The rise and fall of Arthur Sinodinos

Arthur Sinodinos was a well-regarded Treasury official who went to work for John Howard when nobody in Canberra wanted to know him. When Howard's luck changed, so did Sinodinos'. He spent the early part of Howard's Prime Ministership with his eyes on policy while fixers and spivs frittered away the third-biggest electoral margin in history.

When people like Grahame Morris fell away, Sinodinos stepped up. Being a backroom fixer is a step up from being a policy wonk and, if you've seen the blowhards and tryhards who call themselves fixers up close, you can be forgiven for thinking it isn't that hard. For a decade Sinodinos met with people who itched where only a Prime Minister could scratch. Almost all of them were people who earned more than he did.

When he resigned from the PM's office, Howard could've made him an Ambassador,  like Keating did Don Russell and Hawke did Garnaut. Instead, Howard sent him into the world with a rare but strong recommendation: Arthur solves problems. He solved problems at NAB. He solved problems at AWH. He solved problems in the NSW Liberals. He had never run for anything, but so what? Politics is about solving problems. Arthur solves problems.

Had Sinodinos run for something before entering top-level politics, he'd have met shonks and spivs and done one of two things: learned to spot them and stayed right away, or become tarnished early and been filtered out by a once healthy political organisation. He never met people like that at Treasury. People like that tended to be filtered out of Howard's office before they could even get to someone so senior as Sinodinos.

Obeid caused the NSW ALP more grief than the NSW Liberals could manage for most of its last term in state government.  The smarter Liberals resisted Obeid's entreaties; Sinodinos saw a Labor donor looking to switch. If there's one thing Liberals love more than apolitical politicians, it's prodigal sons; Sinodinos saw no harm in arranging a few meetings and making a buck along the way: Arthur solves problems.

Remember when Abbott was all about reprising the Howard government? Sinodinos should be in Cabinet. Nobody knows more about how top-level government works than Sinodinos, not Abbott (even now), not Credlin or Hockey. Sinodinos has forgotten more about how to run this country than Turnbull or Morrison or both Bishops put together.

Sinodinos has no real power base. He could've been Finance Minister, but with the PM and Treasurer from NSW the other states do get their noses out of joint. Had he been Finance Minister, Cormann would have to put his own proposals on financial planner regulation up; proposals that might fairly be regarded as dead and ripe for quiet burial.

The reason why Sinodinos is not in Cabinet is Abbott's weaselly hope that he won't taint his government, in much the same way that you can do a reasonable summary of the Howard government that doesn't dwell too much on, say, Jim Short. The trouble is that it's too late for that decency-veneer; a government born in Donny Randall's rorts and George Brandis' extravagances should have nowhere to go but up. With Sinodinos gone this government has lost one of its most substantial operators; someone to whom Liberals look up, someone whose loss frightens them.

Sinodinos was shadowed by the clever and decent Andrew Leigh, another relatively inexperienced politician. A standard political response to Sinodinos would have been to conflate his personal business arrangements with the worst-case scenarios of lax financial planner regulation, and blast Sinodinos as Dodgy Arthur. Leigh seems to have achieved the same effect without going in so hard.

Arthur Sinodinos is finished, make no mistake: he would only get a second chance at the expense of a more promising MP's first. He'll complain about being quoted out of context, about how it wasn't like that at all: things other politicians learn on the way up. He would've stayed to tough it out if that had solved the problem and he would have quit politics altogether if that had. 'Standing aside' doesn't give Labor the satisfaction but it gets Sinodinos out of the way of the WA Senate election and the budget pantomime. Sometimes the greatest contribution you can make is to go away quietly. Arthur solves problems.

There is no good reason why a journalist could not have gone through AWH and told us all about it, which would have headed off Sinodinos' political career before it began; but that's a blogpost in itself. Such an investigation would've had far more value than Malcolm Farr's assertion that Sinodinos is a good bloke.