Party of the decade must wait
POOR Josh Frydenberg. He was probably planning on holding some kind of celebration last week — possibly with a little bit of fundraising — to mark the 10 years since he was first elected MP for Kooyong.
Instead he was locked up in Canberra, waiting to be released so he could attend parliament on Monday, which marked the end of his second year as Treasurer.
It seems he’s been part of our national life forever because, like Bill Shorten, Frydenberg was someone people were talking about long before he arrived in parliament. But he’s had a rapid rise for a man who’s only been there since 2010.
Made Tony Abbott’s parliamentary secretary when the Coalition came back to power in 2013, he was assistant treasurer a year later. A year after that, he’d made it into cabinet under Malcolm Turnbull.
The beauty in having had three jobs in three years was that no one was really in a position to judge how well he had performed in any of them. That run of luck ended when Turnbull made him environment and energy minister after the 2016 election, handing him the brief of fixing the mess that is energy policy. Four years later, energy policy remains unfixed and Turnbull is long gone.
But even among colleagues who detested Frydenberg’s solution — the since abandoned National Energy Guarantee — there seems to have been a grudging respect for the way he tried to win them over in the two years he was in the portfolio. Which perhaps explains why, when Turnbull fell, taking the NEG with him, no one seems to have held it against Frydenberg that he was its author.
Everyone knew that prior to being handed that big brown sandwich by Turnbull, energy policy was not something that had greatly exercised Frydenberg’s imagination. There’s certainly little indication he has thought about it much since he handed it over to Angus Taylor. He had been given a job to do and he’d done it. Unfortunately, the same might be said of the responsibilities attached to his present portfolio.
The job in Canberra that long-time Josh watchers had assumed he really wanted, aside from the top one of course, was foreign affairs minister.
Which is why I suspect that when he spoke recently of his admiration for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he was thinking more of the man who stood up to the Soviet Union than the supply-side warrior and, in Thatcher’s case, the woman who retrieved the Falklands, not the victor of the miners’ strike.
No one ever lost points with the Liberal Party for expressing an admiration for Thatcher but as personality types she and Frydenberg don’t share much in common. The Iron Lady famously didn’t care what other people thought of her, whereas if there’s one thing his admirers and detractors all agree on about Frydenberg, it’s that he has a craving to be liked. And while she revelled in conflict, he is notoriously conflict-averse.
Moreover, by the time they became leaders, everyone knew what Thatcher and Reagan stood for.
In his first 18 months as Treasurer, Frydenberg gave no sign that he was itching to undertake anything. Which you could argue was fine in those more innocent days.
Since the current disaster has befallen us, he and Scott Morrison have performed admirably. Without the money they have poured into the economy, things would have been unimaginably worse. Working to solve an immediate crisis has played to Frydenberg’s strengths: he’s quick on the uptake, masters a problem quickly and is not overly encumbered with the sort of ideological baggage that would prevent sudden U-turns.
Eventually, however, this crisis will pass (slower than it would have without Victoria’s quarantine debacle) and then we are going to want to see a sign from the government that it knows where it wants to take us.
Frydenberg and the PM deserve real credit for the way they have steered us through this crisis. But is the plan to try to return Australia to the world of December 2019, or will our leaders seize the opportunity to try to remake it? However they answer, the question will involve unpopular decisions.
So congratulations to Frydenberg on 10 years in parliament and on getting us through this crisis. Yet sadly for him, the real work starts here.