Australia’s political conclave theatrics feel blokey, but the future is female

The conclave is over. Habemus Papam! Overnight, the Catholic Church has made a decision that is at once historic (first American Pope) and high risk (creating from scratch an American leader who will be more famous than Donald Trump).

For the 133 cardinals, it’s time to go home.

But in Australia, the conclaves continue. Not just for the Liberal Party, but among the National Party and the Greens too. Never before have these three political groupings suffered — simultaneously, and as a result of the same electoral event — such an extinction event of leadership.

And while the Labor Party’s headline news from Saturday was triumph — So many seats! So many smiling women! — the truth is that the influx of new talent has challenged the existing pecking order so sorely that the crepuscular conclave of the NSW and Victorian Right factions are delivering scenes of backroom carnage that would make even a Borgia Pope blanch.

These negotiations do not involve the wearing of robes and zuchetti, and they do not take place under Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

But they are secretive, they are brutal, and, yes, a lot of the time, they involve groups of men trying to wrap their heads around why they are not more popular with women.

Meanwhile in Australia 

To the Liberal Party first, where the organisational trauma inflicted on Saturday night is so new, and so deep, that early attempts at number-counting defaulted to include MPs who — like inexplicably itchy phantom limbs — were simply no longer there.

An outfit habitually dependent on the healthy rivalry between conservatives and moderates floundered in a brand new hellscape in which neither grouping has a surviving leader. Angus Taylor is the leader of the conservatives now, we assume. He has yet to be sighted since election night, granted. But it is the hope of the tribe that he turns out to be more John Howard than Howard Hughes, moving forward.

Sussan Ley — is she a moderate? She is now! The previous moderate leaders were — more or less — Victorian Senator Jane Hume, with a side helping of David Coleman, who was shadow foreign minister for the election period, after former moderate leader Simon Birmingham retired. (Ley wanted that job, by the way, and as deputy leader she was nominally entitled to demand it, but these Liberal Party rules do sometimes have a way of evolving a lady-shaped carve-out when push comes to shove. Bookmark this thought.)

Coleman has been popped on light duties, okay no duties, by his electorate of Banks, now the property of Labor’s surprised but beaming Zhi Soon. And Senator Hume seems to be in some kind of purgatory, and in any event is in the wrong chamber for party leadership.

Times are tough. You know they’re tough, because the Liberal Party is seriously considering electing a female leader.

It’s all moving pretty fast, in a conclave that is happening where we can’t see it, but from which periodically puffs of smoke burst forth, like the truly extraordinary news yesterday that Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has defected from the Nationals party room to join the Liberals.

This sounds, to the untrained ear, like a minor thing. Aren’t they all part of the Coalition? Isn’t she just moving to a different seat in the same room?

Actually it’s utterly explosive, because the Nationals have already lost deputy leader Perin Davey in a slight Senate vote misadventure on Saturday. To lose another Nat from the Senate takes them from six senators to four. This has serious consequences for party resourcing. And for the Liberal Party, the addition of Senator Price to the already-fraught leadership skirmish is like the addition of a scorpion to a jar full of confused baby mice.

Ley — who this morning declared that her leadership would enhance the party’s appeal to women — is now not the only woman in the mix, and there is talk that she could team up with Taylor as a leadership duo.

Is it ironic that in order to find a woman when they finally decide they need more, the Liberal party had to shoplift one for their Coalition partner? Yes, it is. But these are unusual times.

The sky is thick with portent. It couldn’t be more different from last time, when the Liberal ranks — thinned methodically by voters who didn’t love Scott Morrison — found themselves nevertheless obliged by the merciless laws of mathematics to elect as their leader someone who was a slightly newer and slightly more banana-scented model of the same guy.

The electorate has come back for a second go at explaining the 2022 concept, and this time the Liberal conclave’s waters are turbid and ill-disciplined. People are ditching on each other and circulating files of past blunders. Women are involved. I remind you: WOMEN ARE INVOLVED. Anything could happen. They are expected to convene in Canberra next week.

The Labor conclave

Across this vast and unprepared continent, other conclaves smoulder unseen.

The Greens — having conceded yesterday that the Melbourne seat of leader Adam Bandt is gone — now move into their famously opaque leadership process. It’s too soon to assess how this will go. And realistically, we won’t know until it happens. The Greens are the most leak-proof party operation in Australia, probably more so than the real conclave. But the acting Greens leader, Tasmanian Senator Nick McKim, this morning ruled himself out of contention, so the field is probably Queensland’s Larissa Waters, South Australia’s Sarah Hanson Young, and NSW’s Mehreen Faruqi.

