Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to cross the floor of the House of Representatives is no big deal, particularly when his party is in Opposition. Until the Howard Government, it was not uncommon for backbenchers from non-Labor parties to cross the floor.

Members of the Labor Caucus never cross the floor, whether Labor is in government or Opposition, as it is against ALP rules and the Caucus is much more disciplined. Robert Menzies’ attitude to floor crossers could not have been more different than Howard’s.

When Menzies set up the Liberal Party, he insisted that the party room could not give directions to the Cabinet, or in Opposition, the leader of the Liberals (there were no shadow ministers then). Menzies believed that, as the party room could not vote on policy, any backbencher was free to vote against the government (or when not in government, the Opposition leader) in the Parliament. In short, every backbencher had a conscience vote.

In March 1963, when Arthur Calwell was leader of the Opposition and Gough Whitlam his deputy, the National Conference of the ALP held a special meeting at the Hotel Kingston in Canberra. It was called to decide the party’s attitude to Menzies’ decision to allow the US to set up a communications base at North West Cape in WA. Calwell and Whitlam were permitted to address the conference, but they then had to leave and took no part in the discussions.

Menzies leapt on this outrage, declaring Labor MPs were told how to vote by “36 faceless men”. Rubbing it in, Menzies boasted that no one could tell a Liberal how to vote. (Menzies did insist his ministers at all times supported, publicly and privately, decisions of the Cabinet.)

Queensland travel agent Ian Wood, a Liberal Senator from 1951 to 1978, frequently voted against government measures under Menzies and other Lib leaders, as did Reginald Wright, a pesky Lib Tassie lawyer in the Senate from 1969 to 1978 and Alan Missen, also a lawyer and a Victorian Lib Senator from 1974 till his death in 1986.

There were several other “rebels”, although they weren’t so regarded in the Liberal Party. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser did his best to prevent Liberals voting against him in the House, but knew he could not stop floor crossers in the Senate.  John Howard, the master politician, changed all that.

A control freak, he decided everything that happened in government, even down to which backbenchers could have trips overseas. Anyone wanting to get on, toed the line and dissent, even behind the closed doors of the party room, was infrequent. There were some dissenters on the backbench, such a Petro Georgiou (Vic) and Dr Mal Washer (WA).

In 2006, several Liberal backbenchers, including  Washer, rebelled against the Howard-Tony Abbott the ban on stem cell research.  President Bush had used his veto to block a Senate Bill to increase government funding of human embryonic stem cell research and Howard was in lockstep with Bush.

In the Vatican, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family warned — “Excommunication will be applied to the women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos (and to the) politicians that approve the law.”

Led by Washer, the Lib rebels finally extracted a concession from Howard that the stem cell issue would be subject to conscience vote. Howard and Abbott in Parliament spoke against a measure to allow stem cell research and were defeated.