CHAPTER EIGHT

Oh, Mathias

What made Mathias Cormann’s defection hurt all the more, apart from the fact that Malcolm Turnbull and his office trusted him implicitly, was that during the Longman by-election campaign, Turnbull told his advisers he wished he had killed off the second phase of the company tax cuts in June. In fact, he had told his leadership group they had to be either dumped or passed by the time parliament rose on 28 June. The reason they continued to live on, and why his treasurer, Scott Morrison, backed him to head off previous attempts by cabinet ministers to dump or reshape them into cuts in personal income tax, or bigger cuts for small business, was because Cormann kept insisting on having one more chance to get them through the Senate.

When Turnbull imposed that deadline of the final fortnight of the parliamentary sitting, no one in the tight-knit leadership group – more secure in terms of leaks than the cabinet – which met every sitting day in his office, spoke up against it. Not even Cormann. Everyone agreed. Turnbull told the group that the company tax cuts were a barnacle that had to be removed. Several members of the group – which included the prime minister; the deputy Liberal leader, Julie Bishop; Morrison; the Nationals’ leader, Michael McCormack; Cormann as finance minister and as leader of the government in the Senate; his deputy, Mitch Fifield; and the leader of the House, Christopher Pyne; plus their most senior staff – recall Turnbull saying this at the beginning of that first sitting week, and then repeating it at the beginning of the second sitting week.

Everyone seemed to be in furious agreement that it was the right call to have them dealt with before parliament got up for the winter recess, and definitely before the five by-elections scheduled for Super Saturday, 28 July. No one demurred when Turnbull issued the edict, but, incredibly, after Pauline Hanson welched on the deal to pass them, Cormann pleaded for yet more time. He was this close, this close, he kept telling Turnbull. He was still confident he could get Hanson and the other crossbenchers across the line. He wanted one more chance. Turnbull, backed by Morrison, relented, and gave it to him, because Cormann had come so tantalisingly close to getting agreement, because Cormann’s arguments that governments should stick by their convictions had merit, and because Turnbull’s faith in the ability of the finance minister to deliver, given his record with the recalcitrant senators, was so absolute.

There had been attempts before this to kill off the second phase of the package, which had never been popular and which had given the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, a bottomless, poisoned well of choice lines to hurl at the government and the prime minister. The previous deadline was before the May 2018 budget.

The government’s narrative, that the tax cuts would boost jobs and growth, was no match for Shorten’s cut-through line promising better hospitals and schools, not bigger banks, and that the tax cuts were a gift to the top end of town from the richest occupant of The Lodge there had ever been. One rich man looking after other rich men – particularly the banks and bankers. The government had eventually bowed to the inevitable, allowing a royal commission into the banks to proceed. Day after day, the media were filled with horror stories about the appalling practices of the banks and other financial institutions. There was pressure on the government to excise the banks from the cuts, but they had already had a 0.06 levy imposed on them in the 2017 budget, estimated to raise $16 billion by the time the final phase of the tax cuts was scheduled to be realised. The problem was that nobody remembered the levy. All they knew was that the banks were absolute bastards that ripped people off, all the way to the grave and beyond, and that the government was still planning to reward them.

If Turnbull had followed his instincts and not allowed himself to be swayed by Cormann, history almost surely would have been different.

Research in the immediate aftermath of Longman showed that the most memorable message which stuck with voters from the campaign was the alleged cuts to the local Caboolture hospital, closely followed by the tax cuts for the banks.

Labor’s campaign, and its better candidate, combined with the strong presence of One Nation, saw the Liberal primary vote drop almost 10 points to 29.6 per cent. If the government had dumped the big-business tax cuts before polling day, and converted them to small-business tax cuts, it is as near certain as it can be that the LNP primary vote would have had a three in front of it. The government knew from its research that the small-business tax cuts were a vastly more popular proposition, and it would still have been able to maintain its economic argument. That, plus closer attention by Trevor Ruthenberg and the LNP to his resumé, would certainly have resulted in a higher primary vote.

The post-poll internal research pointedly suggested the need for better candidate vetting, something which had been recommended in the 2016 post-poll review by Andrew Robb. There was not much tracking polling done by the LNP during the campaign; however, what was done showed that Labor’s candidate, Susan Lamb, added significantly to Labor’s vote, while Ruthenberg detracted from the Liberals’.

