DESPITE THE DISAPPOINTMENT of the republic vote, there was a consolation prize for the Turnbulls: Lucy’s election to Sydney Town Hall as the city’s first female deputy lord mayor. Like her husband’s, Lucy’s entry into politics was met with media speculation she could go all the way and become prime minister. Unlike her husband’s, there were very few detractors.
Five years earlier, Lucy had quit working for Malcolm’s law firm to embark on an enormous project of her own: to write the story of Sydney. Her uncle, art critic Robert Hughes, had released his epic Barcelona to coincide with the 1992 Summer Olympics in that city. Lucy did the same in her beloved home town ahead of the 2000 Olympics. During her research, she interviewed Sydney’s long-serving lord mayor, Frank Sartor. Lucy had branched out from the family’s narrower commercial interests, joining the board of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation—which she described as a turning point in her life, the start of a lasting interest in charity—and the Australian Museum Trust, which is where she first met Sartor. A nuggety reformer, Sartor had defied repeated, bruising Labor campaigns to build up a community profile as an independent local politician with integrity, and in 1991 he won the City of Sydney lord mayoralty, a Liberal Party sinecure for seventy years. He had promptly cast off the weighty legacy of pomp and ceremony—previous lord mayors had even had a ‘batman’, a personal servant—and started modernising, particularly in town planning, where he let apartment towers surge into the CBD. As Lucy recalled: ‘I was researching his [Sartor’s] Living City strategy—bringing residential life, after-hours business and dining back into the inner city—and I thought his ideas were fantastic. I rang him up because I wanted to meet him and things developed from there.’1
Sydney went beyond tart-up in the 1990s: every other footpath and roadway erupted in a frenzy of construction as the city scrambled to create a schmick Olympics experience for swarms of visitors, amid the usual shambles. The lord mayor had a seat on the games’ supreme body—the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games—and would play official host for the celebrations, hobnobbing with dignitaries, snaffling the best seats, and so on. This was the big, glamorous prize up for grabs in the 1999 elections, set down for 11 September, and they would be hotly contested. Sartor’s arch rival was the well-liked Kathryn Greiner, wife of former NSW Liberal premier Nick Greiner, who had already served a term on the council as head of the Sydney Alliance. Sartor, who had to replace departing deputy Julie Walton, sought to bolster his Living Sydney team with two women running second and third: the high-profile Lucy followed by barrister Dixie Coulton.
Turnbull added instant glamour to Sartor’s ticket and the announcement went down a treat. Sartor told reporters Lucy had contacts and credibility ‘across the political spectrum’.2 It was more about personality than it was about a platform. As Lucy later explained: ‘I’m not interested in politics per se, but I am interested in Sydney politics.’3 After a decade working part-time for her husband’s law firm, merchant bank and other businesses, Lucy was stepping out from Malcolm’s shadow. At forty, with Alex and Daisy well into teenagehood, she was also emerging from her self-described ‘socially autistic’ years at home, whether parenting, renovating or gazing out at the harbour from the windows of her study as she researched her book: ‘For at least two years I led a hermit-like existence as I immersed myself in documents, parchments, old essays and papers … I am [now] making something of a re-entry into social life.’4
Getting on the campaign trail meant that Lucy, for the first time really, had to submit to public examination: doing profiles, letterboxing, door-knocking and pub-crawling; facing accusations that she could never relate to residents of the grimier inner-city suburbs, especially in the pockets of public housing on the outskirts of the CBD. As the daughter of a politician, Lucy knew what she was in for, of course—she’d handed out leaflets for Tom when she was seven—but she gave off a sense of unease at becoming the object of scrutiny.5
All such temporal concerns went out the window on 28 May, when Lucy’s uncle Robert was left in a critical condition after a near-fatal car accident near Broome. Hughes was in WA filming the documentary Beyond the Fatal Shore. He had been returning at twilight from a tuna-fishing trip at Eco Beach, two hours south of Broome, when his Nissan Pulsar veered onto the wrong side of the road and smashed head-on into a Holden Commodore, injuring its three occupants, one seriously. It took three hours to cut Hughes, fully conscious and fearing incineration, out of the wreckage. He suffered multiple fractures in his legs, which had been trapped, and broke almost every bone on the right side of his body—elbow, ribs, collarbone and sternum.6 Police blamed fatigue, and said Hughes, sixty, was incredibly lucky to survive. He was airlifted to Perth for twelve hours of emergency surgery, and Lucy and Malcolm flew there together. Turnbull told reporters Robert was in ‘remarkably good nick for someone who has been involved in an accident of this kind … there’s mercifully no internal bleeding and they can’t detect any damage to the spine or brain … we are very confident he will make a complete recovery’.7 After three weeks in a coma, Hughes was moved out of intensive care and transferred to Sydney in a private air ambulance arranged by the Turnbulls. Then, as Hughes was recuperating, he was charged with dangerous driving and the press turned against him. It became a sorry legal quagmire, recorded in Hughes’s memoir Things I Didn’t Know, which dragged on for years and included an extortion attempt, a defamation action against him which was settled, and a retrial avoided only by a guilty plea after the initial charges were thrown out. Hughes’s documentary flopped locally and by the end of it all he felt picked on, publicly wishing someone would ‘tow Australia out to sea and sink it’.8 For several months in late 1999, he stayed at the Turnbull residence, wheelchair-bound, reading and causing trouble for his hosts—like when he penned a colourful republican op-ed for The Sunday Telegraph, calling Diana the ‘Princess of Upper Bulimia’.9
