Malcolm Turnbull says Julie Bishop has his “110% confidence” after revelations of the deputy Liberal leader’s role in September’s leadership spill.
Bishop admitted that her chief of staff, Murray Hansen, had attended a meeting with Liberal MPs and senators to plot a coup against the then prime minister, Tony Abbott.
She has defended herself against allegations of treachery against Abbott, saying the meeting was a “drinks function” at Eden-Monaro MP Peter Hendy’s house.
“I did not know who would be attending the meeting and, of course, like all chiefs of staff, they feed back the information that they’ve learned and it was part of my job, as it had been all year, to find out what the backbench were thinking,” she said on Thursday morning.
Under questioning from Labor in question time, she said: “I have fulfilled my responsibilities and my duties as the deputy leader of the Liberal party since 2007.”
Bishop met Turnbull in the days before he mounted an ultimately successful challenge to Abbott’s leadership in September.
Turnbull, visiting Indonesia on Thursday, threw his support behind his deputy.
“Julie Bishop is a very, very dear friend,” he said in Jakarta. “She’s an outstanding foreign minister, she’s been a long-standing and excellent deputy leader of the party, so she has my 110% confidence,” he said.
He downplayed the pre-spill meeting.
“Politicians speak to each other all the time,” the prime minister said. “It’s no revelation to know that politicians are talking, or that Julie and I have [talked].”
Bishop has consistently denied having a role in Abbott’s downfall, saying that she had alerted him as soon as she knew that moves against him were afoot.
Bishop said she told Abbott he had lost party room confidence on spill day, shortly after Hansen reported back from the meeting.
“When I learned who was there on the Monday morning, and when cabinet ministers came to see me, I made the first opportunity available to see the prime minister, who didn’t have a leadership meeting that morning because he was in Adelaide and was flying,” she said. “I met him within five minutes of his attendance here in Parliament House.”
The Liberal backbencher Cory Bernardi has questioned Bishop’s decision to wait to tell Abbott that a leadership spill was imminent.
“I’m surprised that something of such pressing importance wasn’t drawn to his attention immediately,” the senator told ABC radio. “Had I known what became apparent from the meeting, I would have phoned the prime minister or his chief of staff immediately.
“I find it incredulous that what has now been described as a drinks function was actually the final meeting in a coup to unseat a sitting prime minister,” Bernardi said. The spill was a “tawdry thing in the history of the Liberal party”, he said.
“Overwhelmingly I’m just disappointed that members of the Liberal party made this decision, and I thought we’d moved on, quite frankly.”
