The day the Liberal Party (music) died: from a former insider

IN the post-election disaster mop up we feature another commentary from George Christensen, former federal National Party MP, who wants a citizen journalist presence in the Canberra press gallery but is being opposed by mainstream media. See details at this link to help George raise the $9900 he needs to do this. He is seeking 100 people willing to put in $99.

THE sickness inside the Liberals didn’t begin with bad polling or a fractured campaign. For those of us who were there, who served in the trenches of parliament under real conservative leadership, the origin is unmistakable. In fact, you can pinpoint it to an exact day—15 September 2015—because the very day the rot began was the day Malcolm Turnbull knifed Tony Abbott.

I remember exactly where I was. It had been a long parliamentary sitting day, and I’d just sunk into the couch in my parliamentary office for a half-hour power nap — the sweet spot after Question Time when things went a bit quiet. All of a sudden, one of my staff members burst through the door and said, with a level of urgency and alarm that made me instantly alert: “Turn on the TV!” I did as instructed… and there he was — Malcolm Turnbull, the man who would become known as the miserable ghost — announcing he was challenging Tony Abbott for the leadership of the Liberal Party and, by extension, the Prime Ministership of Australia.

It was surreal. The move seemed to come from nowhere. A small group of Nationals MPs gathered in their Chief Whip’s office, just down the hall from the Liberal Party room, watching events unfold. Not long after the Liberals had all entered the party room, the murmurs began from journalists posting on the social media platform Twitter: Abbott had been rolled. Then he emerged, walking alone down the corridor. Michael McCormack, then a backbencher beside me, said: “This is just wrong, Tony.” Abbott replied: “I know it is, mate.” Just like that, the man who had toppled Rudd, then Gillard, then Rudd again — the man who brought the Coalition back from the wilderness — was gone. Relegated to the backbench.

I’d come into Parliament under Abbott’s leadership, elected in 2010 — the same election where he came within a whisker of becoming Prime Minister. Only the flights of fancy from two left-leaning country independents — Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor — kept Julia Gillard in power. Abbott finally swept to victory in 2013 on a platform of principle. He promised to axe the carbon tax — a costly, artificial impost on the economy dressed up as market reform — and he did. He promised to stop the boats, and he did. The commentariat sneered that it couldn’t be done. He proved them wrong.

Abbott faltered on climate policy, like every Liberal Prime Minister since Howard. Instead of calling out the pseudo-science and economic self-harm behind the Paris targets, he gave ground. But even with that flaw, Abbott stood for something. He was my Prime Minister. And I will always be grateful to him for helping me into federal Parliament in both 2010 and 2013.

After my maiden speech, Abbott pulled me aside. He told me I’d given the best speech of the 2010 class. I thought it was a polite line he gave everyone until he leaned in and said, “You displayed excellence, and all of your colleagues saw that. Your colleagues are very ambitious, and so excellence in this place often goes unrewarded — but it never goes unpunished. So watch your back.” That was my first lesson in realpolitik in Canberra: the real enemy wasn’t across the chamber — it was behind you. And that’s where Abbott’s real problem was.

Malcolm Turnbull had once been Liberal leader (in Opposition) and a disastrous one at that. He had nearly ripped the party apart with his support for Labor’s job-destroying Emissions Trading Scheme. You might recall that, in his youth, Turnbull had tried to join Labor. They didn’t want him, so he came to the Liberals. He brought with him the values of a radical merchant banker wrapped in the language of a moderate. He was egotistical, aloof, condescending, and, worst of all, he believed in nothing except his own entitlement to power. If ever the Labor insult of a Liberal believing they were “born to rule” was applicable, it was with him.

When he usurped the leadership of the Liberals, I argued furiously in the Nationals’ party room that our Coalition agreement was with Tony Abbott, not Turnbull. I said we should tear it up. Some agreed. Warren Truss, the Deputy Prime Minister at the time, audibly groaned and put his head in his hands. Cooler heads — or perhaps weaker ones — prevailed. Instead of walking away, the Nationals extracted a few extra concessions out of the Liberals and pretended it was business as usual.