The research found that while voters did not necessarily believe Shorten’s message about cuts to the local hospital, or that it was banks versus health and education – helped along by Mark Latham’s robocall on behalf of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, saying Shorten was a liar – it did not deter them from voting Labor. ‘They knew they were lies,’ one campaigner said later. Nevertheless, showing once again the power of the negative, the truth was not enough to sway them.

Another curious finding came in response to the question to voters of where they had got their messages during the campaign. Both major parties rated closely when it came to TV, radio, and print, but there was a divergence when it came to doorknocking. Labor had a distinct advantage there. Part of the reason for this was put down to the fact that Labor had many more volunteers. The other reason was that while the LNP letterboxed, it didn’t knock on doors, so it made less personal contact with voters. More attention to doorknocking had also been recommended in the 2016 review.

It is still unlikely that the government would have won the seat – unlike the public polling by ReachTEL and others, the party’s private research never showed it was likely to win, nor that the vote shifted much over the 11-week period. However, a higher primary vote would have had a very different psychological impact on Queensland MPs. And by changing policy, the prime minister would have shown he was more in tune with the voters, thereby minimising his greatest negative – that he was out of touch.

Cormann’s obsession with passing the full package was fed by his success in March 2017 when he managed to win over the support of the Nick Xenophon team to get the first stage of the government’s company tax cuts through, meaning businesses with turnovers of up to $50 million would pay a rate of 27.5 per cent, which would drop to 25 per cent by 2026–27. The full 10-year plan would cut the rate from 30 per cent to 25 per cent for all companies by 2026–27, at a cost of around $50 billion.

That win against the odds only encouraged Cormann and the government to keep going, and Turnbull to keep supporting him. It got a lot harder after a wrung-out Xenophon announced he was quitting federal parliament to run in the South Australian election. The constant pressure on Xenophon, particularly during the negotiations on the new media laws, when he broke down in private and cried, saying he could not do it anymore, took its toll. His departure robbed the Senate of its sanest independent voice.

Soon after passage of the first stage, Kelly O’Dwyer, the minister for financial services and women, had a brief spell away from the office from mid-April 2017 for the birth of her second child, Edward.

It was not a break as such, and certainly not when Peta Credlin allowed a story to run for a few days before closing it down that a couple of cranky millionaires, upset by changes to superannuation (which, O’Dwyer’s friends pointed out, were largely drafted by Morrison but carried publicly by her without complaint), were pressing her to challenge O’Dwyer for preselection. During her brief period of maternity leave away from the Canberra bubble, O’Dwyer began to grow uneasy about sticking with the company tax cuts.

Lower-house MPs are fond of slinging off at their Senate colleagues. They reckon that, because they don’t have electorates or constituents as such, senators tend to be more insulated or isolated from the everyday experiences of busy families – even more so if they spend too much time in the echo chamber in Canberra listening to conservative commentators. O’Dwyer thought that Cormann, in particular, suffered from this.

O’Dwyer, both fearless and frank, never holds back in private. In meetings with colleagues, they could always rely on her to say exactly what she thought. They didn’t always like it.

O’Dwyer’s concerns continued to grow, and by the time preparations were under way in earnest for the May 2018 budget, she was convinced that the company tax cuts were toxic. She felt that Cormann so feared the blow to him personally if they were abandoned that he had lost sight of the bigger picture: the damage that was being done to the government.

She flew to Sydney for a ‘deep dive’ exercise (an in-depth examination of options) on personal income tax cuts with Turnbull, Morrison, and Cormann on 6 April in preparation for the budget. During the meeting, O’Dwyer suggested they would do better to convert the remaining company tax cuts to larger personal income tax cuts. She said they were a barnacle that needed to be removed.

She argued that, while they had tried hard to get them through, it was time for the government to cut its losses. She argued that no one was asking for them, and posed the simple question, ‘Why are we doing this?’ More pointedly, she wanted to know why they were continuing to ‘flog a dead horse’.

Cormann was not impressed. He argued he was close to getting them through the Senate, they were part of the government’s economic plan, essential to their narrative, and ‘part of who we are’.

