Frydenberg's past will catch up with him before he gets a chance to shape the Libs' future

Only three of the past 10 federal treasurers made it through to being prime ministers.

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John Howard, who was Malcolm Fraser's last treasurer had to wait 13 years between these jobs, and his succession was far from automatic.

But most of the rest served in their positions expecting that they would be, could be or should be the natural successor to the prime minister.

Josh Frydenberg. Pictures by Keegan Carroll

Not a few thought themselves extra entitled because of the bastardries of their leader, or the hard yards they had to make while the leader swanned around. Only Keating took out his prime minister; perhaps Scott Morrison achieved it by sleight of hand.

Josh Frydenberg was Scott Morrison's treasurer, and, like Morrison (and before him Wayne Swan, under Kevin Rudd during the GFC) deserves some credit for keeping the economy flush with cash during an international financial crisis.

But then he lost his (quite safe) seat. Like Bob Hawke, he seemed always to think it divinely ordained that he would one day lead the Liberal Party and perhaps save it from itself during its darkest hours.

The first obstacle before him was that he would have had to stand for party preselection again, and to have persevered while the party fell apart, in part because a person of his background and standing was not there to lead it away from unforced errors.

He ducked his first opportunity, thus avoiding further personal disaster when the electorate surveyed the state of his party and its policies, and its leadership and direction under Peter Dutton.

Since then, we have had the phenomenon of One Nation - people not at all to his temper or style of politics - but the Liberal party is thought (by some) to have stabilised under the leadership of Angus Taylor.

Now Frydenberg is flirting about whether he should go back into politics - indeed, whether it is his duty to do so. Naturally he wants this dilemma publicly discussed. He would prefer if it was taken for granted, through a loud clamour, that it was his duty to serve and that his party needed him.

Though he has reserved his position to a moment of greatest advantage, it can be assumed that he will answer the call if it is loud enough.

In certain respects, the Liberals could use someone of his talents. He is seen as a party moderate, though a liberal disposition was never particularly evident while he was in power.

After an experiment with Sussan Ley, the party leadership fell into Taylor's hands, and he has taken the party away from the centre and towards conservative extremes.

Taylor can complain that he is squeezed between Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, on one hand, and a calculating Anthony Albanese who has deliberately shifted the Labor Party to the political right.

Labor has plonked itself in Frydenberg's place at the net

Labor firmly occupies the middle ground of politics. It has abandoned some ground to the Greens and independents, even as they have become more difficult to deal with and far less automatic in supporting Labor policies.

But the Liberals are also bedevilled by the emergence of the community independents or teals, and by Liberal resistance to wooing them back to the party fold.

There is, in any event, little prospect of any reconciliation as the party's conservatives have abandoned any commitment to action on climate change, sensible migration and good government. That Labor is much the same does not make the challenge of dragging back the teal vote easier.

If Frydenberg responded to his inner voice, or the public voice, or both, he still faces the challenge of finding a seat and finding a place on Taylor's frontbench.

He says, as he has to say, that he would be loyal to his party's leadership and that he would not spend his time intriguing for the leadership.

He must, nonetheless present positions which show the sorts of policies he favours. He must have a constant profile as an alternative leader.

His record as treasurer under Morrison would not help him much; Morrison remains deeply unpopular with voters. Victoria is presumably well over its love affair with "Dictator Dan", but it is unlikely that they will forget that the Morrison government and its treasurer discriminated against their state during the COVID crisis.

Frydenberg has crafted a convenient legend that he lost his seat because of underhand and illegal tactics by his opponent.

But I doubt there has ever been such a well-funded campaign, a candidate who had brought such unpopularity upon himself, and whose response to criticism was often petulant entitlement.

It was not only Frydenberg who lost his seat because of Morrison-Frydenberg policies. A general swing against the Liberals, (for which he had to bear some responsibility, as deputy leader) took out most of Melbourne's metropolitan seats.

All that can be said is that his personal standing and reputation, and an enormous campaigning budget, was not enough to withstand the tide.

He is by no means the only Liberal who feels a call to serve the party, and some of these would not step aside because of their assessment of his pulling power.

He has, for example, clearly signalled that he believes that his party must again seek the centre rather than the extreme right, and many of the angry old ideologues of the right are not excited by some of his ideas or drawn by his charisma.

Some will leak against him at particularly inconvenient moments even before he secures a preselection or is engaged in policy debate. Many of those who would like to see him leader would like to be rid of Taylor.

However loyal Frydenberg pretends to be, almost everything that Frydenberg says or does will be judged by commentators not only on its own merits but as some gambit against Taylor.

One can expect that Taylor, and many in his camp, will be doing him few favours, even as they profess that they welcome his experience and ability on their side.

