Numbers man: What Liberal powerbroker Michael Sukkar really believes

Labor candidate Matt Gregg, who is trying to snatch the Victorian seat of Deakin from the Liberal Party powerbroker Michael Sukkar, reckons there are two sides to his opponent.

There’s the “nice Michael” (even Sukkar’s enemies say he’s charming). This Michael showers cash to sports clubs in Deakin, the ultra-marginal seat that covers outer-eastern Melbourne suburbs such as Ringwood, Croydon and Mitcham. And the other Michael? He’s the “unusually conservative character” who uses phrases like “common-sense values” aimed at a conservative audience, but never spells them out, says Gregg. “The voters I speak to don’t know where he sits on the more politically fraught or challenging issues. It just hasn’t been part of his pitch to voters.”

You’ve probably seen Michael Sukkar this election. He’s the one at Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s shoulder during press conferences on the housing crisis. As the Coalition’s housing spokesperson, Sukkar is in the middle of this election battleground. He’s also been the one battling Housing Minister Clare O’Neil in several ding-dong debates. Their recent exchange on the ABC’s 7.30 program was such a hot mess of contested numbers and interruptions on both sides that host Sarah Ferguson admonished Sukkar: “What would your mother say, hearing you interrupt her?”

Since taking Deakin from Labor in 2013, Sukkar has won the seat three more times. In 2022, when voters rejected the Morrison government of which he was a part, he suffered a 4.5 per cent swing against him. He holds on by 375 votes, making his the nation’s most marginal electorate. If Sukkar loses his seat, the party and its conservative wing will lose a key factional man – an MP who often influences which Victorian Liberals get to go to Canberra and Spring Street.

Sukkar, 43, is also very close to Dutton, several Liberal sources have confirmed – “I wouldn’t say we’re blood brothers, but we’re as close as you can get in politics, I suppose,” Sukkar tells me – and has been one of his key numbers men, manoeuvring behind the scenes to topple Malcolm Turnbull in 2018 (though it was Scott Morrison who eventually triumphed).

“He’s obviously recruited a lot of members over the years, controls a lot of branches and is a very, very influential figure on the right of politics in Victoria,” Turnbull told 60 Minutes in 2021.

Sukkar derives his power within the party from Mormon, evangelical and pentecostal groups, including former Family First supporters whom he and allies recruited as members (this masthead has published two investigations into Sukkar’s knowledge of a scheme that involved the misuse of public funds for party purposes. A 2020 Finance Department probe found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing, but did not look at key evidence or call pivotal witnesses). “The various religious tribes support him in his electorate, but their real power comes from helping him influence the outcomes of preselections,” says a senior Liberal Party member who would not be named. In 2017, Sukkar abstained from the same-sex marriage vote. How conservative, indeed how religious, is Michael Sukkar?

This is not easy to answer. Sukkar, whose cardiac arrest at age 26 prompted him to increase his pro bono work as a tax lawyer, is rarely specific when talking about his religious beliefs or conservatism. He spoke most clearly about them in a 2021 podcast with Hope City Church, an evangelical mission in his electorate. Sukkar is a Maronite Catholic, a Lebanese form of the faith. He told the young church pastors that while he would never impose his beliefs on others; his guiding light was to “defend the values and institutions that have stood the test of time”. He named these institutions as the family and the church, and said that in his past eight years in parliament, “those traditional values and institutions have probably come under attack more than ever”.

Sukkar declined to be interviewed in person but made himself available for a 45-minute phone chat. He is, as many people told me, charming. But I found myself wondering whether his religious supporters, and some of the party’s economic hardheads, really knew his beliefs – and if they did, would they be disappointed? Later, I thought about what Matt Gregg said. Are there two Michaels? And if so, which Michael did I get?

One of Sukkar’s key concerns is parental control over the values their children are taught at school. “I was one of the first critics against the Safe Schools program,” he says, referring to the 2016 controversy. But what about now? What should I worry about as a parent? He ducks this question. “It’s not just about curing any perceived issues that are there now, but it’s also about guarding against encroachments in the future … It’s about every aspect of our society and whether it strengthens or weakens families … I just don’t think the family gets spoken often about in Australian politics. I think it’s a bit of an inconvenience, a bit of an afterthought.”

When social conservatives talk about families, they often have in mind the heterosexual, nuclear type straight out of Leave it to Beaver. So what does Sukkar mean by “family”? “Well, it’s all families,” says Sukkar, who has two young sons with wife Anna. “I mean anyone raising a child. If you’re raising our next generation of citizens, that’s one of the most important jobs in our society.

‘I don’t think we should see people as units of economic activity.’

Michael Sukkar, Liberal MP

“I’m surrounded by a lot of mothers who are doing everything. They’re juggling a career, they’re juggling raising children. They’re juggling the sports commitments and all the other things. In conversations, I think the component of their life that’s devoted to others, which is typically their children, I just don’t think it’s celebrated as it could be.”