Written under the ambivalent double-barrelled surname Hughes Turnbull, Lucy’s book came out not long after the car crash. It was a big production, somewhere between encyclopaedic and coffee-table book: the hardcover Sydney: Biography of a City ran to 534 pages and was full of glossy pictures. Despite the hefty $75 retail price, it was soon climbing up the non-fiction bestseller lists. Robert Hughes, who wheeled himself to the Sydney launch, told reporters: ‘I wish I could have written something this good.’10 Broadcaster John Laws was effusive, writing that the ‘finished product looks, smells, reads and feels like it should belong in every library’.11 Travel writer Susan Kurosawa, however, felt it was a reference work, and complained of ‘unforgiveable brochurese … if Sydney were a person, you’d think it’d had a personality bypass’.12 Author Alex Buzo fretted about the rash of pre-Olympic ‘Sydneyana’, but described Lucy’s book as ‘monumental, accurate and comprehensive’, even though her writing was ‘somewhat ungalvanic’.13
The timing of the book, and her campaign for council, was too perfect. Lucy flatly denied it was all planned:
If you think I sat down in late 1994 thinking about writing a book with a view to council elections at the end, you’re completely mistaken. I haven’t got that foresight … It really is coincidence. It was to come out in June and when it became August I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is going to look very contrived’. But I absolutely assure you it was not.14
The election win itself was fraught. A preference deal was done with Labor and Sartor led in the polls until three days out from polling day, when the Liberals, led by Kerry Chikarovski, dropped a bombshell in state parliament: they tabled documents under privilege which raised old sexual-harassment allegations from 1992 against Sartor, and made a series of new allegations. Mike Gallacher, leader of the opposition in the Upper House (he would later step down as police minister after corruption allegations were raised in parliament), asked attorney-general Jeff Shaw:
Attorney, were you informed that at least four serious allegations of sexual harassment have been made against the lord mayor, Frank Sartor, some as recent as this year, before the Labor Party agreed to give him preferences to ensure his re-election? Attorney, were you informed of the large number of complaints lodged before the Anti-Discrimination Board involving cases of sexual harassment by the Lord Mayor by members of the staff of the Sydney Town Hall?15
The opposition also tabled a statement from a former council employee relating to an incident in 1992, saying it was the ‘tip of the iceberg’, but within hours the president of the Anti-Discrimination Board, Chris Puplick—a former Liberal Party senator—had written a letter to Sartor, copied to Shaw, confirming that since the beginning of 1995 no ‘complaint has been lodged against you personally, nor have we received any form of complaint alleging sexual harassment listing the Sydney City Council as a respondent’.16 Similarly, the auditor-general confirmed there was no evidence for claims that the City of Sydney had paid $100 000 to settle complaints of sexual harassment. The Liberals’ sensational allegations against Sartor collapsed in a screaming heap. Premier Bob Carr moved a successful censure motion against Chikarovski the next day, and the whole incident was referred to the Parliamentary Privileges and Ethics committee, which two months later found there had been no abuse of privilege, mainly because there were no guidelines against which the conduct could be judged.17
In the court of public opinion, the Liberals’ tactics rebounded heavily on their camp. Lucy defended Sartor to the hilt: ‘You wouldn’t hang a dog on the so-called evidence on which the opposition relied, but that didn’t stop them, apparently blinded by desperation to see Kathryn Greiner in the lord mayoral robes. No facts, no evidence, just name-calling.’18 She went further, noting that while Greiner denied any knowledge of the allegations made in parliament, late in 1998 Greiner had driven from Woollahra over to Point Piper to warn Lucy of the rumours about Sartor: ‘Her purpose was to dissuade me from joining Frank’s Living Sydney Team for the city elections. Her attitude and her readiness to smear Frank based on gossip had precisely the opposite effect.’19
After Sartor and the Living Sydney won a record four out of seven seats on the council, Telegraph journalist Miranda Devine wrote a scathing column, given the 1992 allegation—front-page news at the time—was quickly withdrawn after mediation, and the rest was baseless: ‘For the NSW Liberals to air further unsubstantiated gossip about Sartor three days before the city election was an unforgivable abuse of parliamentary privilege. Even to raise the old allegation was dirty pool.’20 According to Malcolm Turnbull’s republic diary, Nick Greiner had told him a month earlier there were nasty allegations about Sartor’s private life, and Turnbull had warned him against using them, as they could easily rebound. When it all unfolded as predicted, Turnbull called the NSW Liberals ‘rank amateurs’.21
Lucy was duly elected Sydney’s deputy lord mayor, the first woman to hold the office in the city’s history, and there was every expectation she would go on to succeed Sartor as lord mayor—he had already flagged he would not stand again at the next elections in 2003. The tug of history was irresistible, given Lucy’s great-grandfather Tom Hughes had been the city’s first lord mayor back in 1903.22 While keeping mum on whether any prior deal had been done with Frank, Lucy made no secret of her interest in the job. Around Town Hall she was frequently described as ‘mayoress-in-waiting’.23
In the end, Lucy’s historic elevation to the top job at Town Hall came and went more quickly than expected, leaving a bitter aftertaste. After a triumphant Olympics, in early 2003 Sartor pole-vaulted into state politics, putting aside years of party-political rivalry to join the Carr Labor government as energy minister. Lucy became Sydney’s first female lord mayor—Tom, Malcolm, Alex and Daisy all sat in the public gallery to watch her nomination. Labor’s grand plan emerged: the City of Sydney was to be merged with the South Sydney Council that took in Redfern and Waterloo, and its boundaries would be expanded to incorporate pockets of the inner-city suburbs of Glebe and Newtown. The political strategy was clear: to include enough Labor-voting areas to prevent the council ever falling to the Liberals. It was more of the juvenile jockeying that has afflicted the council for decades: whoever is in power in Macquarie Street is compelled to tinker with the boundary or the franchise to advantage their side of politics.