But it wasn’t. The air had gone out of the room. Something was very different. Suddenly, we were governed by a man whose pursuit of the Prime Ministership was akin to a dog chasing a car — he had no idea what to do with it once he caught it. Turnbull brought no vision, only vacuum. No plan, only branding. We went to the 2016 election under his leadership with “growth” and “innovation” as the centrepiece of our platform — not a policy, not a direction, just buzzwords. It was like someone had printed out a word cloud from a Silicon Valley conference and handed it to the public as a substitute for government.

That wasn’t strategy. That was surrender.

And the voters nearly surrendered us at that election as well. As a result of the election, we had only just clung on to office, and it looked like we needed the support of independent North Queensland MP Bob Katter, who was widely known to be a mate of mine.

In the previous few years, I had had next to no contact from Turnbull, so I was surprised the day after the 2016 poll to get a call from the man himself. He had heard that I was close to Bob and wanted to know if I had any insights as to what he would want in order to give us support in terms of confidence and supply on the floor of parliament.

As I began rattling off a list of Bob’s old favourites (which were also some of mine)—dams, an ethanol mandate, supermarket intervention, a sugar marketing code—I was being responded to with murmurs of agreement. The miserable ghost was literally thinking aloud back to me over the phone as to how it could all work. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was pleased he was thinking positively about such policy ideas, but ordinarily, these concepts would be as appealing to Liberals as garlic is to vampires. Yet the blood-lust of power and clinging on to the proverbial car that Turnbull had been chasing all his life meant anything and everything was on the table. (As an aside, I promptly phoned Bob Katter after the call and told him that Malcolm was desperate for his support and that he should ask for as much as he possibly can out of him. I even asked him to throw in a few things I wanted to see happen!)

The Abbott knifing and the events surrounding the 2016 election led to the realisation that the Liberal Party was no longer a party of values. It had become a machine — a self-congratulatory apparatus for delivering election wins, not meaningful change. I remember Turnbull’s friend Christopher Pyne even bragging at an event where he gave a keynote speech that the Liberals had become an “election-winning machine.” He meant it as a boast. But that, my friends, is the rot. When a political party stops being about values, it ceases to be a movement and becomes nothing more than a conduit to get people into office. The irony is that the Liberals eventually stopped winning, too. Because a machine that runs on nothing can’t run for long.

But that loss only happened after there was, briefly, a flicker of hope. Scott Morrison’s so-called “election miracle” in 2019 gave many conservatives in the Coalition a reason to believe the party might right itself — that perhaps the Turnbull experiment was over and the Liberal Party would rediscover its philosophical roots. But that hope was short-lived. When the COVID pandemic was declared, it became abundantly clear that the party was still hollow. The response to COVID was driven not by principle, but by panic and polls. Freedoms were sacrificed with barely a whisper of resistance. Liberty — once the very foundation of the Liberal tradition — was set aside for mandates, restrictions, and compliance. Whatever conservative values once anchored the party had long since been drowned by bureaucratic instincts and media management. The machine persisted, but the soul was gone.

So if you want to know where the sabotage of Peter Dutton began, I can tell you plainly: the blueprint was written in 2015. The culture of backstabbing, poll-chasing, and values-vacuousness wasn’t created during this campaign — it was entrenched a decade ago. The Turnbull coup told the factional operators that they could kill a leader, defy the base, and get away with it. That’s the lesson they never forgot.

And it also meant the hollowing out of the Liberal party. Like a mangy dog it shook itself vigorously and flicked off any last vestiges of values like they were fleas.

I’m not the only one who holds such a view. My good friend and former Liberal Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly, posted this poignant message to X yesterday:

I remember the day that Tony Abbott was knifed by the Liberal Party room in Canberra, and I was walking back to my office and I was hit by a wave a grief, because I knew it was the beginning of the end for the Liberal Party and our country would go into a long term decline.

It was the day that the music died.

Indeed. The music had died, and the rot began to sink in on that very dark day—15 September 2015—when principle was replaced with positioning.

And the rot will keep spreading like a virus until either someone finally has the courage to cut it out… or the Liberal Party expires because of it.

Until next time, God bless you, your family and nation.

Take care,

George Christensen