It got willing between them. Back then, Cormann had argued that discipline and unity would help win the 2019 election for the government. That, plus hard work and a relentless determination to convince the hold-outs that his way was the best way. ‘I’m not giving up,’ he would tell people. ‘I will keep at it unless there is genuinely no chance left.’

It was not the only time that O’Dwyer would butt heads with the all-powerful finance minister. O’Dwyer’s plan for a business case to examine whether the government should set up a default superannuation fund was also shot down by Cormann before the 2018 budget. O’Dwyer alluded to this in her valedictory speech.

The head of Turnbull’s department, Martin Parkinson, had dropped not-so-subtle hints in the lead-up to the May 2018 budget that the tax cuts should be dumped. He did not directly tell the prime minister to abandon the second phase, but that was the subliminal message from Parkinson as he urged him to think about Plan B if they were voted down. Parkinson was clearly pessimistic about the prospect of getting them passed.

Cormann was unmoved. Turnbull and Morrison were reluctant to countermand him, first because Cormann had exceeded expectations in securing passage of difficult measures, and second because the next phase of the company tax cuts had been woven so tightly into their economic narrative.

A pick-up in revenue meant that Morrison found $114 billion for personal income tax cuts, spread over seven years. That helped ensure that the company tax cuts lived on through the May 2018 budget. However, whatever benefit the government derived from passage of the personal tax cuts through the Senate in the third week of June – again, thanks to Cormann – was shortlived.

After a remarkable series of interviews, when her position changed by the minute, Hanson finally declared on Wednesday 27 June, the day before parliament rose for the winter recess, One Nation’s ‘firm decision’ not to support the tax cuts. ‘I’ve sent a message to minister Cormann this morning, so anyway, he knows,’ she said.

Hanson could sniff the wind better than Cormann, and could sense that the company tax cuts would play out very badly during the upcoming by-elections. She didn’t care how much the media ridiculed her minute-by-minute flip-flopping, or the fact that she went on a cruise during the campaign.

But still, Cormann – who thought he knew Hanson better than anyone else did, even better than she knew herself and her own mind, who had invited her to his home for dinner, and who had grown familiar with her ‘wibble wobbles’, as he called them – believed he could swing her around.

Turnbull believed Cormann, and he believed in Cormann, so, backed by Morrison, he agreed to allow the finance minister one last chance to try to weave his magic. He was at that time the government’s best performer, bar none. He dominated the economic debate, had enormous influence over the prime minister, and Turnbull and his office trusted him 100 per cent. In my opinon, he was the best finance minister since Labor’s legendary Peter Walsh, whom Cormann revered.

Although Cormann never said that the government would win either Longman or Braddon in Tasmania, he did cast the by-elections as a referendum on tax, and made clear the day after Hanson’s ‘firm decision’ to renege that the company tax cuts were still alive and kicking. On 28 June, the day that parliament went into recess, he said the upcoming by-elections would be ‘a referendum on who has the better plan for a stronger economy and more jobs’. He appealed to voters in both seats to send Shorten a message that they opposed higher taxes, and then seized on polling showing support among One Nation voters for the government’s package.

‘I hope that the fact that One Nation voters increasingly appear to be coming on board with our plan for lower business taxes will, over time, help to persuade Senator Hanson this is the right thing to do,’ Cormann said.

‘We need more time to make our argument to our colleagues on the Senate crossbench – and we, of course, will continue to make our argument in the Australian community. The government remains fully committed to these business tax cuts for all businesses, because it is the right thing to do for working families around Australia.’

Even Dutton was to say later that the tax cuts should have been dumped, despite the confidence of his best friend that he could get them through.

‘Turnbull should have had the leadership capacity to make that call,’ Dutton told me.

Shorten was not without his problems during the by-election campaigns. Anthony Albanese delivered the annual Whitlam oration on Friday night, 22 June, urging a more business-friendly approach by Labor. It was immediately, rightly, seen as an alternative to Shorten’s hostile approach. The government had steadied. The budget had been well received, and the Coalition was coming back in the polls. Turnbull still maintained a better-than-healthy lead over Shorten as preferred prime minister. Media polls were showing that Labor could lose both Longman and Braddon, fuelling speculation about what might happen to Shorten in the wake of a once-in-a-century event.

