When Tony Abbott brought Malcolm Turnbull back into his shadow cabinet as communications spokesman in 2010, the then Opposition leader mocked Turnbull by calling him the inventor of the internet.

Abbott didn’t need to persuade the voter that he was unable to get his head around the idea of the internet or its connection to the National Broadband Network. But even the half-attentive voter knew Abbott had got his head around one simple misanthropic notion: Never give your political opponent credit for success.

The NBN, at the time, was struggling to meet its timelines and its budget, but it was an audacious nation-building program designed to put Australia in the forefront of global competitiveness. Its audacity in a big country burdened with a geography of “boundless plains” was that it was founded on the idea of a fibre network being connected directly to every premises in the nation, thus providing NBN users with robustness and speed.

Turnbull and the NBN

In appointing Turnbull as communications minister in 2013, Abbott made it abundantly clear that his principal job was to "demolish" Labor’s NBN by scaling it down to simply provide fibre to central locations, leaving end users with inferior copper wire to their premises.

As an incoming minister with a fully functioning brain, Turnbull would have known that the scaled-down NBN was highly likely to be problematic, as it proved to be, and that his prime minister’s demand to wreck the fibre-to-the-premises model was likely to be detrimental to the national interest, but he did not push back.

Turnbull’s commission as communications minister is a stark example of the dynamics at play when a minister of the crown is placed in a position in which abundant pressure is applied to make a decision that aligns with what the prime minister wants purely for short-term political reasons. It raises the associated question as to why ministers are prepared to champion those decisions even when they fly in the face of the national interest or are so morally bankrupt that they are seen by a vast majority of the electorate for what they are.

Asking questions of that order might be regarded in some quarters as naïve because the principle is well established that once a majority decision is made by an elected cabinet, all voting members are bound by the decision whether they agree with it or not. By the same strict convention, if a member can’t live with it, the honourable thing to do is to resign. That is how cabinet solidarity is supposed to work and the received wisdom holds that it is a self-evident attribute of good government.

Secrecy and the 20-year release of cabinet papers

What it does in practice is ensure that secrecy prevails, which means that the general public never know whether issues that come before cabinet have been the subject of debate, or whether contentious issues of public interest ever appear on cabinet agendas.

The public may come to know what happened 20 years later when cabinet records are released. Graeme Dobell’s recent Inside Story article on the decision by Prime Minister John Howard to commit Australia to the Coalition of the Willing provides a glimpse of how cabinet solidarity can be used and abused.

Dobell notes that Howard’s 2003 decision on Iraq launched Australia into what became its first ever entry into a “war of aggression”. He adds that the cabinet papers also reveal that Howard did not take the issue to cabinet, most likely because the intelligence supporting Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction was demonstrably weak, and that a cabinet debate would likely have revealed the singular reason behind the decision was the prime minister’s determination to show loyalty to the US alliance.

That loyalty was explained in part by reference to an injunction that the public service was not to provide any advice on the venture, and that the only issue put before cabinet was to focus on questions of how Australia would participate in the war, not why. If the why question had been up for discussion, cabinet might have “done a Canada” by refusing to be part of the invasion. Dobell alludes to a contemporary 2006 analysis in the wake of the Howard decision.

Surveying the Iraq disaster, one of Australia’s great foreign policy realists, Owen Harries,  judged that “uncritical, loyal support for a bad, failed American policy” would hurt Australia’s standing as an ally in the long run. His dry but devastating denouement: “A reputation for being dumb but loyal and eager is not one to be sought.”

The lack of any Iraq WMD meant the reason for the “dumb but loyal” choice soon stood alone as the sole justification: Australia would go all the way with the US. Iraq was the means. The alliance was the purpose. Squibbing a role in the conquered nation, Howard was deeply committed, but not responsible. The US hubris was massive, and we drank of it.

Albanese’s cabinet

Given that Anthony Albanese has prevailed over a remarkably disciplined cabinet that doesn’t leak, the Australian public have no way of knowing what issues are debated within cabinet or who said what during debates. For example, we do not know whether there has been any dissent within cabinet on Australia’s response to the collective punishment that Israel is relentlessly imposing on the civilian populace of Palestine. But we do know that the Foreign Minister Penny Wong has been prepared to sacrifice her legacy as a defender of humanitarian values to satisfy the Australia’s Zionist lobby’s seemingly insatiable appetite for the blood of Palestinian citizens.

We do not know whether Wong has taken that hit on her own volition as the minister responsible, or whether she has been put under pressure to comply with the political agenda of the prime minister. We do know that Labor MPs and senators were put on notice during June 2024 about the consequences of non-compliance when Senator Fatima Payman called for the government to recognise the state of Palestine. As a lowly backbench senator, Payman was virtually held to the standard of cabinet solidarity on the issue, and she incurred the wrath of a fierce Albanese temper tantrum for taking a public stand on the matter.

Since his recent exclusion from cabinet, the former industry and science minister Ed Husic has taken a position on Palestine not dissimilar to that taken by Payman, which raises the question as to whether he was a lone voice of dissent within cabinet during Labor’s first term, or simply one of a number who observed the principle of cabinet solidarity despite having strong misgivings. Unless ministers leak, the answer to that question is not knowable.

The issue appeared again in the very early days of the Albanese Government’s second term, with the new Environment and Water Minister, Murray Watt, deciding to approve Woodside’s extension of the North West Shelf gas project until 2070. The 40-year extension enables the multinational company to sell Australian gas without paying any material royalties or the petroleum resources rental tax. As essentially a massive export project, it will provide no benefit to Australia’s transition to sustainable energy and will release vast quantities of carbon emissions, yet Australia will not be in official breach of its emissions target because it will hide behind the fig leaf of the export LNG we sell being burned by nations other than Australia.

The Woodside extension is arguably a betrayal of Australian voters who believed the Albanese Government was committed to the International Energy Agency’s fragile target of net zero by 2050. Latrobe University’s Dr Julia Dehm sees the position from her perspective as a lawyer as one which “undercuts Australia’s climate credentials and presents Australia internationally as not just a climate laggard, but really as a destructive player on climate change".

For Watt, the Woodside decision has already redefined his legacy, and not in a good way. He has presented himself to the electorate for many years as a politician working his way into a powerful position in order to act in the national interest, and has now used that power to serve the profiteering agenda of multinational corporate interests. In 20 years’ time, we may discover what Faustian forces were at work that appear to have persuaded him to sell his soul.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.