Not all would see Frydenberg's history in power as one long triumph or exhibition of character

Some people will also return to nagging questions about Frydenberg's character.

In 2003, when he was a staffer in Alexander Downer's office, an intelligence analyst in the Office of National Assessments, Andrew Wilkie resigned, strongly criticising the use the government was making of intelligence assessments about the threat from Iraq. Wilkie said that claims of weapons of mass destruction were a lie.

Downer's office asked for and was supplied with a top-secret document, written by Wilkie. A copy of it was soon in the hands of a friendly journalist, Andrew Bolt who used it to criticise Wilkie.

The leaking of the documents, by whoever did it, was a criminal offence. When this was pointed out, Downer blustered and prevaricated, and failed to answer questions about his own role, or his office's.

A top cop said to me, and I quoted this at the time, that an investigator who couldn't solve this would not be able to find his bum with both hands.

But the crime was never solved, with staffers, including Frydenberg (the adviser most focused on party partisan activity, and the one at whom outsider commentators were pointing fingers at, denying it.)

With less than wholehearted assistance from the ministerial office and the department, the investigation collapsed, but the questions remains about the leak and AFP diligence in pursuing it, 22 years later. Andrew Wilkie is now, of course, an independent member for Clark, in Tasmania.

Years later, when Frydenberg was in Parliament and minister for the environment, he attracted attention for his interchanges with a fellow minister, Angus Taylor, about the prosecution of a Taylor family operation for destroying grassland habitat.

Frydenberg's office was shown by freedom-of-information documents to have asked his department about his power to suspend relevant regulations and abort the prosecution, but Frydenberg insisted he had not been contemplating that so much as informing himself of his powers.

Taylor denied lobbying on his own family's account, saying his question had been sparked by a conversation with a farmer from Yass.

Matters such as these, never entirely cleared up led to suggestions of improper ministerial interference in an investigation and prosecution.

They certainly showed that the minister and his office were less than straightforward about the timing of the interchanges.

Frydenberg's actions may have been perfectly innocent, and a dearth of documentation is unable to show otherwise. But it will be likely to be recorded in any biographies, and, perhaps decades from now, his obituary. He needs to clear these matters up.

Frydenberg has also been much criticised over Treasury and Department of Finance indolence in failing to establish procedures by which the Commonwealth could retrieve billions of dollars handed out, virtually without questions or supervision, to businesses saying that the COVID closures were ruining their operations.

At least $30 billion went to big businesses who either did not spend the money they were given, or who were shown, after the event, to have been ineligible for the grants because they had not been forced to lay off large proportions of their staff. Only a tiny amount was retrieved, and much more by public shaming than by Morrison government effort.

Frydenberg was to claim that the omission of a system of retrieving unspent money was deliberate, an incident of the need to get money out without mindless bureaucracy and discouraging procedures.

His laxity - more likely the laxity and incompetence of the department of Finance and the Treasury - was in marked contrast with the other running public administration scandal of the time: the punitive and coercive robodebt scheme, by which people on welfare were treated with deep suspicion, and regarded as guilty of receiving overpayments unless they could prove otherwise.

Business mates, party donors and cronies of the government did not face this inhumane treatment, receiving contracts without tenders, and grants directly from ministerial officers.

Legal, accountable and transparent government went out the window: the precedents set then are still there, despite a pretence that Albanese government "reforms" would now prevent them.

Frydenberg must also contemplate the impact on his ambitions of the Pauline Hanson movement. Hanson is not a friend or admirer of Frydenberg or his general political philosophy.

He might well be just the sort of professional politician, Canberra insider and non-listener whom she pretends to most despise. He has never said a word hostile to immigration, to multiculturalism, or the transition of Australian society from her 1960s monoculture to the export-oriented economy of today.

He is probably regarded as too sophisticated a player to have ever mixed with ordinary workers, or to have any empathy or feeling for ordinary decent (white) Australians displaced by social, cultural and economic change.

He's no favourite of the Hanson movement

Frydenberg may have strategies for holding One Nation at bay, but he will not be charming One Nation voters, persuading them that his record and philosophy provide better solutions for their complaints, their anxieties and their anger at being ignored.

Indeed, whether as leader, or even as a senior frontbencher in a shadow Coalition ministry, he could be the lightning rod dilettante representing nearly everything (other than Albanese) that they hate.

It's not his fault, because Frydenberg is a realist when many could-be Coalition colleagues are all over the place, uncertain about appeasing Hanson, or being the bulwark against her populism. But, some Hansonites might say, it is his fault because he is the last man standing of a regime and an era when they realised that the system was broken and beyond saving.

My money is that Frydenberg will walk closer and closer to the cliff, but, like Peter Costello, never make the jump.

• Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com

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