The Liberal Party should bring Peta Credlin back into the political arena.
It should get her out of the television studio, find her a winnable House of Representatives seat and give her the chance to lead the party back into contention.
If the Liberals want a politician capable of taking on Pauline Hanson and Anthony Albanese in the same afternoon, there are few stronger options.
Credlin served as Tony Abbott’s chief of staff in opposition and in government. Since 2017, she has hosted her own evening program on what is now News24, formerly Sky News.
Angus Taylor is struggling to gain momentum as Opposition Leader, while the Liberals’ recurring flirtation with Josh Frydenberg has produced little more than speculation.
Tim Wilson and Andrew Hastie each command support within the party room, but either man would probably need the other to engineer a leadership change.
Even if they could unite their internal factions, winning over colleagues is one challenge. Convincing the country is another altogether.
The latest Newspoll puts One Nation on 28 per cent, Labor on 27 per cent and the Coalition on only 21 per cent.
Peta Credlin is pictured at the Midwinter Ball
The Liberal Party should bring Peta Credlin (pictured) back from the political wilderness
Some observers believe the Liberal Party is, to borrow Abbott’s description of WorkChoices, ‘dead, buried and cremated’.
Many people dismissed Abbott when he became opposition leader in 2009.
Credlin helped transform a politician widely regarded as unelectable into a formidable leader of the opposition.
He came within striking distance of government in 2010 before securing a decisive majority in 2013.
The party being written off today should ask what Credlin might be able to achieve for it now.
The Liberals should also take the correct lesson from Sussan Ley’s brief leadership. She did not have the authority required to unite a deeply divided party.
Much of Credlin’s career has involved bringing people with competing views together against a common opponent. It would also be an advantage to have a woman confronting Hanson and Labor directly.
Credlin could challenge Hanson without every clash becoming another episode of Pauline versus the Canberra men. Labor would also find it harder to use the opposition’s gender imbalance as a pretext for dismissing its broader policy arguments.
Credlin was Tony Abbott’s chief of staff in opposition and in government
Credlin sits firmly on the Liberal Right, which gives her a hearing with people who’ve stopped listening to the party, including many who are flirting with One Nation
Credlin sits firmly on the Liberal Right, giving her a hearing among voters who have stopped listening to the Liberals, including many now considering One Nation.
But she has a broader range than Hanson. Consider her comments on the night Parliament passed same-sex marriage.
Credlin spoke warmly about the humanity in the speeches and said Parliament had performed at its best.
Her conservatism has room for more grace than her public image might suggest.
Of course, anyone who remembers the Abbott government has an obvious objection.
Credlin tried to control too many aspects of government. Ministers resented having to pass through her office to reach the prime minister.
In my view, much of that came from her determination to protect Abbott. Yet by shielding him from every possible threat, she helped create a threat within his own government.
By the time Abbott most needed his colleagues, too many of them had already reached the end of their patience.
The Liberals should ask Credlin to run. If she says yes, the first people who ought to worry are Pauline Hanson and Anthony Albanese
As leader, Credlin would have to make the decisions and accept responsibility for them.
The real test would be whether she could give trusted colleagues room to do their jobs and listen when they told her she had got something wrong.
I would back her to have learned that lesson.
She witnessed the consequences of the previous arrangement from the front row.
John Howard returned as leader in 1995 as a far more effective performer than he had been when colleagues removed him in 1989.
Credlin is also a much stronger communicator than she was years ago.
A decade in television has taught her to make an argument in her own voice and deliver it before viewers lose interest.
There is something wasteful about watching her spend another evening on television explaining what the Liberals should do when she could be putting those ideas into practice.
Her years on air would also give Labor enough material to produce a full season of attack advertisements.
Some of the people she has criticised would be sitting alongside her in the party room. That could be uncomfortable.
A few of them are little more than political dead weight, and replacing weaker candidates should be part of any serious Liberal renewal.
As for her opinions, so what? Many voters attracted to Hanson would reject half of what she says. What they value is the sense that she genuinely believes it.
Credlin could offer voters the same conviction while allowing them to disagree with her on particular issues.
A disciplined opposition should be making life extremely difficult for the government. Credlin knows how to do that.
Abbott’s prime ministership demonstrated how dramatically the job changes after an election victory.
Credlin has a case to answer on that front too, given how quickly the Abbott government unravelled.