Around the same time, Buzzfeed broke the story that Labor had initiated an internal inquiry into the conduct of one of its backbenchers, following allegations by staff of bullying and inappropriate behaviour. Emma Husar, the member for Lindsay, was a friend of Shorten and his wife, Chloe. Among the charges were that she had made staff walk her son’s dog and pick up its poo. Lo and behold, the Seven Network got precious footage of a female staffer doing the dirty deed.

Husar ended up announcing she would not recontest her seat, although she went from alleged perpetrator to victim after one leaked allegation which suggested that she had flashed Labor frontbencher Jason Clare was roundly denied.

Shorten rode through the controversy, and produced his most devastating line of attack during the campaigns: better hospitals and schools, not bigger banks. The combination of Labor’s deadly messaging, the lack of a clear one from Turnbull – except to mistakenly cast the contest in one radio interview as a choice between him and Shorten – and the Coalition’s poor candidate, coupled with a poor campaign, all contributed to the drop in the LNP vote.

Even on the night of the vote, Cormann was sticking to his guns. It was like the Alec Guinness character in The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lt. Col Nicholson, who lost all perspective when he tried to stop his fellow prisoners of war from blowing up the bridge they had been forced to build for the Japanese. Despite his framing of the contest as a referendum on tax, Cormann argued that he had never thought they would win Longman. Not even the 29 per cent primary vote moved him to rethink his position. When it was put to him late that night that it spelled the end for phase two of the tax cuts, Cormann loudly, reflexively replied, ‘No! Why?’ Then he again went through all the reasons why the government should stick with them.

Until then, despite wobbles, Dutton had stuck by Turnbull, at least publicly.

Dutton remembers Turnbull twice telling him that the government had only survived thanks to Turnbull himself, Morrison, Cormann, and him – Dutton. This is not in dispute. Turnbull and his office were indebted to Cormann particularly, but then he and Dutton were repaid with serious promotions.

Dutton says they did their best to make up for Turnbull’s lack of political judgement.

The questions have persisted around Cormann. Was he duplicitous, plain old disloyal, or did he just try to do his best in an impossible situation?

There are those close to Turnbull, like Sally Cray and David Bold, who had been with him for years and worked closely with Cormann, who do not believe he was duplicitous. They agree, given the closeness of his relationship with Dutton, that Cormann might have been aware of what Dutton was planning, but believe he was not complicit in it.

Cormann had a much better relationship with Turnbull and his office than he ever had with Abbott and his office. Bold worked hand in glove with Cormann in negotiations with the crossbenchers. If Cormann was the closer, Bold was the go-between.

Cray believes that Cormann was not part of Dutton’s plan until the Tuesday of coup week. Cormann had been instrumental in getting Dutton to tweet his belated support for the prime minister.

Turnbull would tell friends he had come to conclude that Cormann was complicit. He was mightily suspicious later that Cormann seemed to go quiet over the previous weekend. He was used to exchanging frequent texts with Cormann, but later realised that there had been a period of ‘radio silence’ between them.

Conversations at the time provide some guidance on, but not necessarily proof of, the extent of Cormann’s involvement. As someone who spoke regularly with Cormann, and exchanged text messages with him, I can only say I believed he was genuine when he told me in mid-2017 that if there were any move against Turnbull, he would resign. He pledged to stick by Turnbull till the end. I wrote about this in an additional chapter of The Road to Ruin.

And I was not the only one whom Cormann had said this to. He told other close friends – no ifs, no buts – that he would go down with the ship. ‘I had an absolute guarantee that he was rusted on, and I believed it until I saw him on TV going to Malcolm’s office’, one of his close friends said after he watched him walk into the prime minister’s office on that Thursday morning.

In preparation for my column for Thursday’s Australian, I asked Cormann on Monday if he was sticking with Turnbull. He said he was. He also said he had talked it over with his wife, Hayley, and that he would resign if anything happened. He sounded exasperated.

‘I am not budging,’ he said. ‘I am supporting Turnbull.’ Until the bitter end? ‘Until the bitter end.’

He claimed then not to have known what Dutton was up to, saying he assumed that Dutton had not told him so he would not be compromised – although this was in conflict with what Dutton told other colleagues at the time, and what he said later, and what Cormann himself had told friends in 2017 about Dutton’s intentions.

