This was published 7 years ago
Why 2017 Australian politics has already gone to hell
The internal Coalition battles for 2017 have already begun.
By Andrew P Street
Feeling excited about the end of the year? Got that holiday spring in your step at the thought of starting 2017 on the good foot? Well, great news: 2017's politics is already looking like a dog's breakfast. And a really aggressive, snarling, conservative-leaning dog at that.
At the very least, Malcolm Turnbull can abandon any hope that his government would get a chance to hit the reset button over the break.
There were already a bunch of reasons why next year was going to be messy, ranging from the inauguration of Donald Trump in January as the final president of the United States, to the annual Mardi Gras raising questions (as certain zestily handsome commentators wrote about only yesterday) why the government is persisting with the same sex marriage plebiscite as government policy when it quietly canned its funding in the MYEFO – which, in turn, also presaged what's likely to be a lousy 2017 budget.
But it's also because a couple of the louder, less fact-concerned members of the government are giving indications that they want to concentrate on their solo careers. And one of those doesn't really matter at all, and the other could be a catastrophe for the government.
Cory Bernardi has been rumoured to be preparing to form a breakaway conservative party movement.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Let's start with the one that doesn't make any difference: South Australian senator Cory Bernardi.
Cozza's reportedly "on the brink" of quitting the Liberals, again. Then again, he's been playing an increasing tiresome will-he-won't-he game for years, ever since he was sent to the backbench by then-opposition leader Tony Abbott in 2013 for memorably linking marriage equality with people having sex with animals, bless.
With no hope of any sort of a significant position – much less a ministry – he's been waging a low-key war against the party who still regularly and inexplicably gift him the top slot on the SA senate ballot. There's no mention of the Liberal Party of which he is a member on his homepage, for example, and he's also set up his own potential political party: the Australian Conservatives.
Bernardi might have followed through on his post-election threats to quit, except for two tiny issues.
Here's what 2017 looks like, Australia. Credit: Andrew Meares
One, he didn't want to lose the safe six-year senate term he was only going to get as a senator for the Liberal Party (although he was only #2 on the ballot in 2016; Simon Birmingham, an actual frontbench minister with a proper job, was #1).
The other was the legal kerfuffle over SA Family First senator Bob Day: first up, his bankruptcy over his building empire's collapse, and secondly his alleged financial interest in the building in which his office was located, for which the public were paying. And which, by an amazing coincidence, Bernardi's Conservative Leadership Foundation – of which the Australian Conservatives is an "initiative" – is also housed.
This is a big deal because depending on how the Day case pans out, 2017 might well see SA being forced to hold its upper house election again. And while Bernardi has promised "you'll hear more from me in 2017", you can bet he's going to be very, very, very quiet until the party give him a nice safe ballot spot as usual, thereby guaranteeing his return to the upper house without having to risk asking the South Australian public to elect him purely on the basis of his own name, policies and personal charm.
But let's face it: Bernardi being a loose cannon in the Senate will make no difference to anyone. He's already outspokenly silly about progressive matters, and he's going to vote with the Coalition regardless of whether he's a part of them. He'll be like Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm: occasionally entertaining and politically irrelevant.
However, the other threatened resignation is far more interesting, and potentially destabilising: the federal member for Dawson, George Christensen.
Unlike Bernardi, Christensen is in the lower house where the Coalition have a one seat majority. So when he says something worrying in public like "I am loyal to Barnaby [Joyce], loyal to the Nationals, and loyal to local LNP members… But the Turnbull government needs to start being more loyal to the voters who sent us here or there will come a time when remaining inside the tent is no longer tenable to my conscience or my voters," it actually matters.
There have been rumours of Christensen potentially jumping ship to One Nation, although that was before all the senator-quitting and alleged phone-chucking and accusations of print-rorting and all the other stuff that suggests that One Nation are more of a spicy reality show than an actual political party for grown ups.
But if Christensen leaves the party, at best he'd be a Coalition-affiliated independent in a parliament where Malcolm Turnbull no longer had a majority. At worst, he could force the Coalition into a partnership, unofficial or otherwise, with One Nation. How sanguine are the already-frustrated moderates in the Liberal Party going to be about either of those outcomes?
And it's entirely possible to see this as an aggressive piece of negotiation for a frontbench position, under which he'd be obliged to support the government and not speak out against the PM – sort of like what Tony Abbott's been doing for the last 18 months except that the LNP takes George seriously.
Then again, it'd be yet another example of the tiny, tiny Nationals calling the shots on the increasingly timid Liberals - which, to be fair, is pretty much the story of the Coalition since the election.
In other words: enjoy the break, Australia. It might be the only moment of stability you get for a while.
The Double Disillusionists round out 2017 with a year-ending podcast with APS and Dom Knight joined by Dan Ilic and Alice Workman. Andrew P Street will return in 2017.