Lucy was opposed to the merger, and said so loudly. South Sydney was a financial basket case. Sartor had thrown her a hospital pass. Malcolm’s re-entry into Liberal Party politics, which was gathering pace by 2003, didn’t help, calling into question Lucy’s independence. Her deputy, Dixie Coulton, resigned from the Living Sydney team, saying ‘it became apparent to me by her [Lucy’s] decisions and her lack of consultation that it was becoming more Liberal and not truly independent’.24 The trigger for Coulton was Turnbull’s unilateral decision in October to withdraw the city’s support for the Sydney Peace Prize, which had been awarded to world-renowned Palestinian activist and scholar Dr Hanan Ashrawi in 2003. Lucy vehemently denied her decision to pull out had anything to do with her husband contesting a seat with a significant Jewish constituency. Malcolm likewise pooh-poohed the idea, describing his wife as ‘the most contra-suggestible woman in Sydney’.25 Few believed them: the backlash from the Jewish lobby had been ferocious. Former Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld—who would later be jailed for perverting the course of justice over a traffic offence—commented that the lord mayor was ‘relatively inexperienced in politics, certainly in this type of political confrontation. I’ve known Lucy since she was a child. The heavies of the Jewish community would have been pretty heavy for Lucy … I wouldn’t be surprised if some people tried to pressure Malcolm to pressure Lucy.’26 Premier Bob Carr presumed much the same:
The minute Lucy Turnbull made that announcement about pulling out, there was an avalanche—I choose my words carefully—of public reaction, and I witnessed it across Sydney. Nobody has raised any issue with me as they raise the Ashrawi affair, in my entire premiership or, going back further, as leader of the opposition. Forest controversies, urban planning controversies, tax rises for poker machines, electric privatisation or workers’ comp reform. This has been extraordinary.27
Sponsors caved but Carr stood firm, and Ashrawi collected her peace prize. Lucy said nothing more on the affair.
Just before Christmas, and with local government elections looming in March, the State Government Boundaries Commission started an inquiry into the council merger. Lucy thought it was dirty tactics, sneaking the inquiry through over summer, and sought legal advice, which came back that the merger could be challenged. When she told Frank Sartor about it, according to her file notes, which were released to the media, Sartor exploded, calling her and her advisers ‘local government pissants’ and threatening that ‘this Government will destroy you’. After less than a year in the job, Lucy announced she would not recontest the next city election. Both councils were sacked, and Lucy was installed as administrator, but in a recent interview Lucy described the sacking as ‘unfair’ and ‘brutal’ and ‘one of the lowest points of my life’:
My understanding is that the then-government led by Premier Carr took the view that because my husband was in politics, I could not be an independent lord mayor as I had been an independent deputy mayor and … that cut me to the bone. It paid no respect and regard to my independence as a woman, what I had done, how I had conducted myself in that office. It was purely driven by a perceived, I think, 19th-century idea that because my husband was going into politics, I could not be trusted to be a politically independent person. I found that devastating.28
Another independent, Clover Moore, supported by Lucy and Living Sydney, defied the Labor scheming and won the lord mayoralty, and she has retained it since—although elections gerrymandered for business ratepayers are due in early 2016. In almost four years on council, Lucy had chaired the powerful Central Sydney Planning Committee responsible for approving developments worth more than $50 million, spent a lot of time cleaning up Kings Cross, removed a lot of graffiti and was especially proud of putting the first bicycle path through the city29—a program that Moore has expanded and made her own. More importantly, in some ways, she had established her own profile: independent from Malcolm, and from her father. Malcolm and Lucy had always made Sydney’s power couple lists. From now on, they would be a true political double act.
Malcolm Turnbull was dumbfounded by the defeat of the republic referendum in November 1999. He could not believe the Australian people had been so stupid. Given the rejection was laced with personal attacks on Turnbull himself—the monarchists had played the man as much as the ball—it was not the kind of vote, you would think, that would spur most people into politics. But Turnbull was not like most people. He had loved being in the thick of a national debate on an issue of vital importance to the country’s future, and he was now suffering relevance deprivation syndrome. He did mooch around for a while—as when two reporters spotted Turnbull looking glum while Lucy chatted away at the launch of the Sydney Festival in early January 200030—but he was soon back on the horse. In fact, Turnbull’s eight-year republic campaign, and the crushing defeat at its close, cemented an absolute determination to get to the top, and perhaps, one day, to finally achieve the destiny so many people had already mapped out for him.
This time around there was no doubt which party he would join. Turnbull’s flirtation with Labor was over, for good. His reasoning was pretty simple: ‘You don’t have to be Einstein to realise that if there are people in the Liberal Party that would say “Oh, Turnbull’s part of the millionaire’s club, Turnbull’s too pro-business, Turnbull’s a plutocrat” … what possible home could I have in the Labor Party?’31 With a fortune from OzEmail, Goldman Sachs and everything else nicely tucked away, Turnbull felt he was simply too rich for Labor.
Turnbull sought a rapprochement with prime minister John Howard, and was said to have dined with him at Kirribilli House. In December 2000, Turnbull rejoined the Liberal Party, and that act alone sent a ripple of excitement through Sydney’s eastern suburbs. One commentator mused: ‘Turnbull is a bit like a Shakespearean hero: a massively gifted person with a deep flaw—in his case, arrogance—often expressed in a vile temper. It would increase both the IQ and the blood pressure of parliament were he to find his way there.’32 By Christmas, Howard was backing Turnbull to take over as chairman of Liberal Party think tank the Menzies Research Centre.33
Turnbull took soundings locally about standing again for Wentworth, twenty years after his first attempt. The sitting member, Andrew Thomson, who had replaced John Hewson in 1995, had kept a very low profile. But Turnbull soon realised another candidate, former Liberals state director and barrister Peter King, was assembling support for a challenge and had the numbers. Still, party heavyweights like senator Bill Heffernan and former federal director Lynton Crosby came out publicly and urged Turnbull to run. Apparently Turnbull was seen hovering in the William Street headquarters of the NSW Liberal Party on the afternoon of Friday, 2 February 2001, just minutes before nominations closed, torn about the decision.34 He let the deadline pass.
