Peter Dutton enters the chat

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more.

What do Rasputin, Tupac, and Pharaoh Ramses III have in common?

No, it's not the weirdest boy band ever.

They all met their end at the hand of an assassin.

From seizing power to silencing dissidents, Assassins unpacks the moments in which someone decides that murder is the move.

Search Assassins with Aslan Bahari on the ABC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

The saying goes that if you want a friend in politics, well, you better get a dog.

And as Susan Lee is fast learning, chances are a well-trained dog will offer greater discipline.

This latest round of liberal infighting isn't just about the future of the party.

The Rear Vision Mirror 2 is getting a workout.

With Peter Dutton, remember him?

Well, he's re-entering the chat.

Struggling Struggling to keep up?

You're certainly not alone.

Welcome to Politics Now.

Hi, I'm Brett Worthington, filling in for PK.

And I'm Jacob Greber.

I love an introduction with dog in it.

Dogs in it.

Like, hey, that's where we're at at this point.

It really is the story now, Jacob.

Did you imagine when you were waking up on Monday morning that you'd see the words Peter Dutton up in headlines, taking a swipe at Andrew Hastie based off this secret document that who knows who's seen it and who knows where it's come about from but it's part of that broader review that's happening into the Liberal Party election that you don't need to be reminded the worst one they've had in about eight decades yeah so what are we talking about here we're talking about for one thing people have disputed whether it's actually a document or whether where this has come from is a verbal submission that he's given to the Liberal Party's review into the election loss.

That's being headed by Prue Goward, and I've just gone blank on the second person.

Nick Minchin.

Nick Minchin, right.

And so they've been talking to loads of people, like dozens and dozens of people about what went wrong and where it went wrong.

Now there's this report this morning that Peter Dutton wasn't happy with Andrew Hasties' performance during the election campaign, that he essentially went missing,

went on strike was the way it was put it,

was absent, scared to do media or lazy.

Now that's

a pretty sort of harsh character assessment.

We don't know absolutely whether those are the words used by Peter Dutton, but I have verified myself

that there were frustrations

in Peter Dutton's mind with the way Andrew Hastie was campaigning and really wasn't sort of that visible.

Hadn't been for the previous two years as shadow defence spokesman and then during the campaign wasn't really part of it as well.

So there's sort of lingering resentment about that.

What's fascinating, of course, this has happened

two days after Andrew Hastie sensationally quit the front bench.

There's this incredible fracturing that's happening on the Conservative side of the Liberal Party, both inside and out of it.

So we've seen Andrew Hastie's departure and Spearsy and I had a quick look at that on Saturday and it's in the podcast feed if people want to check it out.

But you see Andrew Hastie, a man who'd been long looking for an off-ramp, he got it, he seized it, he says it's over immigration and the ways in which the party was going to shape policy.

He's sitting there in one camp.

You've got Angus Taylor, who ran against Susan Lee in the leadership ballot.

He's also in that Conservative camp.

And then Peter Dutton, who's no longer really involved in any of this, but typical that a leader would offer their reflections on how an election went.

He too making clear that there were simmering tensions between him and Andrew Hastie even before we got to the situation that we're seeing here.

What it points to, and I don't think Peter Dutton's intervention in this is deliberate or in any way, you know, aimed at somehow undermining Andrew Hastie.

I think other forces have grabbed it, put it out there, and

it does look bad for Andrew Hastie.

But it gels with other things I've been hearing, which is a level of disappointment.

Ever since he's been...

active on social media with a bunch of topics, net zero, immigration, manufacturing, you name it,

he's been out there sort of niggling at the current position, indicating he wants to go further to the right.

All part of a sort of leadership thing.

He's meant to be the great saviour of the party from the party's right flank.

Problem is,

where are the runs on the board?

Where has he demonstrated an ability to really take the fight up to the government or the Labor Party?

When was the last time he asked a question that unraveled a minister?

When was the last time he found a document that completely sideswiped the government?