Cormann and I did not speak again. After Turnbull spilled his and Bishop’s positions, Cormann claimed that he was too busy to speak. He later ignored all my text messages and calls requesting an interview for this book.

Although Cray refused to believe that Cormann was part of the move against Turnbull until late in the piece, she had begun to worry about what Cormann might do after Ten’s Hugh Riminton reported exclusively on Monday evening that Dutton could be rendered ineligible to sit in parliament because of his wife’s ownership of child-care centres, which allegedly placed him in breach of section 44 of the Constitution, prohibiting MPs from holding an office of profit under the Crown. The story got huge play the next day, then kept growing.

Dutton and his supporters were convinced that Turnbull or his supporters had leaked the story to Riminton. Riminton emphatically denies this, as do Turnbull and all those around him, saying it was discovered through careful research by himself and his team. Turnbull’s office blamed Labor. Riminton says this also is not true.

Riminton told me later that he and his researcher, Kate Doak, had been working on section 44(v) issues for some time, and had done stories involving Queensland senator Barry O’Sullivan. They came across the Dutton issue, and decided to test it by getting an opinion from constitutional-law expert Anne Twomey. Twomey’s advice was that Dutton could have a problem. Ten then sought another opinion from another constitutional-law expert, George Williams. He agreed with Twomey.

Twomey, conscious of the mounting conspiracy theories that have since sprung up, went back through her emails after I contacted her for this book, and provided a timeline. She said Riminton had called her the week before on Monday 13 August to outline the Dutton issue. She says she discussed it with two other constitutional-law and citizenship-law colleagues across the corridor from her office. All of them agreed there was ‘a real issue’, but none of them was completely confident about the legal questions concerning the trust arrangements. She says she conveyed this to Riminton.

The next day, Tuesday, after going through the High Court judgment on former Family First senator Bob Day, who had been ruled ineligible, Twomey told Riminton that Dutton’s was a borderline case and that a court could fall one way or the other on it. George Williams replied on 14 August that there was an arguable case against Dutton, but that the outcome was unclear, as it depended on matters that the High Court had not yet determined.

On Wednesday, Twomey recorded an interview with Riminton at the University of Sydney. ‘At this stage, I was unaware of any leadership-challenge speculation. I thought it was just another s44 issue, albeit about a minister, so it was likely to be a controversial one,’ Twomey wrote in her email to me.

After the leadership speculation erupted on the Friday, she checked with Riminton to see when her interview with him was likely to be aired. Riminton said that they were having it ‘legalled’ and getting graphics done. At a pinch, Ten could have run the story that night, but Riminton and news executives decided to hold off until the Monday. The reason? Ten had a bigger audience on Monday night. Ten knew it had a good story, it wanted to get it right, it wanted to run it on the night when more people would be watching and when it would have maximum impact. They knew it would play into the biggest political story of the year, but they had begun working on it before Dutton’s plan was exposed.

By Monday, when the story aired, as Twomey says, leadership speculation was ‘reaching a crescendo’. ‘But this was not the context in which the television interview was done,’ she says. ‘Nor was the issue originally raised in the context of a leadership challenge – it was done much earlier, and completely independent of it.’

At 5.30 pm that day, after Ten went to air, Twomey was attending a legal seminar that the Commonwealth solicitor-general, Stephen Donaghue, was speaking at. ‘After it finished, I tipped him off that he would be no doubt asked for advice on the Dutton issue,’ she said in her email to me. ‘It seemed to be the first he had heard of it.’

Riminton says the only political office he spoke to during the story’s preparation was Dutton’s, and that was on Monday, when he submitted a series of questions and Dutton denied there was a problem.

Cray knew the story would anger Cormann, and that he would be tempted to believe Turnbull was behind it. She texted him, swearing they had nothing to do with it. Cormann was getting angrier by the minute.

Cormann’s suspicion over the Ten story was not eased by Turnbull’s decision not to take him into his confidence before Tuesday’s party meeting. Cray knew that the story about Dutton’s eligibility, which was being picked up by every other news outlet, and getting huge play, would only deepen the distrust, making an extremely difficult situation even worse.