Over the next three years, Turnbull got his ducks in a row. The priority was to burnish his Liberal credentials, and Turnbull took to this with gusto. In mid-2001, with the HIH royal commission looming, he stepped down from his Goldman Sachs chairmanship, effective at the end of the year, and promptly quashed rumours he was hunting for a seat: ‘It’s important not to be seen as a perpetual candidate and I’m not. I’m not a candidate at all at this point.’35 Backed by Howard, Crosby and serving federal director Shane Stone, Turnbull was picked to take over as the Liberals’ honorary federal treasurer from Ron Walker, party fundraiser par excellence.36 Walker, a very wealthy property developer, welcomed Turnbull’s appointment, describing the position as ‘a one-man band. Very few people in Australia can do it. That’s why the party has only had five treasurers in fifty years, and twenty-five presidents.’37
Turnbull didn’t step into the treasurer’s job until April 2002, but when he did he hit the ground running, working closely with his old friend Michael Yabsley, an opponent in the Wentworth preselection contest of 1981 and now the party’s NSW treasurer. Yabsley had developed his own fundraising formula—in 1999 he established the hugely successful Millennium Forum, which provided high-level ministerial and even prime ministerial access to significant individual and corporate donors in private, convivial surroundings. Within eighteen months, selling off golf days with John Howard and the like, Yabsley had raised enough to clear the party’s $3.6 million debt from the disastrous 1999 state election.38 The Millennium Forum would provide the template for Turnbull’s own subsequent Wentworth Forum, and for federal treasurer Joe Hockey’s North Sydney Forum—subject many years later of the famous ‘Treasurer for Sale’ exposé by Fairfax Media, which triggered a defamation case.39 The Millennium Forum grew too successful, in fact. Just over a decade after Yabsley stepped down in 2003, and after Labor introduced laws banning developer donations, the forum was disbanded when illegal fundraising activity was exposed by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption.
During his short term as treasurer, Turnbull tried to institutionalise the Liberal Party’s fundraising efforts so that it was less dependent on the personality of the treasurer, and claimed to have raised a record amount for a non-election year. Michael Yabsley says this was Turnbull’s first interface with the party organisation, which suffered from poor governance, accountability and transparency, and ‘it would be fair to say he found it deeply frustrating’. Yabsley later held the same position himself:
The Liberal Party machine, you’d be putting it kindly to say it is clunky. Records weren’t there, you want to do a mailout. I remember scanning the database when I first became federal treasurer … Kerry Packer was on the list, he’d been dead for ten years! [Malcolm and I] have swapped notes about this, about how bloody hopeless the party machine was.
Apart from chronic disorganisation Yabsley adds that the job is also incredibly demanding: ‘It’s full on, you’re under the pump morning, noon and night, to raise money for a party that has always been impecunious.’ It was not uncommon to be told that things weren’t looking good for salaries the next month. Apart from the well-endowed Victorian Branch, he says, the Liberal Party has always had a hand to mouth existence.40 As it turned out Turnbull was not in the office long enough to introduce permanent fixes, although he did claim to have raised a record amount for a non-election year in 2001–02.
Turnbull also threw himself into developing new policy ideas as chairman of the Menzies Research Centre, working with executive director John Roskam, later head of the Institute of Public Affairs. A paper co-authored by Roskam, an education policy adviser to the Kennett government, and education expert Brian Caldwell, titled ‘Australia’s Education Choices’, advocated a school funding model based on students’ educational needs, rather than on whether a school was government or non-government, and to some extent prefigured the Gonski reforms introduced under the Gillard Labor government.41 The centre also published a paper on home ownership co-authored by Christopher Joye—son of socialite Judy Joye, a close friend of Lucy’s—who was a Sydney University medallist in economics and a protégé of Malcolm’s at Goldman Sachs, before quitting to do a doctorate at Cambridge.42 Joye’s paper came up with the brilliant idea of allowing people to buy part of a home, rather than all of it, or in other words letting banks and other lenders provide equity as well as debt finance. It became the first part of a three-volume prime ministerial task force on home ownership, chaired by Turnbull. Joye’s synopsis pondered whether the extensive work might be thought ‘an immature yearning to stretch out our moment on the public stage’,43 but Turnbull got the trowel out, heaping praise on the young man: ‘His work is not simply original and rigorous; it is also the product of a tireless dedication. All of us who have received emails from Christopher at all hours of the day know that his capacity for work knows no bounds … we are all in his debt.’44 Unfortunately, the paper’s central idea was panned by almost everyone, from 2GB’s Alan Jones, who called it ‘stupid’, to treasurer Peter Costello, who thought it would be rejected by most Australians. Many economists thought it was likely to exacerbate the problem, pushing house prices higher by adding to demand.45
Turnbull put more of himself into another paper, ‘It’s the Birth Rate, Stupid’, a speech delivered to the 2003 National Population Summit in Adelaide, amid heightened debate about the ageing population. John Howard had earlier coined the term ‘barbecue stopper’ in reference to the imbalance between work and family life, and Peter Costello had identified the long-term budgetary implications in the first intergeneration report and introduced the baby bonus. Turnbull tapped into the fear that falling fertility spelled the decline of the West, arguing that advanced countries from Asia to Europe had lost the will to reproduce as women got educated and joined the workforce, and so faced precipitous population decline by mid-century:
A society with a birth rate of 1.2 is not ageing. It is dying … The gravest threat to Western society over this century is therefore neither global warming nor international terrorism. Rather it is the unprecedented, sustained decline in the birth rate in almost all developed countries to levels that are well below the replacement rate.46
The thrust of Turnbull’s speech was to propose ways to make it easier for women to work and have kids. He canvassed a range of pro-natalist policies, including replacing complex child support with a single per-child payment to each mother—whether working or not, and regardless of means:
Women with higher and professional qualifications are, as we have seen, less likely to have children than those without. We should stop being obsessed with hang-ups about ‘middle class welfare’ and take proactive steps to make it easier for our most skilled women to have the children every survey tells us they want to have, but experience shows too many of them have been denied.47