It's not like he hasn't been in a portfolio with lots going on.

I mean, the whole defence space has been under pressure now for a few years.

The question of AUKUS and how to fund it has been live.

Do you recall Hastie being at the forefront of that?

No, and there's a moment that is really seared in my memory of late in the last parliament, of Andrew Hastie, who, like you say, was very much framed in some ways as the heir apparent, early 40s.

He's from central casting in terms of the dream liberal candidate.

And he had to follow Peter Dutton in a parliamentary speech in which you just had to go off the cuff.

You just needed to be able to talk for 15 minutes.

And I think that some elements had forgotten just how long Peter Dutton had been in the parliament for and his ability to get up and understand how the parliament works.

He's been a manager of government business.

He knows how that building runs.

And yes, this doesn't really matter insofar as like in the real world, what does it matter if you don't understand necessarily how the parliament works?

Well, if you want to get anything done, you've got to understand how the parliament works.

But to have that confidence to just stand up and go for it.

and this was you know months ago now, my kind of thinking was he's not quite where Peter Dutton, a figure like that, is.

And if he wants to be the leader, you need to carry that authority.

And if that's a nervousness that exists within the parliament and understanding how that would work, that would undercut your effort as an opposition leader to be able to really go after the government.

It's interesting that these questions have come up.

It really doesn't matter what you and I think of Andrew Hastie, it's utterly irrelevant.

What matters is what his colleagues think of Andrew Hastie.

And the reviews are quite mixed, it has to be said.

Yes, he presents well, he does all right on camera, he's got that backstory that's compelling.

But in the rough and tumble of politics

he hasn't drawn blood and

he hasn't sort of scored in that sense.

Now you might say well who cares if you can't run parliament?

Who cares if you're not good at the shenanigans of parliament?

Well let me give you two names.

Anthony Albanese and John Howard.

Both men had apprenticeships in the parliament.

They intrinsically knew how the institution works.

They knew where the levers were.

They knew how you wield power inside this building.

And that made them increase, or it's in the case of the current Prime Minister, we'll see, we'll see how long he lasts, but it's so far making them very, very effective.

You need to know how that place works in order for you to be a successful Prime Minister.

Peter Dutton, as you said, had much longer experience, did much more in terms of coming up through the ranks than Andrew Hastie has.

The incredible thing is, he's been there 10 years, but he came in right on that Tony Abbott wave when there was a whole bunch of more senior people ahead of him who got all the cabinet positions.

And then, as that government aged, he eventually got up to the point where he was sort of just short of really of a big hitting job.

And then, in opposition, you know, hasn't really fired.

So, those questions sort of linger.

I think they're important.

Maybe he gets that experience somehow.

But

there are two people now who've jumped up on the right, Jacinta Amber Jemba Price and Andrew Hastie, who, in the eyes of a lot of their colleagues, aren't yet up to this job.

And so we've got a kind of short-term and then longer-term efforts.

If we look at the longer-term Andrew Hastie project, he says he's going away.

He wants to really focus on the centre-right of politics.

He's concerned about One Nation.

We've seen another poll out today where that essentially doubling the primary vote of where One Nation was at at the last election.

And it's clear that he wants to focus in on domestic issues, economic issues as a way of shaping that policy.

Says he's not challenging Susan Lee today in the here and now, but

very much in the here and now, Susan Lee is without a permanent home affairs spokesperson at a time in which there is a story out there that the coalition is very much keen to get onto.

We've seen James Patterson, who's back in the role in an acting capacity, trying to prosecute the government over what it knew about the return of these women and and their children from Syria who'd been languishing for many years, the so-called ISIS brides.

James Patterson made clear this morning he won't be staying in that home affairs portfolio.

What are you expecting then from Susan Lee in terms of how she shapes up for that key position?

Well,

there are various names being bandied about for that job.

Good time to have a J at the front of your name at the moment.

Yes, is it James McGrath?

