Politics with Michelle Grattan: Simon Birmingham on Liberal moderates, regrets, and Donald Trump

Opposition Senate leader and former senior minister in the Coalition government Simon Birmingham has announced he will quit parliament at the election. Birmingham, one of the few remaining moderates in the Liberals’ ranks, is shadow foreign minister. Now , aged 50, he’s defecting to a (yet to be announced) commercial job.

He joins the podcast to talk about the highs and lows of his time in politics and the Liberal Party, as well as to share his biggest regret and a couple of anecdotes.

So why is he going?

I don’t think I have the same partisan fight in me that I probably had in the early days of my career, and so I think there is an element of recognising that perhaps politics, as is, requires and demands people to take on the fight in our system. And the team deserves people who will take on that fight. I’ve always put the team first, as much as I possibly can, and that requires compromise at all times – and in the end, after a while, you start to tire of the compromise.

So all of that together with yes, a great and exciting opportunity that sets my career up for hopefully the next ten, 20 or longer years of work life. […] and still enables my family to stay in Adelaide, where their careers and education are flourishing.

Speaking about regrets, Birmingham highlights climate change:

I wish we had better landed policies and direction around how Australia responds to climate change. It’s been the thread right throughout my career – of division and politicking. I think the biggest missed opportunity was probably the National Energy Guarantee, which Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg came so very close to landing.

It’s actually a mechanism that could have strongly supported a nuclear energy market, for example, as well, and I wish that we had found the way to see that through because I think our policy landscape would be much better today had that been the case.

As a leading moderate within the Liberal Party, Birmingham reflects on the teal movement and where it leaves the moderates:

I think the last election, in particular, not only sent us a clear message of dissatisfaction from more moderately aligned and teal-leaning seats.

But it simultaneously left the party room less well-equipped to respond to those messages because we lost some people who were really about to come into their prime and their own. People like Trent Zimmerman and Tim Wilson and Katie Allen and Dave Sharma [Sharma has since returned to parliament as a senator], they were becoming much stronger and more authoritative voices in the party room, who I have missed greatly in this term and where I think we would have been better placed having them there.

I just hope that coming into the next election where […] we’ve got some great new candidates in different seats who I think are true custodians of the liberal tradition in the Liberal Party, I hope that we can win those seats back and restore some of that balance in the party room.

With the return of Donald Trump, Birmingham recounts his experiences when he was trade minister during the Trump Mark 1 administration:

I remember at [a] dinner with Donald Trump […] we did get into a debate about the trade balance between our countries, and I ultimately reached into some of the documents I had and handed a graph across the table that showed for how long and how significantly the US has had a trade surplus over Australia.

Whilst I don’t think trade relations should be about the binary of surplus v deficit but, in the end, if that’s what’s going to sway his thinking, we’ve got to pitch it in that regard.

He also recalls:

I was scheduled to go from Ottawa through to Washington, DC on my way back to Australia, and Joe Hockey rang me while I was in Ottawa and said, mate your New Zealand counterpart came here on his way to Ottawa and he asked to get the same exemptions to the steel and aluminium tariffs that Australia has got. And Bob Lighthizer, who was Trump’s equivalent of the trade minister, went nuts at the New Zealanders and marched them out of his office saying, ‘you’re not getting it, and Australia never should have either’. And Joe said to me, mate, I think it might be best if you have a family emergency and head back to Australia.  

Lo and behold, I took Joe’s wise advice and counsel, made my way straight back to Australia, making apologies to those in D.C. I was meant to see.