Turnbull threw in reference to pro-family policies from elsewhere in the world, including laws in Florida to teach high school kids about marriage and conception (as well as contraception and sex education), and complements to no-fault divorce such as giving couples the right to contract to a higher standard of marital commitment where small children are involved. He took pot shots at his feminist critics as well. Turnbull sought recognition that ‘a higher birth rate requires us to enhance rather than restrict the choices of women’ and threw in a feisty footnote: ‘emphasis added for the benefit of Ann [sic] Summers and other critics who have not had time to read what I have actually said as opposed to summaries in the media’.48 Turnbull went on: ‘This can be seen as a call to return to the 1950s but not everything about the 1950s, at least in terms of the attitude to the family, was wrong.’49
Behind Turnbull’s apparent social conservativism was a relatively new Catholicism. It had been a while coming, and started with Tom Hughes, who had walked out on the Church when he was refused communion on account of his divorce. Hughes had returned to the Catholic fold in the early 1990s—famously pursued and persuaded by the late Jesuit priest Father Emmet Costello, legendary chaplain of Hughes’s old school, St Ignatius College, Riverview.50 Lucy rediscovered her faith, too, and started going to St Canice’s church at Kings Cross—built by one of her forebears, John Hughes—and there befriended Jesuit priest Richard Leonard, who got to know the Turnbulls and started talking to Malcolm. A few years later, Leonard asked Father Michael Kelly to prepare Malcolm for reception into the church. Kelly had been the head of Catholic Telecommunications, which bought in services for the church’s vast national network of 6000 schools, hospitals and nursing homes, and met Turnbull during the OzEmail days, when they had struck a deal for internet connections and telephony.51 Now Kelly started talking to Turnbull about faith. Kelly recalls one of his conversations with Turnbull:
I said, ‘So Malcolm, you’re a highly intelligent, well-educated chap, in a period when the Church’s public profile is about as low and unintelligible as it’s been in its whole history in Australia (all the pedophilia stuff was going on), the reputation of the clergy is as low as it’s ever been, why in God’s name are you interested in Catholicism?’ And he said a number of things: ‘First of all, human beings are inherently social and you can’t have faith individually, it has to be collected in some sort of social aggregation, all of which entails being compromised by a whole range of things you don’t appreciate, approve of, like or wish to endorse. The second thing is, I really think I’ve been actively disposed to being Catholic since my school days … I really think I went to a Catholic School. The people who had most impact on me were the most intelligent bunch of Catholics I’ve ever met, who were the masters at Sydney Grammar.’52
Kelly says he was flabbergasted at the depth of Turnbull’s thinking on his faith. ‘I know of no-one that I have ever met who has read the catechism of the Catholic Church from cover to cover, and Malcolm has.’ Turnbull was particularly taken with a 1985 book Kelly recommended, by late British Jesuit Gerard Hughes, God of Surprises (also an inspiration to Pope Francis),53 which moved Turnbull to tears. It was not clear that Turnbull had ever been baptised—he had no memory of it, although he remembered being told about it—so Father Leonard led a simple christening ceremony at St Canice’s. Turnbull told Kelly that it had brought him ‘as great a contentment as he’s ever had in his life’ and admitted he had been putting it off. Turnbull’s faith was not political posturing—in fact he doesn’t talk about it much—but it was certainly a big shift from his younger days. Bob Carr, for example, remembers Turnbull coming out of the funeral of Labor stalwart Laurie Brereton’s father, Tom, in the Catholic Church at Kensington in Sydney’s east decades earlier:
Malcolm embarrassed me by his animated comments on the service we’d just sat through. He couldn’t believe that there was incense, and there were bells, in a church service. I don’t believe for a moment he converted to Catholicism for cynical reasons, there is nothing to be gained from it in these times, nothing at all, but it was a fact, that the young Malcolm did not have the faintest sympathies or associations with a Catholic view of the world. His instincts standing on the steps of that church, judging by the vigour of his comments to me, were the anti-Catholic instincts of an Orangeman.54
Politically convenient or not, Turnbull embraced Catholicism and was moving right, signalling that his Labor dalliances were behind him. With prominent backers but no power base within the Liberal Party, Turnbull could only circle, preparing for possibly his biggest battle, one he could not afford to lose.55 For all his denials, Turnbull was bent on one thing: winning Wentworth.
Turnbull first told Michael Yabsley he was having another crack at his local seat over a quiet beer at the East Sydney Hotel, a lovely old watering hole in inner-city Woolloomooloo. He was targeting the Point Piper branch. Yabsley was dubious:
I basically said to him, this is a good idea, yes of course you’re streets ahead of Peter King, but you’ll never do it because the numbers in the Liberal Party branches will fall Peter King’s way, and with that he reached into his briefcase and got out a wad of membership forms you couldn’t jump over. This was an absolutely extraordinary thing to drop on the table, It was his way of indicating, ‘This is how serious I am, do you want to get with my side or not?’56
The Point Piper branch was about to expand a thousand-fold. Yabsley quit as chair of the Millennium Forum to head up Turnbull’s campaign team. The biggest stack since Federation was on.
By Liberal Party convention, challenging a sitting member for preselection is not the done thing. But at the age of forty-seven, Turnbull no longer had time on his side. What’s more, Peter King had unseated Andrew Thomson, stacking his own Rose Bay branch in a nasty dust-up that sparked a police investigation. ‘Live by the sword, die by the sword’, the Turnbull camp reasoned. On paper the two candidates had a lot in common: both were lawyers who had won Rhodes scholarships, and they lived within a stone’s throw of each other at Point Piper, although Turnbull lived in a mansion while King owned a flat. Hilariously enough, in the thick of their battle, Turnbull paddled his kayak right past King, who was standing with his back to the harbour, and warned, ‘Don’t take a backward step.’ But King was a member of the party’s moderate faction who had been mentored by federal environment minister Robert Hill, while Turnbull was unaligned and courting the right. King had barely rated a mention in his first term as an MP, while no-one doubted Turnbull’s talent or ambition. Crucially for the battle ahead, King was a monarchist while Turnbull, of course, was a republican. There would be no prisoners taken.
Wentworth had been in Liberal hands for 103 years. It was blue-ribbon, by any definition, although it was held by the Liberal Party on a surprisingly small margin of just 7 per cent. The smallest electorate in the country, covering just 26 square kilometres, it also had the highest population density, and successive redistributions had pushed the boundaries west towards the inner city and south towards Coogee, moving increasingly into Labor areas. It was a safe seat, but only just.
Under the party’s rules, the Liberal candidate for Wentworth would be chosen by 160 preselectors, of whom forty-eight were apparatchiks and head-office types appointed by the state and federal divisions, and 112 were divvied up between the local branches in proportion to the number of members in each. A clever branch stack could give a candidate an overwhelming number of preselectors. Going into the preselection contest, Wentworth had about 750 financial members all up, most centred on King’s Rose Bay branch, a legacy of his successful 2001 stack.