John O'Dunnim,

Julia Lisa, James Patterson's had a go, and James Hume's being a good one.

James Hume might come out.

Very good, okay.

Only qualification, your first name starts with Jane.

Well, actually, I could have a go.

I've got a late entrance.

So when you're not becoming the home affairs folks, can you imagine

a worse job?

Yeah, look, it's an opportunity for her.

Maybe she brings someone in like a Jane Hume, who's probably wasted on the back bench.

Jane Hume had a shocking campaign.

She had a terrible campaign.

But he's a great communicator and is up there and willing to mount a case and wants to talk to the electorates that the Liberal Party is going to have to win back if they're going to get back to government.

John O'Duniam from the right, maybe he's a good one for her to bring in so that she can cross that divide internally.

McGrath, I think is also an option.

So, yeah, she's got some people she can bring in who I actually suspect will do quite well.

And Spearsy on Saturday compared James Patterson to something like what Matthias Cormann was to Malcolm Turnbull during Malcolm Turnbull's prime ministership, a conservative figure.

James Patterson, very much in that leadership group now around Susan Lee, was out on Saturday, again out today, reinforcing the support that she has within the party room.

But he is young, he is conservative, and he's keen to shape the future of the party.

And I think fairly close to Andrew Hastie, that he is your break in case of an emergency guy.

He will be crucial, don't you think, to the future of Susan Lee's leadership?

Yes, yes, I do.

And he's also demonstrating what a team player looks like.

They can put him up pretty much on any topic.

Now, whether you like his politics or not, put that to one side.

He's incredibly effective.

He can handle interviews, he can throw it back on the government.

I don't think anyone who's tangled with him underestimates him.

He's incredibly sharp and quick, but he's not out there sort of making it about himself.

So that is a demonstration of the team aspect of politics.

And it is a team sport in our Westminster system.

And frankly, that's why, I mean, Hastie, he wanted to weigh in on Dan Tien's portfolio of net zero.

He wanted to weigh in on Susan McDonald's portfolio of energy.

He wanted to weigh in on Paul Scar's immigration policy and Alex Hawke on manufacturing.

So he didn't have much choice but to leave.

Like

if you want to be able to spray across the landscape like that, the political portfolio landscape, you can't be in a shadow cabinet.

And the public and private sentiment that you hear is that there is no challenge on today, whether from Andrew Hastie or someone else within the party.

But how are you assessing where this leader is at five months into the job?

It's incredibly tough, incredibly tough.

I think there's disappointment with her in quarters of the Liberal Party.

They tend to handicap her performance against the underlying reality.

of devastation in the May election,

the incredibly tough circumstance that they are in, and a government that's ascendant, in control of everything, able to dominate the narrative.

So they handicap her performance against that.

But there is definitely disappointment with her.

There is also a recognition that these internal kind of blow-ups are not necessarily her fault, but they're symptomatic of weaker leadership.

There are those who love to point out that these same rows occurred under Peter Dutton, but that they were kept in check.

They never made it to the newspapers.

And there's some truth to that.

We can debate at what cost that came when it came to the election and not having policy positions.

So I think there's also a sympathetic view that this is a process the Liberal Party has to go through.

They didn't do it in the first term.

They have to go through this painful reckoning and these arguing on these fundamental points of disagreement.

And you're right.

I don't know if you've detected anything, but there's actually a sense that Andrew Hastie might have even lost numbers in the last few weeks

with the way he's handled this.

I think that there is that also assumption that, and it's something you've you've talked about as well, that it's not an empty chair challenge anymore.

To replace Susan Lee as the leader requires someone to make a front-on challenge to her.

The numbers that Angus Taylor and Susan Lee had, sure,

the party room has changed since then, but also a leader has had four or five months in the job.

It's a different party room than on many levels.

That's right, and that's why I don't think anything's in it now

because

those numbers as they were, and there was really only a vote in it,

and then Susan Lee has lost, Giselle Capterian, I think Linda Reynolds

and maybe.