But the strangest conclave — and the blokiest (in domestic terms I mean, line honours and a tip of the zucchetto always of course going to the Vatican) — belongs, surprisingly, to the Australian Labor Party.

Yes, this is the party that just won a historic victory and increased its parliamentary ranks after one term of government, in a way that actually never happens.

Yes, this is the party that has achieved gender parity 30 years after making some very hard decisions about quotas at the urging of some extremely firm-willed women including a young Penny Wong.

And yes, this is the party that — having experienced uncomfortable chafing from its tight margin of victory in 2022 (77 seats, in a House that requires a majority of 76) — now finds itself in the elasticated pants zone of a 90-plus seat count.

Cabinet ministers Mark Dreyfus, Ed Husic scrapped from new Albanese ministry

Ten years ago, the ginger group of Labor MPs who plotted to get rid of Julia Gillard and reinstall Kevin Rudd — most active among which was the former NSW Right MP Joel Fitzgibbon — used to call themselves The Cardinals.

And — wow. The Right faction has really donned the robes again this week.

The new influx of talent is playing merry hell with the existing power structures, delicately titrated over generations by the watchful factions. The NSW Right — which has long observed an orderly queue for leadership rendered no less matronly by the fact that it is all-male — has been struck amidships by the unexpected success of the Victorian Right, and the Left. Numerically, it is obliged to surrender a cardinal from its cabinet ranks, thanks to the iron laws of factional arithmetic, which determine the membership of the cabinet, if not the specific job allocation, which is the pleasure of the prime minister.

The NSW Right — whose western Sydney heavyweights include Tony Burke, Chris Bowen, Jason Clare, Michelle Rowland and Ed Husic — does not want to surrender a cardinal.

In a party swamped by exultant new female MPs, the power struggle now rages among men of the Right. The Victorian Right appears to have sacrificed Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, without his consent, to make way for newcomer Sam Rae, who just won the seat of Hawke. The NSW Right has countered, it seems, by offering the scalp of Minister for Science Ed Husic. Again.

What is fascinating about these conclaves — and do not underestimate the ugliness of these tussles, as disagreements between believers are always the most horrible of all — is the extent to which they miss the point.

The biggest headline story from election night was the massive swing towards Labor, and Anthony Albanese’s dominance of the House of Representatives, which is the chamber of government.

But the much more powerful, and much less evident under-story is the evolving realisation about where the real power is after July 1 this year.

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A sobering reality for Greens, Coalition

The Labor Party, after that date, will have more seats in the Senate than the Coalition. This is unprecedented in this century. 

And despite the humiliations of the Greens in the Lower House, including the loss of the Greens leader, the Greens will hold the balance of power in the new Senate. In order to get legislation passed through the Senate, the Government will have to persuade either the Greens or the opposition. This is a sobering reality both for the Greens and for the Coalition, in different ways.

It will be true no matter how the residual Senate races pan out, including the transfixing arm-wrestle between Jacqui Lambie and Lee Hanson (daughter of Pauline) in Tasmania.

This is the story of real power, and where it lands.

Forget all the pre-election talk of deals and minority government, which Anthony Albanese — the grizzled managerial veteran of Julia Gillard’s minority term — effectively downplayed during the campaign.

Forget the Teals.

Forget all the Labor blokes jockeying for front-bench spots on the House of Representatives’ green leather. These are struggles around personal ego and legacy. How do we know this? Here’s a clue: Andrew Charlton, who just held on to the marginal seat of Parramatta and is among the most clearly gifted people of the NSW Right — isn’t anywhere near the head of the Cabinet queue, and it’s not because he’s a man. It’s because he’s in a queue, and the queue is full of dudes.

Forget, even — honestly, you can afford to, because they are going to be a hot mess for quite some time — who becomes Liberal leader. Whoever it is will almost certainly be a placeholder.

Because the real power, after July 1, is in the Senate. The real deals on what gets through and what doesn’t are going to be struck on red carpet, not green.

Who’s in charge in the Senate?

Let’s check, because hardly anyone ever mentions it, but it’s about to be screamingly important.

At present, the government’s leader is Penny Wong, who manages Senate business with the assistance of Albanese’s implicitly-trusted Finance Minister Katy Gallagher. The Coalition’s Senate leader is Michaelia Cash, flanked by South Australian Liberal Anne Ruston. Who knows who the Greens’ new leader will be? But if (as is possible) the job goes to either the Senate leader Larissa Waters or deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi or long-serving South Australian senator Sarah Hanson Young, who manages the party’s Senate business, the quiet pattern is confirmed. The current theatrics feel blokey, but the future is female.

Don’t tell the cardinals.

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