Final Curtin for Julie Bishop, is it curtains for the Coalition?

In the end all the shouting and stomping was for nothing. Momentum lurched one way and then the other only to be stopped dead in its tracks as Julie Bishop got to her feet in the House just after three o’clock yesterday to announce her retirement from politics.

Everyone could take a breather. The quarrels, scandals and policy missteps would take a back seat. Bishop’s announcement led on all news reports with the day to day entrail examination of federal politics either discarded entirely or run somewhere up the back just before the sport, the weather and the amusing cat that does the ironing segment.

A 20-year veteran of federal politics, Bishop was a minister in the Howard government (Education and Science, Women, and Ageing), the first female deputy leader of the federal Liberal Party (erroneously described as Deputy Prime Minister on both the Channel Seven and Nine News services) and Foreign Minister in the Abbott and Turnbull governments since 2013.

Depending on your view, we have just 78 or 85 sleeps before the next election. Of these, just three have been set aside as parliamentary sitting days. Put that in the nice work if you can get it category.

On the final sitting day but three of the 45th Parliament, Bishop not only halted the tawdry to-and-fro politicking, she cast other retiring pollies into the shade.

Euromoney’s MVP in 2009, Wayne Swan’s valedictory speech where he tactfully neglected to mention the 100,000 or so single mothers he, Julia Gillard and Labor dispatched into poverty, was left to nestle deep in oblivion while Labor’s favourite policy nuffy, Jenny Macklin, might wander off into retirement to try her hand at getting by on the Newstart Allowance, as she once boasted she could but now probably won’t.

Bishop took a near marginal seat to the safest confines on the electoral pendulum. She won almost two thirds of the primary vote in the 2016 election. She enjoyed a three per cent swing on primary vote while nationwide the Coalition lost 14 seats with a 3.55 per cent swing against it.

Depending on your vintage, is JBish the Keith Miller or the Shane Warne of Australian politics, e.g. the best captain we never had? Had she emerged triumphant from the scorched earth of the August 2018 spill, where would the Coalition be now? My best guess is she and it would have enjoyed a significant poll bounce at least in the short term, but we are dealing with fantasy politics here. The truth is, she could only find 11 supporters out of 85 in the party room and once that grim news hit home, her decision to retire from politics was only a matter of time.

Given the stunning personal support she enjoyed from voters if not the Liberal Party room, we can safely say there will be a swing against the Liberals in Curtin at the next election. It may be a beaut, if the Liberals get the politics of the preselection wrong. Worse, it could have a knock-on effect in other seats where margins are much tighter (Andrew Hastie in Canning, 6.8 per cent and Stirling where Michael Keenan is retiring, 6.1 per cent).

The Coalition could lose the next federal election in Western Australia alone. On the betting at this moment, Labor would pick up Hasluck (Ken Wyatt), Pearce (Christian Porter) and Swan (Steve Irons).

Those bubble bound necromancers in Canberra have long thought the retirement of Bishop would allow Christian Porter to seamlessly traverse electoral borders and ensconce himself as lord of the manor in Curtin.

Porter is one of the Liberal Party’s brightest charges, the current attorney-general and a potential leader of the parliamentary party.

We can also safely assume there will be no captain’s picks of candidates in Curtin given the arcane nature of Western Australian Liberal Party which has been fussin’ and feudin’ since I was a lad.

Another retiree from parliament, the National MP for Mallee, Andrew Broad, a man who regarded himself as something of a James Bond of Australian politics — whether it was a Craig, Lazenby, Moore, Connery, Dalton, Brosnan or Woody Allen, I cannot say — did offer something of a scientician’s view of gender and politics in a door stop to SkyNews yesterday.

“Politics,” Broad said, “is very gruelling on people who want to have a family and the very nature of biology is that it’s tougher on women.”

I am not entirely sure what that means but it seems to me that upsetting a good chunk of 51 per cent of the voting public is not an especially solid strategy in electoral politics.

Bishop has called for a woman within the party to replace her. The parachute drop of Porter into Curtin, while eminently sensible, will necessarily and obviously cause headlines and very possibly widespread consternation. It will not be an easy preselection. This is a case of politics pointing to one outcome while logic points to another.

In the end it might not matter, especially if the people of Victoria decide to put the Liberal Party’s lights out a good two hours before the votes start rolling in from the west. But if an unlikely victory is to remain possible or even if furniture is to be saved, what happens in Curtin in the next two months will be crucial to the Coalition’s future.

This column was first published in The Australian on 22 February 2019