At the end of September 2003, a few weeks out from the cut-off date, Turnbull’s camp dropped to sympathetic Sydney Morning Herald columnist Paul Sheehan that 450 new applications to join the Point Piper branch were about to be delivered to head office, with hundreds more to come. Sheehan wrote: ‘All the major political parties have banged on about the need to bring heavyweights into parliament but have done very little about doing so. The only way to crash through the factional alliance system may be to out-machine the machine.’57 The phoney war was over, ending months and years of speculation about whether Turnbull would or wouldn’t stand.
If the key to victory is the element of surprise, however, Turnbull had blown it. It was a major tactical error, as he conceded later. King saw the challenge for what it was and started recruiting madly. He had a firm ally in Kerry Jones at Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, who kept an unrivalled list of Turnbull-haters, many based in Wentworth, and was reported to have signed up almost 700 of them. King also cried foul: Was Turnbull taking advantage of his position as party treasurer, accessing lists of members and donors and pressuring them to transfer their membership to the Point Piper branch or join the party, respectively? John Howard was forced to intervene, warning that Turnbull’s position was tenuous and there would be a perception of conflict if it was allowed to drag on. Turnbull stood aside instantly from the treasurership, but this in itself was a knock to the party, which was in a precarious financial position heading into an election year and was rattled by the elevation of Mark Latham to lead the ALP. Turnbull promised the party would not be caught short: ‘My total commitment, whether I’m officially federal treasurer or not, is to get the money for the election, and I can assure everyone that I will deliver on that.’58 One senior South Australian Liberal didn’t buy it: ‘Malcolm Turnbull seems to have had some kind of brain implosion. He’s supposed to be the treasurer of the federal party, but at the moment he’s tearing the party limb from limb. This is an entirely self-indulgent exercise.’59
Turnbull’s challenge turned the Wentworth preselection into a national issue, dividing Liberals right down the middle. It was dubbed an A-list takeover. Turnbull had any number of high-profile backers from the richest electorate in the country. James Packer joined up. So did Chris Corrigan, former Hoyts CEO Peter Ivany and real estate guru Max Raine, who cited Menzies as the authority for the proposition that while there were lots of nice backbenchers, ‘in the blue-ribbon seats you must concentrate on what I call Cabinet timber’.60 Party luminaries such as former Liberal leader Andrew Peacock, Lady Susan Atwill (widow of a former Liberal president) and Lady Nancy Gorton (widow of former prime minister John Gorton) also backed Turnbull. So, too, did Nick Greiner, a King supporter the last time around who’d now switched his allegiance with a particularly ringing endorsement:
Malcolm is a class act. He has been extraordinarily successful in each and every enterprise, which ranges from small business to big business to various forms of public life. And, yeah, I think it would be a tragedy if the Liberal Party thought that despite the obvious class act that he is, that they should just stay with near enough is good enough. It would be, I think, very sad if someone who on any objective assessment is one of the most successful Australians of the last twenty or so years across a range of relevant fields, was denied the opportunity … sad for Wentworth and for the country.61
But King had his supporters too. His father-in-law, Ian Sinclair, the former National Party leader, was a prominent backer, as was former NSW MP Rosemary Foot and Wentworth federal electoral conference president and Waverley councillor Sally Betts (who later worked for Turnbull). The monarchist David Flint, Lady Mary Fairfax and Nutrimetics founders Bill and Imelda Roche backed King. So, too, did federal parliamentarians Robert Hill and Tony Abbott, who acknowledged it was a tough choice but said he was simply upholding the party convention to back the sitting member—although there were plenty of commentators willing to observe that Turnbull posed an unwelcome threat to future leadership contenders. Not one of his future parliamentary colleagues backed Turnbull, and John Howard remained studiously on the sidelines. As one senior Liberal said:
The only reason for that is not a sense of camaraderie for Peter, or even a great liking for him, but simply that the idea of Malcolm Turnbull sitting in the House of Representatives scares the shit out of every one of them. Malcolm Turnbull is, as the cross is to Dracula, an unbearable image, and the thought to the long line of people in the queue for the spoils of office that they might get pushed back one place due to him, is enough to ensure this near-perfect unity of view.62
Turnbull went all out, and he was certainly prepared to use unconventional tactics. He set up a website, ‘turnbullforwentworth’. He did direct mail. His son, Alex, by now at Harvard University, urged 200 expats there to join the Point Piper branch, while Christopher Joye did the same in Cambridge. Turnbull even bought advertising space on radio, paying some $5000 a go for Alan Jones to read out an endorsement—unprecedented for a preselection, in either major party. NSW Liberals director Scott Morrison forced Turnbull to pull the ads after complaints from King, arguing it breached a party ban on airing internal matters in public. The Turnbulls’ mansion was a drawcard, thrown open for parties and fundraisers. As one gossip writer noted, while the Sydney Cancer Foundation was a great cause, its cocktail party on 17 October—two days before the preselection deadline—was ‘proving a must-have invitation simply because it gives guests the chance to nose about in Lord Mayor Lucy Turnbull’s Point Piper pile’.63 Some 300 guests sipped champagne on the terrace and in marquees round the pool.64 King branded it money politics, the first American-style primary election to be held in Australia.
All the while, the touted membership figures of the Point Piper and Rose Bay branches kept climbing. By the day of the cut-off, King had actually out-stacked Turnbull: by 1800 to 1500, in round figures. Given King could count on the majority of the pre-existing members, he was well in front. He had the advantage of being able to trawl the party’s electoral database, made available to every sitting member.65
Counting both sides, the stack amounted to half the party’s national membership. Just accepting such a large number of membership applications posed a new challenge for Morrison, and there had to be extra staff put on to approve them. On the one hand, the stoush was a boon for the party, with roughly 3500 new members at $68 a pop generating almost $250 000. On the other hand, the party was in turmoil. Both sides were poised for a legal challenge on the slightest grounds, although wiser heads warned that candidates rarely got far by suing their own party, even if they won the case. One person from Bellevue Hill told the ABC he’d been approached by the Turnbull camp and offered a cash refund if he paid by cheque. Turnbull flatly denied it, saying ‘that is complete and utter news to me. All of them have to pay; I have not paid for anybody or asked to pay for anybody. It may be that people are enthusiastic. I don’t know.’66 Yabsley says the suggestion Turnbull was paying is crazy, as there was no way such a big operation could be kept secret: ‘Talk about creating a slow-moving target. If you’ve recruited three hundred people and paid their membership fees, the wheels would fall off that in no time.’67 Turnbull did challenge about a thousand of King’s new members on the basis of procedural irregularities at the branch meetings that approved them, but Morrison ruled that the new members were valid. He then took it to the party’s disputes panel, but they knocked him back. Round one had gone to King.
