FORMER New England MP Tony Windsor says Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership success will be judged on whether he can overcome self-perceived intellectual superiority and negotiate with a diverse Senate cross-bench.
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Mr Windsor was one of two rural MPs who held the balance of power in the Lower House after the 2010 federal election and chose to back Labor to form government.
He has been one of the most vocal critics of former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott who relentlessly attacked Julia Gillard’s government as the Opposition leader in the hung parliament.
The Coalition subsequently won the 2013 election in a landslide result, but had its large majority cut to the slimmest possible margin of one seat, at this year’s poll.
Mr Windsor resigned ahead of the 2013 election and tried unsuccessfully to challenge Nationals’ leader Barnaby Joyce to reclaim his old seat in northern NSW this year.
But speaking to Fairfax Media, the one-time king-maker and no-nonsense farmer said he was now interested to see how the Turnbull regime handled its slender lead in the House of Representatives and expanded crossbench in the Upper House.
The Coalition has only 30 seats in the Senate and will need to broker deals through negotiations with various crossbenchers, if it can’t pass legislation with the support of Labor or the Greens.
The 11-member crossbench - up from eight - includes four One Nation senators, three from the Nick Xenophon Team and four independent and minor party members.
In a tongue in cheek reference to the reversal of roles from the hung parliament, Mr Windsor said he would enjoy observing how Mr Turnbull and Mr Joyce managed the new government and dealt with the, “chaos and illegitimacy, of the people’s voice”.
He said the Coalition had a perverse view that if a party had an elected majority in the House of Representatives, “you have the right to dictate to everybody else”.
Mr Windsor said that was “an ego thing more than anything else but that’s not how our system works”.
“Tony Abbott, I’m told by some of the crossbenchers, didn’t negotiate anything with them,” he said.
“He had a cup of tea with a few of them once or twice and I don’t think Malcolm Turnbull has been much better but Scott Morrison has been the pick of them, I hear.
“And this is the big challenge for Turnbull because he thinks he’s an intellectual giant.
“They’ve got to learn to negotiate with people who may not be intellectual giants but they are there in the parliament because the people put them there and if he can’t do that, this parliament will be a failure too.”
Mr Windsor questioned how Mr Turnbull would deal with the increased pressure of the new parliament and the Coalition’s reduced numbers.
“Is he going to see it as a chaotic mess in front of him or as a challenge?” he said.
“He should see it as a challenge and he may well be surprised by the intellectual rigor that some of these people have because he’s never really spoken to them.
“But you can bet your bottom dollar that (Opposition leader) Bill Shorten will portray it as a mess and there will be some payback here from the hung parliament.
“Shorten will be prosecuting the case that this is all chaotic and illegitimate and it’ll be interesting to watch Barnaby Joyce and others, who preyed on that, as to how they handle it.
“It will all be very entertaining and I’ll watch on with a fair degree of interest.”
Mr Windsor said Mr Turnbull had performed “surprisingly poorly” from the first day he claimed the PM’s job, after removing Mr Abbott as Liberal leader late last year.
“For a man who said he was interested in the economic realities and everything being on the table in terms of the economy, he’s just developed into an opportunist like the rest of them,” he said.
“And I think that was highlighted when Bill Shorten put negative gearing on the table, from opposition, and Morrison and Co had to argue against something that they actually believed in privately.
“I thought that summed Turnbull up.
“They know something has to be done about that one issue and other issues like climate change and the NBN.
“Turnbull knows better on both of those issues yet he’s been subjugated to a bit of a puppet on both of them,
“It’s very sad because I think there was a lot of expectation about Malcolm and very little, if any of it, has been delivered.”
Mr Windsor said looking back objectively at the hung parliament’s outcomes on policy and legislation it won, “hands down”, compared to the previous majority parliament of Abbott and Turnbull.
“The hung parliament wins by a country mile,” he said.
“The majority parliament of both Abbott and Turnbull has been a failure because of a lack of leadership and partly because they don’t know how to negotiate with people in the Senate.”
After losing his electoral battle at the July 2 election, Mr Windsor said he wasn’t into the “nonsense” of making a phone call to Mr Joyce, to concede the final result.
“The people have spoken,” he said.
Mr Windsor said there was “no doubt” that reports in The Australian newspaper had an impact during the tense last week of the bitter election race, costing him 5-6 per cent of the vote.
“Our polling was neck and neck with a week to go and that fell apart on some of the bull shit stories they ran but that’s part and parcel of modern day politics and how they work,” he said.
“Not many people read them, but they start the fire for the other media and the other media are that dumb now that some of them just pick up on it and dress it up as fact.
“Not all of them - in fact the local press and Fairfax people up here from what I saw were very good - but even the local ABC picked up on some of The Australian’s crap.”
Journalists from the news outlet were locked out of an election night function by Mr Windsor’s team but he said the company had been blacklisted by him for the past five years.
Mr Windsor said his lawyers were considering legal action relating to coverage he objected to during the final days of the campaign “and we’ll see what comes of that”.
He also promised to continue working in the political space on issues that motivated him to try and beat Mr Joyce and return to parliament, like land use conflicts between mining and agriculture and improving regional communications, health and education.
“I wouldn’t say I’m done with at all,” he said of another possible future tilt at politics.
“I’m not saying yes either but I think it’s silly to say ‘never’ and rule anything out because you never know, we could be back at the polls in three months.
“I’d never say never to any of the options that are out there but irrespective of that I’m going to stay on the government’s hammer on some of those issues.”
Mr Windsor said he knew most of the Senate crossbenchers and would be making himself available to talk to them, especially on the Liverpool Plains coal mining issue or gas mining.
“If the appropriate scientific work hasn’t been done - and it hasn’t - I’m more than happy to be part of the civil disobedience in terms of the community,” he said of the Shenhua mine project.
“As I’ve said many times before, if the Franklin River issue was a significant issue in our economic and environmental past this one will be a very important one in terms of our future.”
Mr Windsor estimated his nomination for New England created political competition that delivered $300 million in Coalition election promises for the rural electorate.
“In seven weeks they’ve been able to achieve an outcome for the electorate that’s probably far greater than most other safe seats will see in a full term,” he said.
“There was $300 million worth of commitments made by the government and that all eventuated in the last six or seven weeks of the campaign.
“And none of that would have happened if I hadn’t been delivering a level of competitiveness.”