andrew Hastie says. "These things are pretty robust. I got some pretty robust phone calls from Malcolm Turnbull, I got to tell you. And you know what? That's part of the game."
"There were pre-selections being threatened," Craig Laundy says. "It was not a nice place to be and it was just the Dutton camp's dogged determination to get to the number on the paper so that they could kill the joint, burn the joint to the ground."
Peter Dutton declined to be interviewed for this series and did not provide responses to written questions.
Thursday ended with the challenger just short of the 43 names he needed. Time was running out.
Was Morrison playing a double game?
Friday August 24, 2018
Friday began how Thursday ended – a desperate quest for the last few names. Dutton's supporters were tantalisingly close. With 42 signatures – one shy of the target – they appealed to a veteran Liberal to get them over the line.
"Initially, they came to me, and I said, 'No, I'm not going to sign it,'" says Queenslander Warren Entsch. "But I said, 'If you get 42 signatures, you come and see me and I'd give you the 43rd, but I won't be anything other than 43.' To their credit, they went out and they came back and I said, 'Show me where there's 42,' and they were able to show me. I said, 'All righty, I will sign the 43rd,' and that's when I wrote 'for Brendan Nelson'."
Entsch knows that in politics what goes around comes around. A decade earlier, Turnbull had challenged Brendan Nelson for the Liberal leadership, winning by four votes. "I thought it was a timely reminder back to Turnbull of the treachery and lack of respect that he did for Brendan," Entsch says. "And so that, of course, triggered the spill."
The partyroom meeting was on. Turnbull was almost certain to bow out. In the three-way contest for the leadership, Dutton had his nose in front. But Morrison was glued to the phone and didn't stop making calls until the moment he walked to the meeting.
Like Turnbull, moderate faction leader Christopher Pyne was willing to do anything to stop a Dutton victory. Crunching the numbers, he knew the only way to stop the conservative champion was to cruel the chances of his faction's candidate – Julie Bishop. It didn't help matters that Bishop was also a friend.
"[Dutton's camp] completely miscalculated in that they believed that the moderates would, to a man and woman, support Julie Bishop, and that Scott Morrison would never be a candidate, or he might get half a dozen votes," Pyne says.
"It never occurred to them that the moderates would make a clear-eyed assessment of the fact that Julie – much as I support Julie and she's a particular friend – that Julie couldn't win, and that therefore there was no point in supporting her because Scott could win and, therefore, we would support Scott."
The party room assembled. The first motion — to spill the leadership — passed 45 votes to 40. Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership was over.
"This had been a week of complete insanity," Turnbull says. "And I just looked around the room and thought, 'Well, this is the little group of people in a fit of collective madness … we've embarked on this wild week thinking it's all about themselves but, in fact, they're changing the government of Australia.'"
"My biggest regret is that elements of the party never let Malcolm be Malcolm," Craig Laundy says. "And as a result, I don't think we ever got to see the best of Malcolm."
A ballot was then held for the leadership. Dutton garnered 38 votes, Morrison 36, and Julie Bishop just 11. Bishop was out of the running.
"They smashed her. They didn't just break her, they smashed her," says veteran Liberal and Bishop backer Russell Broadbent. "And it was predatory in the way they did it."
That left Dutton and Morrison in a run-off.
"My clearest memory was that Scott was sitting there — and he wasn't the frontrunner at the time — and he had this very self-satisfied, smirky grin on his face," says Liberal veteran John Alexander. "And I'm thinking, 'Oh my God, he knows he's won this thing.'"
"When it came down to a choice between Peter and myself … I had been on the conservative side of most issues," Morrison says. "So I suppose I had the ability to reach out to quite a number of members from a conservative perspective, but at the same time not be seen as a great intolerant threat to the moderate side of the party."
Morrison's confidence was not misplaced. He won the final ballot 45 votes to 40. "I'd prayed for peace and calm and it had come," says Australia's 30th prime minister.
Looking back more than five years later, Malcolm Turnbull believes he was played by Scott Morrison during "the week of madness". He claims Morrison wasn't the loyal lieutenant he painted himself to be.
"It's clear to me that Morrison played a double game on the Tuesday, and that his people – six or seven we think – voted for Dutton in that [original] spill, and that made Dutton's numbers look better and increased the pressure on me," Turnbull says.
"Now, did Scott vote for Dutton? I would doubt that but he might have. But it was his modus operandi, which we'd seen in 2015, to publicly go one way and get his henchmen to go the other. Could they have voted for Dutton without his knowledge? Absolutely not. I mean, as I think we all know now, having seen him as prime minister, he is the ultimate control freak."
"It's just not true. It's not possible to be true," counters Morrison. "None of us knew the vote was on … so there was no way to possibly discuss it, one. And two, I don't run a faction in the Liberal Party. I don't control numbers. There are others who do that. I'm not one of them."
As Christopher Pyne remarked about leadership schisms, they "leave lasting scars, friendships are broken". The friendship between Turnbull and Morrison was shattered in the wake of the week of madness.
"I'm saddened … he was a friend," Morrison says. "Maybe one day we will be again."
Watch the ABC's political docuseries Nemesis on iview now.
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