With the branches stacked and the preselectors nominated, Turnbull and King had a four-month wait until the day of the vote itself, set down for 26 February 2004 at Bondi’s Swiss Grand Hotel. The focus shifted to lobbying individual preselectors. Both camps mailed out references: Turnbull had letters from Lynton Crosby, Alan Jones, Chris Corrigan, Max Raine, Rabbi Pinchos Woolstone and Olympic hockey gold medallist Danielle Roche. Jones wrote: ‘I’m sure there are many instances where members of the Liberal Party and Malcolm will disagree. We must enthusiastically embrace people of [his] intellect, vision and achievement.’68 By convention, politicians wouldn’t write a reference against a sitting member, but Turnbull also had the public backing of Joe Hockey, and monarchist and parliamentary secretary to the treasurer, Ross Cameron. King had letters from John Howard, Peter Costello, Tony Abbott and Robert Hill, as well as Rosemary Foot and Rabbis Yanky Berger and Pinchus Feldman.69
A week out from the vote, momentum started to swing Turnbull’s way, as Turnbull applied maximum legal pressure to the effort of knocking out King’s backers, with two QCs said to be poring over the party constitution to identify rules that may have been infringed.70 An audit showed membership applications to King’s Rose Bay branch had been doctored, and about 120 members were struck off, forcing a last-minute rejig of the preselection panel. It was a very bad look, and cost King two preselectors, with Turnbull gaining two. Then Turnbull found out that a polling company calling itself Access Research, which nobody could identify, had been ringing preselectors to ask about their voting intentions and feeding the information back to King. Another bad look.
A final blow came when King lost two more preselectors, two days out from the preselection vote, after an internal disputes panel ruled invalid a takeover of the Paddington branch by John Hyde Page, a staffer for King. Hyde Page and another office bearer at the branch were kicked off the Wentworth preselection panel, and two Turnbull backers installed.71 Hyde Page, an up-and-coming moderate who had aspired to become the president of the Young Liberals, would go on to write a racy expose on his experience in the party, including the battle for Wentworth. At one point Hyde Page met with Turnbull with a view to betraying King by providing information that would exclude new members of the King-aligned branches. But Hyde Page thought if he did help Turnbull ‘it would be my most despicable act in seven years as a party hack’. The quid pro quo was that Turnbull would procure the extra votes Hyde Page needed to become president from the Randwick–Coogee branch of the Young Liberals. As Hyde Page wrote:
The members of Randwick–Coogee were prepared to betray their own faction if it would help Turnbull, though their motivation can only seem absurd in a country as secular as Australia. In truth, their motivation offended me. Randwick–Coogee was a branch that the right wing had stacked with nasty Catholic fundamentalists and they were prepared to sell out their faction to help Turnbull because he was a fellow Catholic. Sectarianism, it seemed, still had a part to play in Australian politics. I found the whole thing pretty revolting …72
Hyde Page decided Turnbull was just trying to pump him for information, and that he was unlikely to come through with the numbers for the presidency. Along the way, though, he revealed the suspicions within the King camp that Turnbull had a mole in their office, copying internal branch correspondence and leaking back to him—the person was exposed as Vivienne Dye, a member of the Paddington branch, who faced expulsion from the party.73 An end to the trench warfare could not come soon enough.
At the same time this was happening, forty-eight hours from the vote, Abbott intervened on King’s behalf, telling a gathering of 120 supporters that Turnbull should not be rewarded just for being ‘rich and ambitious’, and ‘the party should not reward someone who described the prime minister as having broken the nation’s heart’.74
On the day of the preselection, the Turnbulls were unbelievably nervous: Would the defeats of twenty years ago be repeated? Yabsley had to pressure his wife, Susie, a preselector for Malcolm, to leave her aunt’s funeral early. ‘If she hadn’t been there, my life wouldn’t have been worth living,’ he recalls.75 Lucy told one reporter on the way into the Swiss Grand there were rumours that King was in front: ‘I think [Malcolm] has lost … it’s just intuition. I’ve seen a lot of people smiling that I haven’t seen smiling in a long time.’76 She was so uptight, she went off to watch a movie—Lost in Translation—as the six-hour meeting got underway.77 Outside the hotel, Labor’s candidate for the looming general election, David Patch, was getting in early, holding a fundraising stall for the local school, and generally making as much noise as possible, just to be a nuisance. He presented Malcolm with a little present, a vanity mirror he could carry in his pocket. Inside the hotel, it was like speed-dating: each candidate had to sit down for ten minutes with a table of ten preselectors, answering their questions, before rotating to the next table. That happened sixteen times, after which the candidates had eight minutes each to deliver a stump speech and then twelve minutes for questioning, before a secret ballot.78 No mobiles were allowed. Twenty observers paid $100 each for the privilege of sitting in.