This is interesting territory because many voters, particularly women, might agree with Sukkar there. It’s the sort of argument ABC journalist Annabel Crabb marked out with her 2014 book Wife Drought. The economy was built by and for people who had wives at home. The political sphere was built for people with wives. Caring for children is, as Sukkar says, an afterthought in the world of career, mortgages and daily economic survival. Wow, I think, is Michael Sukkar something of a … feminist?

If we really put children first, I say to Sukkar, we’d probably have a different economy: mothers and fathers wouldn’t be constantly squeezing in kids around everything else. “And that’s where fundamentally I’m probably a bit of a weird beast,” Sukkar says. “I don’t think we should see people as units of economic activity. I think often the way in which our economy is managed, and the policies that flow from that, just treat us like commoditised units of economic activity and that offends me.”

This is not the sort of talk Sukkar’s friends at the conservative HR Nicholls Society would appreciate. Late last year, the society launched a blueprint to remake Australia’s industrial relations system, including scrapping awards and making it easier to sack people in small businesses. The 107-page document mentioned flexible work once. Sukkar was the keynote speaker at the blueprint’s launch and, while he was careful not to endorse what he called the society’s “wishlist”, he criticised Labor’s right to disconnect laws, designed to improve work-life balance (and which Dutton vowed to repeal), and named working from home a “very poor public sector practice”.

“You can’t force people to have a child”

But what about the “wishlist” of his religious allies in the party? Many of those churches would like to see a winding back of abortion rights. I ask Sukkar about his stance on this. “Well,” he says, clearing his throat. “It is not a federal issue.” But he believes the best possible care should be given to anyone contemplating an abortion. “Do I want to see more abortions in our society? No, absolutely not,” he says. Does he support a woman’s right to choose? “I don’t think you can force people, for a whole host of reasons, to have a child they don’t want to have … I don’t think that’s worked anywhere in the world where it’s been enforced.”

A senior Victorian Liberal Party member told me he believed Sukkar was probably not overly religious, that it was just advantageous for him to appear religiously conservative as it played well to his party constituents. When I put this to Sukkar, he agreed he wasn’t overly devout and didn’t get to church as often as he would like. “There are a lot of people out there who are just a lot more devout than I am.” Sukkar insists the role of faith in the Victorian Liberal Party is “massively over-egged” (though three of his recent preselection picks have all been pastors, preachers or lifelong members of Baptist or pentecostal churches, including Kyle Hoppitt for the Senate and state parliament’s Nicole Werner and Renee Heath). The party members and MPs from these churches are not about policing behaviour, he says, they just want fewer taxes on small businesses. “We don’t have little conclaves of people and Bible readings.”

Sukkar says he works “harmoniously” on party matters with the other two senior Victorian Liberals: Wannon MP Dan Tehan and Senator James Paterson. He leaves out Senator Jane Hume, another senior Victorian. In 2021, this masthead revealed texts between Sukkar and his allies denigrating Hume for, in Sukkar’s words, an “indulgent” and “quite frankly bizarre” post she’d made in 2018 about juggling family life and politics. “That wasn’t a nice thing to say,” he tells me. But if that’s the most egregious thing found in “thousands” of his text messages, he says, then it proves he typically says nice things about people. Sukkar says that he’d long ago decided getting involved in the Victorian party’s “internecine wars” was a waste of time. “I do take that job as a dad really, really seriously. So I promise you, I don’t have time for all that internal bullshit.”

Sukkar is hated in the Labor Party. This election, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described him as arrogant, and last year, Sukkar was officially the worst-behaved parliamentarian, ejected from the chamber 16 times for disorderly conduct – yet it is doing little to challenge him in Deakin. In Victoria, Labor is putting its money into defending the seats it holds, so Matt Gregg’s campaign is decidedly low key. On my trips to Deakin, I saw no Labor advertising, but spotted two anti-Labor billboards, two Sukkar corflutes and his face adorning a bus stop. “He’s spending more money than someone who’s confident would,” says Gregg.

Good on the stump

What do Deakin voters think of their MP? One Ringwood mum tells me she is still disappointed he abstained from the same-sex marriage vote. She mentions his 2017 comment that getting a “highly paid job” was the “first step” to home ownership. “He seems to be able to do all these things and continually get voted in because he’s at every school, every sports event, just everywhere advertising [himself].” Meanwhile, one anti-Sukkar local politician begrudgingly admits he is “very good on the stump” and “greets everyone by name”.

Suzy Stojanovic, a former local councillor, says Sukkar is “very charismatic” in person, but appears to have done little to address housing affordability, climate policy or help domestic violence victims. Stojanovic, a domestic abuse survivor advocate, says Sukkar is on good terms with the Men’s Shed but, as far as she knew, has not been to any of the Community Houses, “where a lot of the women are”.

At Ringwood’s Eastland shopping centre, I find Joe, 90, who says: “I think he is a good man.” Joe voted for Albanese last time, but this time it’s hard to choose. “Food prices,” he says. “It’s a factor for everybody.”

That’s something that’s difficult to fix – for both Michaels.

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