PETER COSTELLO may be remembered as a long-serving treasurer, but he surely has another claim to enduring fame: the longest sulk in history. I still think John Howard made a mistake in not handing over the reins to his deputy, but what Howard was acknowledging, without saying directly, was that Costello was unpopular with his own party. Howard’s oft-repeated mantra that he would remain “as long as the party wants me” was a clever code portraying him as the humble, dutiful and selfless servant of the party, but what it really said was, “I have the numbers and Costello doesn’t.”
The fact is that Costello has never enjoyed wide support within the party, and even when he was contemplating a challenge back in 2006 his support in a party room of 110 was never greater than twenty-seven or twenty-eight at best. (And the bulk of this mixed bunch of malcontents was not so much pro-Costello as anti-Howard, more through thwarted ambition than any pro-Costello sentiment. They were hardly either the cream of the party or the party’s future.) Notwithstanding his success as treasurer (and in a boom, it’s not that hard to look good – Billy McMahon in the 1960s is an example), Costello has always been a divisive figure, and there are good reasons for questioning his judgement.
Costello entered parliament with fanfare, as did another of the class of ’90, the enigmatic South Australian, Ian McLachlan. To be sure, they were star recruits – and the Liberal Party was desperately in need of a talent infusion after losing four elections in a row and watching the party unravel both from within – as Howard and Andrew Peacock waged their prolonged struggle for the party’s soul and leadership – and externally from the likes of the megalomaniac from Queensland, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who allowed himself to be flattered into an ultimately disastrous (and always risible) tilt at federal politics.
Older heads within the party counselled that the divisions had to end, that the civil war was over and it was time to unite behind a new leader. Many eyes then turned to a newcomer from 1987, John Hewson, who was encouraged to contest the leadership that Peacock, having lost his second election, was anxious to vacate.
The number crunchers quickly went into action – in fact, the first calls were made on election night once it became clear that Labor had won another term. A broad consensus emerged that Hewson was the man, but one pocket of resistance quickly came to light as the numbers men called and counted – Kroger and Costello.
They were of the view that Peacock, a fellow Victorian, should be encouraged to stay on for a time as the party regrouped, arguing from local experience that an untried leader needed to be groomed into the leadership rather than thrown to the wolves. Their precedent was Lindsay Thompson’s retention of the Victorian party leadership after the 1982 loss, bedding down and soothing a demoralised party after twenty-seven years in government, while a new leader – in this case, Jeff Kennett – was readied. Whether this was persuasive or not, it is what they argued.
Hewson and his backers were furious. So, too, were the supporters of Howard who still smarted from Peacock’s coup against their man in 1989: they would not have Peacock stay on under any circumstances. The way the Sydneysider Hewson saw it, Kroger and Costello had ambitions of their own to take over the federal party just as they had in Victoria, and they were planning on running their own candidate for leadership – McLachlan.
The upshot was that by the time Costello arrived in Canberra he already had enemies – and foremost among them was Hewson, who not only treated Costello with contempt and gave him a very junior shadow portfolio (corporate law reform) but also had his staff undermine Costello in the press gallery. Hewson simply never trusted him – and the Downer–Costello coup against him in 1993 simply confirmed his distrust.
Others look askance at Costello’s role in supporting Downer’s leadership in the so-called (surely ironically) Dream Team. The argument within Liberal circles goes like this: Costello must have known Downer was a prat and would be a disaster, but if he did not, why didn’t he? Was his judgement so faulty, or did he support Downer knowing Downer would fail and expecting it would all fall to him? If so, he read it all wrong, and completely missed the elephant in the room, Howard, sitting there quietly waiting and counting.
So Howard became leader and Costello clung to his deputy’s job. After the election win in 1996, Costello exercised the traditional prerogative of a Liberal deputy leader by choosing his own portfolio, even though it was widely believed in the party that Howard would have preferred his long-time supporter Peter Reith, or even McLachlan.
It is of course history now that Costello disappointed his own supporters by not challenging Howard. Most likely it would have been an act of futility in the short-term, but nevertheless it would have staked his claim as a serious contender rather than just a pretender. (The history of successful leadership challenges in Australia suggests that success requires two challenges, as was the case with Fraser and Snedden in the 1970s, and Hawke and Hayden in the 1980s.)
The long sulk set in after the 2007 election loss, and has continued ever since. Failing to get a corporate job overseas, Costello alternated between the silent hulking presence on the backbench and the agonised Hamlet. When the party needed soothing and steadying after the loss, he was out of the picture. He let Brendan Nelson stumble and bumble along; he is happy to let Malcolm Turnbull do the same. His contribution appears to have been close to zero; his considerable experience unshared. He has already failed the test of leadership – but that probably confirms the opinion of many of his colleagues.
The idea of leadership in the Liberal Party is qualitatively different from the leadership idea in the Labor Party, just as it differs significantly from notions of corporate and military leadership. It is a leadership idea neither encumbered by theory nor bound by precedent; it has considerably more to do with personal skills and personality than it does with ideology, and its efficacy at any given time is essentially of a prescriptive nature: the circumstances do indeed call forth the leader. It has been said with considerable justification that the “locus of power” in the Liberal Party is the parliamentary leader – owing, largely, to the leader’s right to select the front bench and also because of an inherent tendency to concede greater weight to party leaders than to notions of party democracy. The party is uniquely dependent upon its parliamentary leadership for its coherence and unity.
Effective leadership in the Liberal Party essentially delivers three things: a sense of movement measured in electoral success, a sense of purpose and a sense of unity. It is hard to see a man sulking in self-imposed exile successfully delivering any of these, his considerable talents notwithstanding. It is even harder to fathom the sense of the Liberal Party in even entertaining the notion of rewarding what is undignified and totally self-serving behaviour. •