Before joining Abbott, however, she worked as a senior adviser and chief of staff in Howard-era ministerial offices covering portfolios such as defence, immigration and communications.
She understands how government decisions are made, where they stall and what happens when a prime minister’s office tries to control every department.
Given her senior role at the time, she must also have learned a great deal from Abbott’s downfall.
The Liberals should ask Credlin to stand. If she accepts, Pauline Hanson and Anthony Albanese should be among the first to take notice.
Hammered again
The Hammer has taken another blow, this time from the nation’s highest court.
The dispute involved Uber, an $81.5 million payroll tax assessment in NSW and a judge who accepted the company’s argument that money passed on to drivers did not constitute wages under the relevant tax legislation.
That judge was Supreme Court Justice David Hammerschlag, known in legal circles as ‘the Hammer’. His 2024 decision overturned assessments covering the 2015 to 2020 financial years.
Five NSW appeal judges unanimously reversed his ruling. The High Court has now rejected Uber’s further appeal by a six-to-one majority.
That is a substantial judicial repair bill.
The central issue was relatively clear: payroll tax laws cover more than traditional employment relationships. Describing Uber as a payment collection agent did not prevent the money it transferred to drivers from falling within provisions covering payments connected to their work.
The legislation expressly includes certain contractor payments as well as conventional wages. If Uber could avoid the liability simply because it collected fares before passing them on, the provisions would be weakened and businesses meeting similar obligations would be put at a disadvantage.
An app should not provide a convenient escape route from a tax bill.
The Court of Appeal said Hammerschlag’s reasoning placed an ‘unsupportable gloss’ on the legislation. In less technical language, it found the decision seriously flawed. Uber took the dispute to the High Court and lost again.
The reasoning behind the Hammer’s original decision, which delivered Uber its victory, has now been battered twice on appeal.
That raises an issue well beyond one judge and one multinational company.
How many other first-instance rulings might collapse if every unsuccessful litigant had the resources to pursue a case all the way to the top?
Appeal rights look impressive on paper. In practice, using them requires money, time and a willingness to risk another enormous costs bill if the challenge fails. For most people, that makes an appeal impossible.
A wealthy corporation can hire the best legal advisers and pursue every available avenue. An ordinary person may be told by experts that a lower-court ruling is plainly wrong, yet still have no realistic choice but to accept it.
Judges wield enormous power over people’s money, livelihoods and futures. Their reasoning deserves public examination, alongside the professional respect owed to the courts.
At least this case was corrected. The question is how many other errors have gone unchallenged.
Albo avoids questions
For nearly nine years, Matthew Franklin helped Anthony Albanese handle difficult questions as his senior media adviser. Now back in journalism, Franklin posed one of his own on Tuesday. The Prime Minister invoked national security rather than answer it.
I know Matthew well. We dealt regularly when he worked for Albanese, having first worked together years ago at The Australian. He is a direct and determined journalist. When he asked his former boss why the government repeatedly invites reporters to examine material they have not been given time to read, Albanese appeared uncomfortable.
‘Are you afraid that if we’re better informed by reading stuff, we’ll ask harder questions? Why do you do this?’ Franklin asked.
It was an excellent question. It deserved a stronger response than the one Albanese provided.
The Prime Minister had summoned reporters to announce that his government had accepted all 18 recommendations from a rapid review into an incident involving OpenAI and Medicare. Yet journalists were expected to question him about the review without having received a copy. It was absurd.
‘Not at all. We’re protecting our national interest and our national security,’ Albanese said. He then promised that the recommendations would be released in full.
What national security risk would have been created by allowing journalists to read those same recommendations before the press conference?
Albanese said the report had been cleared by the government only about an hour earlier and that he was facing the media at the earliest possible opportunity.
Who decided that such an unnecessary rush was required?
The government could have released the material once it was cleared, allowed journalists time to read it and then taken questions. Otherwise, what was the purpose of the exercise?
Nor should anyone pretend this was simply a consequence of the sensitivities surrounding one review.
In September, the government released its draft Digital Duty of Care laws while Albanese and Communications Minister Anika Wells were already speaking at the press conference.
In April, the 154-page interim report from the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was published only minutes before Albanese took questions in Sydney.
If the Prime Minister wants credit for facing the media, he has to earn it. Release the documents, give journalists time to read them, then stand up and answer the questions he was so eager to avoid.