Paul Murray: A free piece of advice for Libs that love to share their party’s internal riff - STFU

Here’s a bit of free media advice for Liberal MPs from someone who has been closely observing and reporting on political behaviour for a very long time.

This is done in the interests of advancing the sound idea that a strong opposition is needed to ensure good government. And most Liberals are in opposition these days.

So here goes: Stop talking publicly about your party’s internal matters. Just stop.

Reporters have every right to inquire about party affairs they believe are in the public interest, but that doesn’t mean backbenchers with axes to grind have to respond.

And Federal Liberal politicians should realise their factional barneys are of no importance to voters. But talking about yourselves is a turn-off. A gift to your opponents.

In short, try adopting a smidgin of the discipline Labor has shown in office by keeping its once-famous factional brawling in check.

All Anthony Albanese needed to say about the Federal Liberals’ new net zero policy last weekend was that they are a “clown show”, which he later reduced to “a divided rabble”.

Political epithets only need a grain of truth for them to stick. And those two had a truckload of relevance.

Liberal infighting allowed the Prime Minister to deflect to insults when a cohesive Opposition armed with a new policy should have him defending an obviously flawed net zero strategy.

The morning after the joint party room ratified the Coalition’s policy last Sunday, the front-page lead on the national daily newspaper was about the Liberals’ “moderate” faction moving to ditch Sussan Ley, a moderate.

Her sin appeared to be that she had agreed to a clear majority position, pushed by conservative Liberals, on net zero by 2050.

The conclusion to be drawn was that her fellow moderates thought she was either too weak to push back the conservatives, and therefore not capable of party leadership, or that she should fall on her sword in defeat.

For those having trouble keeping up: The self-proclaimed “moderates” are in fact the party’s Left faction, with the Centre Right between them and the conservatives. So not really moderate at all, more like “progressives”.

The Australian appeared to have no difficulty in cobbling together the report that WA’s Andrew Hastie now had the numbers for a leadership challenge. Liberal MPs were lining up to spill the beans.

The report contained comments from a minimum of five discernibly different Liberal sources — possibly more — speaking anonymously. Who said Parliament was “the coward’s castle”?

So another bit of free media advice to politicians would be that if you don’t want to be accountable for your comments intended for publication, then, in social media terms, STFU.

That’s if you want your party to be taken seriously. Because nothing makes a political party look like a divided rabble more than media reports replete with quotes from un-named MPs undermining the leader.

It takes us back to the bad old days of Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, who were experts at the dark arts when they were seeking to grab power.

The Australian’s lead story began by quoting “two senior moderates” saying “a majority of MPs in the faction would vote for Mr Hastie against Ms Ley if a ballot were held this week”.

It quoted “another moderate” on the level of the unrest before moving on to mention “conservative powerbrokers” were saying Ley’s leadership was terminal.

It then reported “leading moderate Anne Ruston” — who Ley had put on the Liberal team led by energy spokesman Dan Tehan to negotiate the ultimate net zero policy with the Nationals — as having “used a joint party room meeting on Sunday to claim she never agreed to backing new coal-fired power plants with taxpayer underwriting”. Pretty specific leak.

The story continued that “Liberal sources” expected Victorian moderate Tim Wilson to resign from shadow cabinet over the policy, but then directly quoted him saying: “I’m supporting the leader and shadow minister to sell their policy.” Confused yet?

“Moderates are furious there are no meaningful policies to reduce emissions under the joint ­Coalition policy” was the next point, followed by “moderates argue they had made clear that taxpayer-funded coal was a ‘red line’ for them”.

“Moderates were furious with the responses provided by Mr Tehan in the party room meeting on Sunday, claiming he repeatedly avoided explicitly saying that new coal-fired power stations would receive taxpayer support,” The Australian reported.

Angry people, those moderates. Those “backgrounding” reporters and behaving like spoilt brats on Sunday were named on Sky this week by its Canberra chief Andrew Clennell, so their identities are hardly a secret.

Anyone reading that report could only conclude the Liberals were a divided rabble with no prospect of becoming united. Even the moderates allegedly proposing Hastie as a leader were doing so on the basis that he would fail.

“A moderate MP conceded the faction had little in common with Mr Hastie’s populist agenda, but argued ‘if he thinks he has got all the bright ideas then let him do it’,” the paper reported.

So instead of the Coalition leadership having clean air to sell a difficult new policy, the week in politics was consumed (again) by Liberal instability. The effect of The Australian’s report was that the rest of the media fed off it for days.

Here’s the bottom line: Factionalism is killing the Liberal Party.

When factional heavies get to the point that they put out media statements promoting their own views on internal party matters, factionalism becomes cancerous.

But that’s just what happened on Monday after The Australian’s report. Two moderates, both senators, put out a statement through Ley’s office purporting to speak for their factional colleagues only.

Ruston, elected in 2013 and a minister in the Morrison government, and Maria Kovacic — a former NSW Liberal Party president who was parachuted into the Senate in a factional deal in 2023 following the death of Senator Jim Molan — should know better.

“Media reports this morning about the moderates are incorrect,” they said. “We, along with an overwhelming majority of our moderate colleagues, continue to strongly support Sussan’s leadership.”

So can we now expect that each Liberal faction will routinely release statements promoting their individual positions on the issues of the day?

What part of Bob Hawke’s famous catchphrase “disunity is death” do they not understand? STFU.

One of this factionalism’s pernicious effects is in candidate pre-selection contests. Far too many duds get a factional rails run and the best candidate is often overlooked. The Senate has become a dumping ground for hacks of limited ability.

The Liberals are so self-obsessed they don’t know how to take the fight to Labor. The consequence of their Sunday venting was that Anthony Albanese had a free week of grandstanding in WA, bar an egregious blunder on the Brittany Higgins affair.

Have the Liberals forgotten how Labor destroyed their nuclear policy? By fabricating a $600 billion cost estimate to frighten Australians who had been gradually moving towards nuclear as a valid emissions-free baseload power source.

They should have been ready on Monday with a campaign turning the cost issue back on Labor — which refuses to put a price on its renewables-only revolution — and promoting the new plan to drive down power bills.

Have Liberal MPs forgotten how the Voice campaign was won? Once again, they had to be led by the Nationals, but hard work and raising the right issues turned Australia around.

However, as we’ve seen in leadership coups in NSW and Victoria this week, the messiah complex is alive and well among Liberal MPs nationally. Thumb-sucking by lazy time-servers.

If Andrew Hastie is to become the next Liberal leader sooner rather than later, he will have no chance of success on the party’s current behaviour.

And everyone should realise that leading a major political party federally from WA is immensely difficult without battling internal backsliding and undermining.

I well remember having to pre-record phone interviews with a very busy Kim Beazley when he was the Federal Opposition Leader and I was presenting the morning program on 6PR.

We would often chat before the interview and Beazley would outline that if he was in Perth when Parliament wasn’t sitting, he started work as early as 3am during daylight saving in the Eastern States.

Not only did he need to appear fresh for national breakfast television and radio appearances, but he had to be well briefed on everything in the east coast newspapers and what would likely break in the day ahead.

It was a gruelling and exhausting schedule, which would be even harder for a prime minister.

However, it can be done. Beazley came within a whisker in 1998 when Labor got 50.98 per cent of the national vote, just failing to win enough seats to put him in the Lodge.

But he wasn’t leading a divided rabble.