Turnbull cracked it: eighty-eight votes to seventy—adding to King’s ignominy, two of his preselectors had run late and were locked out. The margin was higher than expected. After the vote, a King source mourned: ‘Obviously a lot of people who said one thing did another.’79 Victorious, Turnbull and crew went straight across the road to the Hotel Bondi, with Yabsley, Bruce McWilliam, Danni Roche and others better dressed but just as raucous as the scruffy surfies and beach babes—the hotel’s typical Saturday night crowd.80
The next day, the prognostications cranked up a gear. Howard was forced to advise journalists that there was no deal to vault Turnbull into Cabinet, and that everyone—everyone—who arrived new to parliament had to learn the ropes. Turnbull was counted among The Lodge wannabes, even though he hadn’t won his seat yet. John Roskam, by now at the Institute of Public Affairs, wrote that ‘not often can members of either the Liberal Party or the Labor Party claim with a reasonable degree of certainty that they have preselected [not only] a future Cabinet minister but also a possible prime minister’.81 The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen welcomed Turnbull’s win, warning against the narrow, perishing conservatism that could never accept a republican in the ranks and cheering the defeat of the moderate King:
Genuine conservatives ought to be embracing Turnbull as a fillip to the conservative cause in Australia when the cause could do with some fire in its belly … Turnbull doesn’t just spout on about conservative values. He lives them … Insiders at Saturday’s pre-selection say several conservative votes swung his way. When asked by preselectors what was the Howard government’s weakness coming up to the next election, King said the Kyoto Protocol. Turnbull said it was getting a better balance into the work and family issue. The real wonder is that King scored as many votes as he did.82
It was not an elegant win: it was a nail-biting, down-to-the-wire, contentious win. The Australian’s leader-writer made the sharp observation that, ‘as usual, Mr Turnbull is acting like a bull who takes his own china shop around with him’.83 Turnbull had prevailed at the centre of a high-profile conflict. North Sydney independent Ted Mack, a fairly disinterested observer, draws the contrast between Turnbull’s divisive, damaging, oxygen-sucking entry to parliament, and that of former federal director Andrew Robb, who had also been casting around for a seat and slipped unopposed into the Melbourne seat of Goldstein the same year: ‘There’s someone who knows how to do politics.’84
Turnbull’s preselection win was so bruising, in fact, that King simply couldn’t let it rest. Six months later, after a tortuous, drawn-out guessing game, King turned on his party and announced he would run for Wentworth as an independent. For a former NSW Liberal president and federal MP, this was nigh-on unthinkable. Turnbull had certainly not expected it. For him, it presented a nightmare scenario, the splitting of the conservative vote, and Wentworth suddenly became very loseable. King was roundly condemned by Liberals, from Howard down, but he was suffering an acute case of candidate’s disease—he believed the people loved and wanted him.
He was right to this extent: many Liberal voters of Wentworth were furious with Turnbull and the party and felt an outcome was being foisted upon them. Three months after the preselection, one poll showed a collapse in the Liberals’ primary vote, from 50 per cent at the last election to 35 per cent—King was polling 18 per cent support before he’d even nominated; Labor’s Patch was steady on 29 per cent.85 On the preferred member for Wentworth, King out-polled Turnbull 44 per cent to 27 per cent. Out on the hustings, King sounded cocky: ‘It just shows the antics of head office are going to cost us the seat. Extreme factionalism is also abhorrent to ordinary folk, and that’s apparently been borne out by this poll.’86
Indeed, Turnbull was not immediately popular with the punters, and it could not be explained away as a hangover from the republic referendum—as he often pointed out, more than 60 per cent of the Wentworth electorate had voted Yes in 1999. Compounding the dire polling, Turnbull’s office was in turmoil, with key staff departing, and his whole funding strategy for the campaign had collapsed. He and Yabsley had planned to established a Wentworth Alliance, based on the Millennium Forum, but senior Liberals were worried it would splinter the national strategy.87 Turnbull was in the unique position that he could fund the entire campaign himself, but he worried that that would alienate the party faithful, who would suddenly be redundant. In the end the desire to win took over, and Turnbull spent more than $600 000 of his own money to win Wentworth; a campaign veteran told the Daily Telegaph, ‘I’ve heard of $500 000 on a seat, but nothing like this.’88 The government was also accused of pork barrelling in Wentworth, with Bondi winning $221 000 in regional grants.89
Turnbull was uneasy on the street at first, but the fabulously wealthy ex–merchant banker, lumbered with a fold-out table and handing out leaflets, soon got used to being bailed up by strangers. He tackled head-on his reputation for arrogance, his famous inability to suffer fools, trying instead to become a good listener:
I learn a lot from my mistakes. Clearly, your approach to people and issues must be more grassroots-based, more people-based. My father-in-law, Tom Hughes, has always given me a great piece of advice. You should always treat the rudest question, the most offensive question, as though it was a polite request for information, and the ruder and nastier someone is, the more charm you should respond with, the bigger your smile should be.90
Soon, Yabsley reckons, Turnbull had the little old ladies eating out of the palm of his hand. But he continued to attract flack. Graham Richardson stirred the pot, wheeling out the old discussions with Turnbull about seeking a Labor seat. King pounced straight on it. King was also quick to encourage Nik Krkovski, who was chasing Turnbull over Star Mining. Turnbull had to resort to legal threats against King and Krkovski to shut the story down.91 There were gaffes, including the August ‘meet the candidates’ forum in Bondi, where Turnbull opined that ‘History will judge [US President George W] Bush’s invasion of Iraq as an unadulterated error.’ It made all the news bulletins, and Labor’s Tanya Plibersek was quick to raise it in parliament, asking John Howard whether the prime minister knew of those views when he supported Turnbull for preselection? A visibly grumpy PM gave a one-word reply—‘no’—and sat back down.92 Having swerved right to win the party’s backing for Wentworth, Turnbull was now swerving left to win the seat.
By September, Labor polling suggested the Liberals were about to lose Wentworth, with Turnbull at 30 per cent, Patch at 27 per cent and King at 25 per cent. If King and Patch preferenced each other, Turnbull was toast.93 Far from being an asset to the party, Turnbull had become a major liability. Turnbull and Howard had a private dinner to work out how to save the seat,94 and Howard then intervened, writing to Wentworth electors backing Turnbull and sending in hardman Bill Heffernan to shadow King’s campaign, rattling the opposition. In the end, of course, Howard bested Latham nationally and King fizzled in Wentworth: Turnbull copped a 10 per cent swing on the primary vote, which fell to 42 per cent, but on the two-party preferred this was reduced to just a 2 per cent swing and he was returned with a 5 per cent margin. King did not outpoll Turnbull, and most of his backers preferenced the Liberal Party.
Although many in the party must have wondered whether it was all worth it, Turnbull had got over the line. The richest politician Australia had ever seen, later to be nicknamed ‘the Member for Net Worth’,95 had arrived.