The Attorney-General, Christian Porter, has revealed he feared he was facing a constitutional crisis as Malcolm Turnbull threatened to call an early election to save his prime ministership last year.
“Somehow or other, I ended up being the commonwealth Attorney-General, and I’m facing down a potential constitutional crisis,’’ Mr Porter tells The Australian columnist Niki Savva in her new book Plots and Prayers.
“Ultimately, one that got to DEFCON 4, and then all the army stood down.”
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As the leadership crisis crippled his government in August, Mr Turnbull put his personal security and official car on standby to take him to Yarralumla and visit the Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, to dissolve parliament. The revelation was confirmed in Savva’s book by former Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne.
Even after Mr Turnbull said he would not renominate for the top job if the leadership spill against him was carried, Mr Pyne acknowledged that the besieged prime minister had his official car, “C1”, at the ready in case he decided to visit Sir Peter.
“There was a lot of nonsense going on,” Mr Pyne told Savva. “He wanted to keep all his options open.”
Liberal MPs warned Mr Turnbull his position was untenable. Senior Liberal Simon Birmingham is quoted as saying: “You can’t call an election against your own side.”
Savva’s account of the coup confirms revelations in The Australian yesterday that Mr Turnbull tried to save his position by threatening to advise Sir Peter not to commission contender Peter Dutton as prime minister over concerns he was ineligible to sit in parliament under section 44 (v) of the Constitution.
The threat from Mr Turnbull led to a political showdown with Mr Porter, who argued Sir Peter should be concerned only with the question of whether the new prime minister could guarantee confidence and supply. Mr Porter said he was willing to publicly repudiate Mr Turnbull’s view that Sir Peter could not commission Mr Dutton. The Attorney-General also raised with Mr Turnbull the prospect of offering his resignation but later thought this was a mistake. “There was a significant likelihood that you might have had Peter Dutton win a ballot in the partyroom and someone argue to the Attorney-General — to the Governor-General — that he shouldn’t appoint Peter as prime minister,’’ Mr Porter said. “And then Australia wouldn’t have had a prime minister.
“And I wasn’t going to do that again (offer his resignation), because I had a very firm view after that meeting that the best thing I could do was ensure that Australia had an attorney-general through this process.”
In his interviews for the book, Mr Porter said he voted against the spill motion, which Mr Turnbull lost 45 votes to 40, but he then voted for Mr Dutton in the two rounds of leadership ballots. He said he resisted the urge to bite back against Mr Turnbull. “I felt like saying: ‘Mate, they’re doing to you what you did to them. Like, have some perspective on it’. ”
The book also reveals that soon after Finance Minister Mathias Cormann heard Mr Turnbull had declared his position vacant at the Liberal partyroom meeting on Tuesday, August 21, he told Mr Porter: “This is f..king crazy.”
The Australian’s revelations yesterday drew a sharp response from Mr Turnbull, who took to Twitter to blast Mr Porter’s “nonsense” view that the Governor-General did not need to be involved if Mr Dutton won the spill. “The discretion to swear in a person as PM is vested in the governor-general,” Mr Turnbull tweeted.
“The proposition advanced by Mr Porter that it is none of the GG’s business whether the would-be PM is constitutionally eligible is nonsense. The GG is not a constitutional cypher.’’
Canberra Bureau Chief
Canberra
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