LAST Wednesday night Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott made a critical tactical decision that rang serious alarm bells for Tony Abbott and his camp.
Late in the evening, having been locked up at their request with the Treasury boffins on a fact-finding mission, Windsor and Oakeshott took the unprecedented decision to release intricate details of the parties' election costings. The spreadsheets pinged into unsuspecting inboxes all around the building.
It was late and the Parliament - sailing through the Canberra night like a ghostly galleon in this strange indeterminate transition - had emptied of apparatchiks and many journalists.
The costings were released by the two independents on the basis that for them, transparency mattered. Given there was a significant hole in the Coalition's numbers, the blind-siding - and it was a total blind side - was bad news for Abbott.
The Liberal leader tried to get Windsor on the phone. He was told the independent was in a meeting. It turned out the meeting was with a documentary crew from Four Corners. They were filming in Windsor's Parliament House office.
Undeterred, Abbott strode around with his own documentation to try to explain his position. The ABC crew apparently caught Abbott's attempt to have the discussion; one insider says he was agitated and insistent. Gillard by contrast has adopted her best queenly demeanour in the discussions.
Afterwards the Liberal camp was certainly confused and suspicious. Key Liberal figures doubted whether Windsor and Oakeshott were actually sincere in the discussions, or whether long-held animus between them and the National Party would be the factor that ultimately prevailed.
The mood inside the Liberal camp went downhill after this point, whereas the mood inside Labor progressively, if cautiously, brightened - although the final wash-up would take another week and many tense moments to conclude.
Julia Gillard learned her fate yesterday camped out in the office she had wrested from Kevin Rudd. She watched events with Wayne Swan, personal staff including senior strategists Amanda Lampe, Tom Bentley and Russell Mahoney, and some mates in the ministry including Brendan O'Connor - but not partner Tim. Tim Mathieson is not in the capital.
Abbott was in a similar position, although he knew the direction in which Bob Katter was heading, if not the means of the announcement. Abbott had spoken personally to Katter earlier in the day; chief of staff Peta Credlin had been round to the office during the morning. The idiosyncratic Katter - despite previous indications the three would stick together - was coming their way.
There has been considerable suspicion in Liberal ranks about the behind-the-scenes role played by Bruce Hawker, the sharp-witted Labor strategist, drafted to help choreograph Gillard's path to minority government. Hawker, who by helpful coincidence is Tony Windsor's cousin, was official point man during Rob Oakeshott's process of drafting reforms to parliamentary process.
Hawker has certainly been an effective hub for camp Labor - consider some of his spokes - a personal mate of Kevin Rudd's, present inside his office during his last chaotic weeks in office, well connected to the NSW crew around Gillard courtesy of a long stint serving Bob Carr, a key consultant during the recent election campaign, a useful familial relationship with Windsor, a river guide to Oakeshott during the formative time the Port Macquarie man was making his decision.
Bruce Hawker has made a professional lifetime of being the man in the room - and his long investment of moving, cajoling, strategising and shaking in professional politics and beyond paid dividends for the ALP in a very dark hour.
The weak link in the chain was always Labor's relationship with Katter. Enter Kevin Rudd, deployed in shirt sleeves and olde Queensland vernacular, in the privacy of his own Canberra apartment, with wife Therese and the Resources Minister Martin Ferguson to make cups of tea and turn on the charm offensive. Labor sources insist this was Rudd's idea. And ultimately the sortie failed. Katter clothed his decision to back Abbott partly in his anger about Gillard's decision to fell Rudd in the leadership coup in late June. Rudd had tried to bring in Katter, and failed.
Labor insiders believed Windsor and Oakeshott could be persuaded to back a Labor government - despite the significant cultural impediments within their electorates - if a package could be crafted delivering on the theme of regional development, and if they could be sufficiently convinced by the bona fides of the leader they would back into The Lodge.
Windsor made regional development a focus of his final, critical weekend back home in Tamworth, drafting a proposal that went backwards and forwards through much of the last 24 hours.
Labor figures, including Wayne Swan, exhausted and hoarse after the gruelling events of the past few months, scrambled to offset spending given Andrew Wilkie's theatrical last-ditch rejection last week of Tony Abbott's promised billion for the Hobart hospital.
At the victory, Swan could hardly speak.
Source: The Age
Email a friend