David Fawcett from South Australia has retired as well.

Right.

But that was when it was an option of A versus B, not against an incumbent.

Now it will be a contest against an incumbent leader.

Unless she steps down, it will be a challenge.

And so those numbers don't necessarily play out the way they did in that ballot.

Again,

it'll be a different set of circumstances.

Angus Taylor, who obviously lost out to Susan Lee, has been very quiet.

Very.

Is that a smart move?

What do you think is coming up?

I think that, say, you look at this primary vote again in the news poll that's come out today, and News Poll is one that is respected across both sides of the political aisle.

The Prime Minister very much keeps a close eye.

He wants to know where News Poll is at.

The opposition's primary vote is at 28%.

One Nation is sitting at 11%, and Labor is up at 38, which is the best result it's had in quite some time.

Angus Taylor, you suspect, is playing a longer game here in that what is the rush to get to that job right now, to challenge for the leadership now when you've still then got two and a half years until the next election and a government that, according to these polls, is faring quite well.

The rush to get that job now,

you'd think would not bode well for keeping that job by the time that election rolls around again.

And has he now got, I mean, politics is always about framing, isn't it?

It's perception.

And

you build the extremes and then you put yourself in the middle and say, this is who I am.

Angus Taylor now can say, actually, I'm not the most right-wing candidate in the Liberal Party.

I'm the moderate.

I'm the moderate.

I'm the conservative moderate of the Liberal Party.

And maybe that helps him down the track, you know, bring some of those middling votes back.

We'll get a fascinating insight into this tomorrow.

When the Parliament is back, we'll see that first question time.

And too many

centimetres in newspapers and radio airwaves and TV airwaves are focused to question time.

But you will get a sense of how the party room is travelling when Susan Lee steps up to give that first question.

What is the party like behind her when she speaks?

But she's also potentially not the only leader at the moment with some leadership headaches.

I'm so glad you brought that up.

Talk to me about Larissa Waters.

Yesterday was on Insiders.

Well, our colleague David Spears interviewed her and threw what I thought were pretty straightforward questions and she really struggled a bit.

There was the one that jumps out the most that is generating a bit of chatter around the place,

her answer to the question of whether she supports wind in the energy mix.

And she kept saying, well, I support renewables.

Because the question was, do you support a quadrupling as the advice suggests Australia will need in order to reach?

Now, the significance of her saying that is there is actually quite a live debate within the Greens about wind.

There's a block that really doesn't like wind, including the Christine Mill and Bob Brown kind of

side of the movement.

They're campaigning heavily against a very, very large wind project in Tasmania called Robben Island, which the Commonwealth government has approved.

Larissa Waters incredibly...

She doesn't know much about it.

Well, she said, I haven't looked into that, which is, I mean, that doesn't quite pass the sniff test.

Bob Brown is a famous supporter of Larissa Waters.

You could argue that he probably toasted the Labor Party in 2019 by campaigning on Adani.

And that was really about getting Larissa Waters into the Senate, getting her to keep that Senate spot.

So it just doesn't add up that she doesn't have a view on that project.

And I think she, like Susan Lee, is under pressure trying to manage a party where there are these divisions.

Now, it's not the Greens don't do it in that sort of,

you know, they don't.

But it's nonetheless a live thing for them.

And

it was a sign that she, too, is sort of struggling as leader to balance those tensions, I think.

I mean, I know what you think.

Is that okay for her to have that sort of a position?

It just doesn't seem to add up.

The bit that I was trying to get to the bottom of was, you know, Larissa Waters has made a real virtue out of a bit of plain speaking

since becoming the leader.

And the language on Insiders yesterday was quite politician-political political in a way in which you're trying to avoid saying anything in many ways here.

You either you don't want to say you're against wind, but also you want to protect a bird, a parrot, I believe it's one of the issues with this wind farm.

