Frydenberg tilt exposes Liberals’ skirmish

The undercurrents of self-doubt in the Liberal Party bubbled to the surface earlier in the week, with a rush to return former treasurer and leadership hopeful Josh Frydenberg to parliament.

A draft redistribution of Kooyong, the seat he lost to independent Monique Ryan in the teal wave that swept across blue-ribbon Liberal seats at the last election, reawakened Frydenberg’s ambitions with a jolt.

The early assessment of the proposed boundaries suggest that folding 30,000 voters from neighbouring Higgins into Kooyong would improve the Liberals’ chances of seizing it back. Election analyst Kevin Bonham isn’t so sure, especially if Ryan “gets the super-sized second election vote boost that independents often get”, but that didn’t dint the calls for Frydenberg’s return.

No sooner had the Australian Electoral Commission posted the proposed changes for Victoria and Western Australia than calls went out for Frydenberg to seek the preselection. Another victim of the teals, Jason Falinski, who lost the seat of Mackellar to Sophie Scamps, told Sky News he thought “Josh would be silly not to be looking at the new boundaries and not to be reconsidering his decision last year not to recontest”.

That thought had certainly occurred to Frydenberg. There are conflicting reports on private polling in the electorate last November, but whether the former treasurer was just ahead of Ryan or just behind her, it wasn’t enough at the time to steel him for another run.

He skipped the preselection just over two months ago and it was won easily by 31-year-old Amelia Hamer, an Oxford graduate and former financier who is a grand-niece of former Victorian premier Dick Hamer. She’s the sort of candidate the party needs more of and has already begun enthusiastically campaigning in the seat.

Falinski, who is now New South Wales Liberal Party president, saw this consideration as secondary to getting back into the federal parliament someone who would be more attractive than Peter Dutton to voters south of the Tweed River. In doing so, however, he was also flagging doubts about the party’s prospects at the upcoming election.

In a backhander to Hamer that riled Liberal women, Falinski said he thought she was a team player and “would understand that we want to put our best people in the field and there are other seats, especially in the state parliament, that need to be filled”.

Charlotte Mortlock, founder of the women’s advocacy group Hilma’s Network, which is pushing for more female representation in the Liberal Party, posted: “Josh could have challenged Scott Morrison for the leadership, he didn’t. Josh could have put his hand up for Kooyong, he didn’t.” She added: “Women are not collateral damage for Josh Frydenberg’s regrets.”

Karen Andrews, who was a Liberal cabinet minister and is retiring at the next election, gave a series of interviews that were more on Falinski’s page. In one she described Frydenberg as “an absolute asset” to the team. She said he was “someone we need to bring back into the Liberal Party and into federal politics”. Andrews agreed the former treasurer had leadership potential but noted the “Liberal Party has a leader at the moment”.

It’s the next moment that Frydenberg and his supporters have in mind, however. Does anybody seriously think that if Frydenberg actually made it back into the parliament and Dutton lost the election, he would be content to be shadow treasurer to Angus Taylor or anyone else as leader?

Frydenberg has previously stated his ambition to emulate Sir Robert Menzies and become the next Liberal prime minister from Kooyong. This explains the hubris of thinking the state division would tear up the rule book and hold new preselections to accommodate him. Former premier Jeff Kennett was quick to put paid to that.

Not to be missed, however, is the malaise of the party, particularly in Victoria. The Liberals hold only six of the federal seats to Labor’s 25. The Nationals have three, the Greens have one and there are three independents, plus disendorsed Liberal veteran Russell Broadbent.

No one except the conservative rump left in the parliamentary party believes Peter Dutton has much if any hope of appealing to the eastern suburban seats they lost in 2022. These, however, are the seats they need to win back to have any chance of regaining government.

The assessment in the party – both in the state and beyond – is that the Victorian branch “made a fucking mess of it” by holding the preselections before the electoral commission had completed the redistribution everyone knew was coming.

