Nelson secures leadership with backroom deal with right wing Libs

Backroom deal seals Nelson bid

November 30, 2007

IF POLITICS offers redemption, Brendan Nelson got more than a whiff of it yesterday, thanks to a backroom deal with MPs from the one state that bucked the vote-slide to Labor at the weekend, Western Australia.

A few years ago, Dr Nelson told an interviewer that if he had known he was going to be a politician, he would have done a lot of things in his life differently, because he'd made a lot of mistakes.

Liberal Party powerbrokers allowed him to put those mistakes to one side yesterday. The party, of course, is desperate and on its knees after losing in a single weekend a federal election, a prime minister and a treasurer it thought would become its next leader.

But who might have thought it would elect as its future a thrice-married man who was considered by his friends a Labor man for 20 years, and who was a signed-up Labor Party member from 1988 until 1992 — just four years before he entered Parliament as a Liberal?

A group who wanted to deny multimillionaire Sydneysider Malcolm Turnbull, it turns out. According to reliable sources, right-wing Senate leader Nick Minchin was crucial to brokering a last-minute deal that swung six crucial West Australian votes from Mr Turnbull to Dr Nelson.

The reasons were complex, but one stood out. Mr Minchin and those who switched could not abide Mr Turnbull's declaration early this week that John Howard should have said sorry to indigenous Australia.

The arrangement guaranteed not only that the leadership went to Dr Nelson, but the deputy leadership to West Australian Julie Bishop. Essentially, Ms Bishop was offered strong support for her tilt at the deputy leadership on the understanding that she would swing her vote, and that of five West Australian colleagues, to Dr Nelson. It would not only mean defeat for Mr Turnbull, but for Victorian deputy leader candidate and former federal Liberal Party director Andrew Robb.

The whispered deal, however, may have handed Dr Nelson a poisoned chalice.

In a party with a long tradition of leadership instability in opposition — the 1980s, for example, proved a lost decade as Andrew Peacock and John Howard fought over the Liberal leadership — Dr Nelson already has guaranteed rivals. Tony Abbott said only two days ago he would not rule out future challenges for the leadership, and Malcolm Turnbull clearly did not enter politics to play second fiddle for too long. He was believed to have been furious last night after learning of the manoeuvring that blew his leadership chances away.

Dr Nelson waved aside questions about how he would avoid leadership instability yesterday, saying that we would just have to watch.

Dr Nelson, former federal president of the Australian Medical Association and a minister of both education and defence in the Howard government, won the Liberal leadership from Mr Turnbull by just three votes in the party room yesterday, 45-42.

Many observers had tipped that Mr Turnbull would be chosen ahead of Dr Nelson, partly because Mr Turnbull had played out his campaign publicly.

In fact, Dr Nelson appears to have got the upper hand by staying in the shadows and quietly garnering the support of such heavyweights as Senator Minchin.

One hint that he was confident of winning was his studied behaviour on Wednesday.

Outside the executive wing of Canberra's Parliament House, Tony Abbott had just finished telling the gathered media that he was withdrawing as a leadership candidate because he did not have the numbers. Those few votes he did have, it seemed plain, would flow to Dr Nelson rather than the new boy on the block, Mr Abbott's ideological opposite, Mr Turnbull.

A short time later, word went out that Dr Nelson was on his way to Parliament House. Camera crews gathered and, sure enough, he sauntered by, declining to utter a word but smiling for the cameras.

Often judged by critics as little more than a show pony, Dr Nelson had adopted a new persona — the coy pussycat, who perhaps knew he had got the cream.

Neither candidate had the opportunity to pitch his wares to colleagues in the party room. Liberal rules require candidates to "stand in their place" silently until the ballot is complete. Thus, Dr Nelson had won the leadership, and Mr Turnbull had lost it, before they entered the ground-floor room at Parliament House.

Mr Turnbull had presented himself in media interviews as new, energetic and open-minded, prepared to say "sorry" to indigenous Australians and to offer a socially inclusive face to the electorate.

According to a number of Liberal MPs who spoke to The Age yesterday, Mr Turnbull's very public willingness to spruik his strengths was his greatest weakness when it came to the vote.

"He was seen to believe vociferously in things like the republic and he made this unilateral comment about saying sorry — things that a lot of us had opposed over the years," one Liberal said. "And he made these sort of policy statements through the media. We felt that if this was the way he would operate, we weren't ready for him." Others said that some backbenchers, wearied of toeing the Howard line for years, felt they could not abide another powerful and prescriptive personality.

Yet others compared Dr Nelson's 12 years in Parliament to Mr Turnbull's three. "We remembered the experience of Dr John Hewson who was in parliament for only a short time before he became leader, then in short order lost an election," a Liberal who voted for Dr Nelson said.

Another factor that played against Mr Turnbull, according to some sources, was the fact that although he was considered clever, articulate and confident, he was identified as a rich Sydneysider — "a bit too glitzy and slick, and a small 'l' liberal".

Dr Nelson, on the other hand, was a "small 'c' conservative", whose roots were humble and far from Sydney.

Dr Nelson — in a somewhat Kevin Ruddesque manner — used that very story to declare to the media yesterday his journey to Liberal leader was "unorthodox".

"My dad was a Labor man, and my family by and large was a Labor family," he said.

"In the streets of Launceston where we grew up, my father said to me, 'Son, in the absence of family influence, the only way that you're ever going to be a better person and live in a more confident Australia is if you work and study as hard as you can at school'."

And so, through school and university in Adelaide he grew to become a medical doctor, the head of the AMA and finally, a cabinet minister.

As he stood before the media for a "significant day in the history of the Liberal Party", he noted that it was "important for us to stand true to what we believe".

It is a theme he has repeated for years. Back in 1993, though, he was captured by television cameras just days before the election shouting at a crowd that "I have never voted Liberal in my life".

Questions about his character arose when he later told interviewers and a Liberal pre-selection panel that he, in fact, voted Liberal during the years he belonged to the Labor Party.

Now, at his crowning moment of redemption, the waters around him are poisoned once again. So much for party renewal.