CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The lifelong enemies that symbolise a weeping factional wound in Australian conservatism have this week briefly put down their swords.
Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the devout Catholic thatcherite from Sydney’s Upper North Shore, and Malcolm Turnbull the small L reformer from Sydney’s eastern suburbs.
They’ve never had much in common, and their rivalry has torn the Liberal Party to pieces – with endless leadership spills over gay rights, energy policies, and differing views on whether every single Muslim is a terrorist.
But their complicated legacies within Liberal Party still aren’t as tarnished at the man that came after them.
Scott Morrison. The Pentecostal fake rugby league fan who pretended to be from Cronulla despite growing up closer to the Eastern Suburbs beaches than Turnbull did. A man who somehow managed to also be a worse Christian than Tony Abbott.
A man that epitomises everything that is wrong with the ‘me-first’ culture that has been cultivated amongst the Howard Battlers. A man who got everything handed to him without even having to contend with the pressure of consolidating a family fortune. A man who’s upper middle class life was somehow easier than the rich. A man so full hot air that he destroyed the Liberal Party when he ran out of sound bites.
Both Abbott and Turnbull can agree that they aren’t as bad as him. And that he isn’t one of them.
And that’s why they’ve teamed up together this week to deny his membership to Sydney’s exclusive ‘Australian Club’.
Both men are believed to have shook hands as they removed Scott Morrison’s name from the list of prospective members last week.
The Australian Club, situated on the ninth floor at 165 Macquarie Street, is an exclusive, all-male club where elites map out their plans to use the media and government to make themselves even richer. It is no place for new money bogans who dance like clowns at football matches.
It’s an institution that espouses real power – with members including a number of former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd, CEOs, bankers, and judges.
And despite his own love of ‘boys clubs’ it seems Scott Morrison simply doesn’t meet the criteria for the biggest boys club of them all. As a multimillionaire career public servant who made his money on no-brainer property investments that simply came down to luck, Scott Morrison is not one of these people.
Even if he was a useful idiot for a couple years there, nobody wants him to hang around now. That is something that Turnbull and Abbott can agree on.