On Wednesday, Cormann had several meetings with Turnbull. At the first, in the morning, Cormann told Turnbull it was looking bad and that the numbers were shifting. He said that another three cabinet ministers had shifted. Two of those turned out to be Mitch Fifield and Michaelia Cash.

Cormann told Turnbull he should step aside to enable a peaceful transition to Dutton. Turnbull, who did not believe that the numbers had shifted to Dutton, and believed that in fact Dutton had lost some, was outraged by Cormann’s suggestion that he should simply hand over the prime ministership to Dutton.

‘This is terrorism,’ he said to Cormann. Cormann agreed it was. ‘You are asking me to give in to terrorism,’ Turnbull told him. Cormann replied, ‘You have to.’

Cormann was reluctant to appear with Turnbull and Morrison at the press conference after the company tax cuts were voted down by the Senate. He knew he would be asked by the media if he remained loyal to the prime minister. Turnbull insisted that Cormann had to be there. Apart from anything else, Cormann was the one who had insisted they stick with the tax cuts way beyond political prudence, so how could he fail to appear at the press conference supposedly to discuss Plan B?

Cormann stood beside Turnbull and with Morrison on Wednesday to bury them – the tax cuts, that is – and then he pledged publicly to stick with Turnbull. Although it was not as enthusiastic as Morrison’s literal embrace of Turnbull, there were no ifs or buts.

Asked if he might shift his support, Cormann replied, ‘I was very grateful when Malcolm invited me to serve in his cabinet in September 2015. I have served Malcolm loyally ever since. I will continue to serve him loyally into the future.’

Unfortunately for Turnbull, as far as Cormann was concerned, the future did not extend beyond the setting of the sun.

Later that day, aware that Morrison would run if there was another spill, Cray WhatsApped Cormann to warn him that if Dutton persisted with his challenge, Morrison would be prime minister by the end of the week.

Around eight o’clock that night, just as news was breaking that Cormann was shifting, Cray took off for Cormann’s office with a bottle of white wine. She was still hoping she could prevail on him to stick with Turnbull. Cormann was no longer trying to keep things calm. Cray also tried to tell him that Dutton had not gained any numbers – he had in fact lost some, particularly after his thought-bubble on the GST. Cormann said he could no longer hold back the tide. He said that more cabinet ministers were defecting. To Cray, he seemed in despair.

They talked for 45 minutes. Again, she warned him that the week would end with Morrison as prime minister. Cormann agreed that Morrison was ‘up to something’. She tried to convince him that Dutton did not have the numbers and that the people he had surrounded himself with couldn’t run a chook raffle. She wasn’t angry, and nor was he, but he could not see how the genie was going to be put back into the bottle.

In some perverse way, the prospect of Morrison as prime minister, given that Cormann had decided Turnbull was terminal, and that neither Cormann nor Dutton liked Morrison very much, probably strengthened Cormann’s resolve to come out for Dutton.

Despite the public shows of unity and bonhomie, Cormann was not close to Morrison, did not have a high opinion of him, and, according to one person who knew them both well, would have found the idea of Morrison as prime minister ‘sickening’. They had a professional working relationship, but that was it.

Next morning, Cormann rang Cray to say he wanted to see the prime minister. She told him that, as he would know, the prime minister was in the usual morning leadership meeting and would see him later, around 9.10 am.

Cormann was impatient. He texted Turnbull, and turned up at his office door around 8.45 am with Fifield and Cash. Cray saw him, and demanded to know why he was there. Furious, she turned on Fifield and Cash, calling them weak.

As soon as Turnbull told Bishop on Thursday that Cormann was coming around to see him, Bishop says she knew what was about to happen. Later, recounting events to me, she was scathing about Cormann. She described him as ‘the ultimate seducer and betrayer’. She was convinced he had been part of it all along, that he had never supported Turnbull. She noted he had backed Abbott to the hilt.

On Thursday, after Cormann told Turnbull that he was resigning to vote for Dutton, and that he and Fifield and Cash were about to do a press conference, Bishop exploded. ‘I told all of you years ago that this is the most disloyal man and someone you couldn’t trust,’ Bishop told Turnbull and what remained of his leadership group inside the prime minister’s office.

‘I was always told I was wrong. I knew one day he would prove me right – I just wish it had not been today.’