It’s quite a mess, too: damaging the party’s efforts to reach out to women and in the process harming Frydenberg’s standing in the party and more broadly. It’s a lesson for him that Peter Costello, another former treasurer with leadership ambitions, failed to learn: if you want the top job, you have to fight for it.

So severe was the blowback that, by Monday afternoon, Frydenberg beat a retreat on social media. He said he was not rushing back to politics. His position on contesting the next election remained unchanged. “I will continue to support the Liberal Party and our local candidate Amelia Hamer.”

Kooyong incumbent Monique Ryan says she knows the new area being added to the electorate, having lived there and attended school there. “As an independent my priority is my community,” she says.

Last weekend she had 80 volunteers “out at 12 locations listening to the community’s concerns”.

“It’s a shame the Liberal Party’s focus seemed elsewhere.”

It won’t be the exact boundaries or notional swings that will be decisive in Kooyong, nor indeed in any of the other electorates the Liberals lost to independents campaigning hard on climate change, women’s representation and integrity. The real issue is how much the Liberals have done to address those concerns.

So far we have seen the Dutton-led Coalition critical of the government’s renewables rollout. There is talk of ditching a 2035 emissions reduction target and, as Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen says, everything is being paused “while they develop the fantasy of nuclear”.

Politically the Coalition is backing a long-shot winner. The latest Lowy Institute annual poll does show increasing support for the idea of nuclear power to generate electricity (61 per cent) but, to address the “pressing problem” of global warming, a majority of Australians support “a more ambitious national emissions reduction target” (72 per cent). A vast majority (87 per cent) say they would support the government providing subsidies for the development of renewable energy.

Albanese told his party room on Tuesday Dutton’s nuclear policy is “friendless” and he cannot announce it “without dividing his party”. Picking up on the theme, Bowen told parliament Dutton didn’t have “the guts to release” his policy. The opposition leader said he would “within a couple of weeks”, but that was 12 weeks ago. Bowen mocked Dutton for saying he would not be held to Labor’s timetable when “he won’t be held to his own”.

The Coalition is convinced rising energy prices have taken a lot of the steam out of the climate change issue. Lowy finds almost half of Australians (48 per cent) now say “reducing household energy bills should be the main priority for the government’s energy policy”. No wonder Labor’s own post-budget research finds the budget measures resonating with voters are the $300 energy bill relief and tax cuts.

By midweek, when the latest national accounts were released, the penny had finally dropped for the opposition that its relentless pursuit of Immigration Minister Andrew Giles over visas for foreign criminals was not the main game. At the same time, it emerged Dutton as minister allowed one of the individuals the Liberals were pursuing Giles over to remain in the country.

RedBridge Group pollster Kos Samaras says the opposition’s Question Time focus last week and earlier this week has elevated the issue but it is still a long way down the list of voters’ concerns. Cost of living is the dominant preoccupation.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the anaemic economy, teetering on the edge in the latest national accounts, is the result of “higher interest rates, combined with moderating but persistent inflation and ongoing global uncertainty”.

He says the flat economy in the March quarter justifies the government’s decision not to “slash and burn” in the budget or respond to opposition calls to dramatically cut spending. The $315 billion Dutton and shadow treasurer Angus Taylor keep attacking includes pension indexation, family payments and relief measures.

The government will be hoping Reserve Bank of Australia governor Michele Bullock will not rush to judgement. She told Senate estimates she “would not hesitate” to raise interest rates again if inflation was judged to be going up or was “stickier than we think”.

At a midweek news conference, Chalmers clashed with a finance journalist who queried the wisdom of his spending measures and the possibility he was giving the RBA no option but to raise rates. The treasurer said there were billions of dollars of spending restraint compared with what he inherited, along with turning projected deficits into surpluses.

Labor research finds while the opposition does articulate the challenges facing voters, so far it hasn’t convinced them it has any better solutions. If that persists, new electoral boundaries will have little impact.