It looked like a leader that was desperately trying to get out of the question and the trouble with an insiders interview is there's time and David Spears knows how to use it very well.

Yeah, yeah.

It left her looking quite exposed on that issue and it has been picked up.

Does she have the clout now to, I don't know, negotiate with the government on the EPPC, the environmental protection laws that are coming up towards the end of the year, early next year?

It's going to be a very, very big debate.

She will be at the centre of that as the leader.

The Greens will be pushing the government hard.

They'll want things like a climate consideration in the bill.

They'll want

an end to native logging if they're pushing the way they did last time when they tried to get this through a year ago,

a bit under a year ago.

And so she's going to be in the middle of this argument.

Does she have the clout to push this and then do the compromise that is inevitable?

Yeah, Jacob, as we're recording this, I look up and Anthony Albanese is in a warm embrace with the PNG Prime Minister James Marapay.

They're about to sign.

It's finally happening.

It's finally happening.

To what extent is the Prime Minister breathing a sigh of relief that the PUC treaty is finally being signed?

He was incredibly confident two weeks ago that it would get signed and

held to that.

He would have probably wanted it signed on the spot when they were there for the 50th anniversary of PNG independence.

That would have been a big piece next to it.

Kind of almost makes sense now that it isn't happening on the same day.

I mean, you're celebrating independence.

And on the same day, what, you're signing this treaty that sort of, I mean, it doesn't explicitly reduce your independence, but it certainly binds you to your old colonial master, as it were, in a military

colour.

Maybe not come here and offer money for you.

Maybe not a great look.

I think it was interesting, there was a lot of people who were quick to pounce on that as a failure for the Prime Minister, an embarrassment, a setback.

And now we're seeing, obviously, that that was more on the Papua New Guinea side.

They couldn't get a quorum in their cabinet.

They've signed that off last week, and here they are now doing it

in the Prime Minister's.

Is it the ante-room of the cabinet room?

I think that's right.

As we look at the screen, there's a lot of the flags are set up.

It's all happening.

Well, the the last time we signed one of these was more than 70 years ago.

So it's a big deal.

Yes, it incredible.

It puts PNG on the same level as the United States and New Zealand in terms of Australia's three allies.

We talk a lot about our close, dear friends in the world.

We now have three allies.

Well, we've still got to get this treaty through Parliament, of course.

Which might be easier on the Australian side, it seems, than the PNG side, according to some reporting.

Right, right.

I can't see the opposition putting up too much resistance to it, I would have thought, because the national interest here is really quite compelling.

It allows Australia this vital defence zone, the broader area of interest, as they sort of say in the military planning space, does encompass Papua New Guinea into the archipelago.

Having that relationship, having troops embedded on both sides, having equipment there is a really, really big deal.

And of course, that element in the treaty of essentially coming to each other's aid is vital as well.

So, really, really quite a big deal to sign this deal today.

It might or might not lead to some other deals in the Pacific as well.

That would certainly be the government's hope.

There are more challenging ones with Sevanuadu and Fiji.

I'm no NRL expert, but how many teams can we accommodate?

Sounds like it's going to get expensive, isn't it?

I think we're dropping half a bill on a Papua New Guinea team.

Yeah.

Look, I'm the kiss of death for any sporting team at the moment.

So, you know, I'm sure they won't want me cheering for them.

Are they going to be called the crocodiles, the PNG Crocodiles?

Or just call it bookpook.

Bookpook.

Jacob, lovely to get to spend some time with you again.

Pleasure.

Thanks, Brett.

And tomorrow, Raph Epstein will be with me here on Politics Now.

By then, we will have seen the Parliament come back, got Senate estimates underway.

The Communications Minister is going to be sitting down with the telco bosses to read the Riot Act to them ahead of bushfire season.

If you have a question on any of this or more, you can always send us a voice note.

The partyroom at abc.net.au and Mel Clark and I will get an answer for you when we bring you the party room on Thursday.

See you, Jacob.

See you, mate.