Ciobo’s reaction was also visceral. As he watched Cormann and company at their doorstop, he was thinking, ‘This is without doubt the stupidest thing I have heard in my whole life in politics.’

Before that, Ciobo had thought it was over: Turnbull had won, Dutton was swimming upstream, and had lost support inside the party and outside it with his idea to take the GST off power bills.

He thought the whole thing was a complete debacle, and was angry with Cormann, believing that if he and Cash and Fifield had not walked away from Turnbull, he would still be leader.

‘In my mind, it was done, settled,’ he said later.

‘I genuinely had been trying to be an honest broker. It became very evident to me we were stuck in no man’s land. There was now no way on God’s green earth we could allow this quagmire to continue through the two non-sitting weeks. It had to be brought to a head.’

Darren Chester was horrified by Cormann’s defection, and saddened by the corporate damage it inflicted.

‘Your character is tested every day in this place,’ he told me later. ‘A lot of my colleagues failed the test of character that week. Our collective behaviour that week played directly into the public cynicism about politics in Australia, and whether you can trust any politician whatsoever.’

Chester believes – and who can argue with him? – that it reinforced the view that it was every man and woman for herself. He tweeted to apologise to Australians for what had happened. He had never felt so disappointed or so despondent.

‘Malcolm had his faults, but he was the right man to lead our nation, and he didn’t deserve to be treated the way he was,’ Chester said. ‘My personal disappointment at being sacked [as a minister by Joyce in December 2017] was nothing.’

Chester says there was no real policy issue at the core of it. Abbott and Turnbull had been at war for 20 years, dating back to the time of the Republican debate.

So Chester’s answer to the why-question, why Turnbull was no longer prime minister, was this: ‘Personal animosities within the Liberal Party made it impossible for certain individuals to work in the national interest and put aside personal ambitions.’

Turnbull himself realised that Cormann’s actions spelled doom for his prime ministership. His hopes of hanging on plummeted at that point. His government was at a tipping point, and he knew the damaging impact the defection would have on his MPs. He believed it succeeded in doing exactly what Dutton and Cormann intended at the moment their coup was failing, and that was to undermine him and the government to make sure there was no chance he could recover or make it to the end of the week, and perhaps call an election. Turnbull saw it as a deliberate and calculated act of betrayal designed to destroy him and to revive Dutton’s challenge.

He knew he would not be able to hold out much longer against another party meeting, that MPs would desert him. He knew they would look at what Cormann had done and say they would never be able to put the pieces back together. But he was determined that if he was not to survive, he would hold on long enough to enable Morrison to succeed rather than Dutton.

Dutton was damaged by his actions, probably everywhere except in Queensland and in the studios of the delcons, the bully boys and girls. If anything, the damage to Cormann’s reputation was greater, partly because he had been held in such high esteem and people expected him to not only stick to his word, but to play the adult. Even Cormann’s friends could not understand how he could stand beside Turnbull one day and pledge allegiance, then publicly abandon him the next. He not only wrecked Turnbull’s prime ministership, but he also he wrecked his own credibility. In the 2016 election campaign, he had been a star player. In 2019, there was room for only one star, Morrison. Cormann had a bit part.

Cormann was personally taken aback by the ferocity of the reaction to his decision, and waited for judgement from the electorate. In those early days, at least, his friends said he was reluctant to go out.

‘He did not expect it. When it came, he tried to get out in front of it, then it was like, whoa,’ one said.

Less than a week after the coup, there was a high-powered business roundtable in Perth. Woodside CEO Peter Coleman and Wesfarmers chair Michael Chaney were among those who attended. According to one attendee, Coleman, although not a great fan of Turnbull’s, made it clear that he was appalled by what had happened. Both Coleman and Chaney wanted stability; they were sick of the revolving leadership door, and believed Turnbull was capable of winning the election.

They were concerned about the prospect of a Shorten prime ministership. And they were particularly scornful about Cormann’s role in the coup. All of Cormann’s hard work, all his previous successes, melted away.

Cormann justified his actions in interviews with others by pointing to Turnbull’s decision to bring the challenge on, Cormann’s belief that the 35 votes against Turnbull had rendered his position untenable, and Cormann’s conviction that Dutton had the numbers.