Opinion: Malcolm Turnbull needs someone like Peta Credlin on his team to win the election

OPINION: Bring back Peta Credlin. Someone must whip the Turnbull Government into shape to save it from the worst own goal in Liberal history.

BRING back Peta Credlin. Someone must whip the Turnbull Government into shape to save it from the worst own goal in Liberal history.

The Government’s farcical performance on Tuesday – the day Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull confirmed we’d go to the polls on July 2 – should terrify Liberal MPs.

It was a shambles. If the rest of the campaign’s 75 days are like this first one, the Liberals are on a slow-mo cruise to disaster.

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Already Turnbull’s office seems to lack the firm hand of a Credlin, who as Tony Abbott’s chief of staff was vilified by the media and Turnbull supporters as a manic dominatrix and control freak.

Now see what the opposite looks like, when there is no one tough enough to force the team, including its leader, to sing in tune.

Turnbull on Tuesday should have decisively announced when the election would be held, what the main issues were and why voters should back the Liberals. Simple.

After all, he’d for weeks warned he’d call a double dissolution election for July 2 if the Senate again rejected a Bill for a workplace cop for the construction industry.

On Monday the Senate predictably called Turnbull’s bluff. It rejected his Bill. The Liberal election campaign should have smoothly kicked into gear.

It instead fell to bits.

First, deputy Liberal leader Julie Bishop claimed in her morning media conference to be unsure whether the election really would be on July 2 – or any time that month.

“One option available to us is a July election,” she said.

Immediately confusion. How could Bishop not know?

But enter Turnbull. You’d expect an impressive speech in the Prime Minister’s courtyard with Turnbull flanked by key lieutenants like Treasurer Scott Morrison and deputy Julie Bishop.

He instead turned up an hour late at a Belconnen business to stand next to a boss who didn’t want the CFMEU to control his workplace – an issue of nth-order importance to most voters.

Only when a journalist asked did Turnbull say it was his “intention” to call the election for July 2, an answer so weak that he had to toughen it up in Parliament hours later.

Labor leader Bill Shorten strode up to a platform with deputy Tanya Plibersek and shadow treasurer Chris Bowen to tell voters the values and policies he would fight for at this election. Picture: Kym Smith

This is how you start a campaign for your political life? When defeat would mean ruin for the Liberals and utter humiliation for yourself?

In contrast, Labor leader Bill Shorten strode up to a platform with deputy Tanya Plibersek and shadow treasurer Chris Bowen to tell voters the values and policies he would fight for at this election. Chalk, meet cheese.

But that was not the end of Tuesday’s misfires.

Turnbull told his partyroom that same day the election campaign hadn’t actually started, when voters could see with their own eyes it had.

Three Coalition MPs at that meeting then openly supported Labor’s election promise to call a royal commission into the banks, opposed by Turnbull.

This wasn’t the only sign of disunity. Another Government MP, Warren Entsch, told journalists he’d hung up on Turnbull in disgust after his Cairns electorate missed out on a big share of a naval shipbuilding contract.

Turnbull told his partyroom that same day the election campaign hadn’t actually started, when voters could see with their own eyes it had. Picture: Ray Strange

Yet another Liberal, Dennis Jensen, who has lost his preselection, attacked his own leadership for “all of these pie in the sky ideas [that] come out of nowhere”.

Is this a team or a rabble?

On it went. The Government’s scripts for a TV campaign to spruik its Budget – with taxpayers’ money, mind you – had fallen the night before into the hands of Sky News’ Paul Murray in what Labor gleefully hyped as a “humiliating” leak of core budget details.

And by Tuesday’s end, Labor and the Greens ambushed the Government by getting the Senate to agree to a snap inquiry next month into political donations that will drag before it Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos, who already faces questions about what he knew of illegal donations as NSW Liberal party Treasurer.

How could the day go so wrong? Bear in mind that one great advantage of being in Government is that you get to pick the election date that best suits you, so you can start with a bang.

Moreover, the Liberals also face what should be a sitting target: a Labor Party that actually boasts it will raise taxes by another $100 billion in 10 years and blow most of it on yet more spending. A party, what’s more, that will bring back another kind of carbon tax.

Turnbull should still win this election, but if he doesn’t get a Peta Credlin to kick his campaign team into shape, he’ll have thrown it away.