Australians Take a Stand
Kerry Wakefield looks back on late November, 2009, and the great popular uprising that removed Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party.
Kerry Wakefield looks back on late November, 2009, and the great popular uprising that removed Malcolm Turnbull as leader of the Liberal Party:
On Tuesday 24, then-Liberal leader Turnbull had rammed his carbon reduction scheme through a deeply divided party room, and emerged claiming (mischievously) party room support.
Early the next morning my husband, then-Liberal Senate Leader Nick Minchin, rang home to say that MPs’ phones were melting down with an extraordinary backlash from the party faithful; not just a few offices either, but across the board.
I could hear the surprise and awe in his voice. I had reported politics for the Age in the Canberra gallery, but neither of us had ever seen anything like it. This was a genuine grassroots mass moment yet the media pack could not have been less interested.
In their view Turnbull was on the side of the angels and his opponents were Neanderthal climate deniers, so not for the first (or last) time, the groupthink gallery missed a real story.
Later that day my husband resigned from the frontbench. The following week Turnbull lost the leadership ...
Something of the same spirit may now be observed regarding China. Wakefield mentions a friend’s business venture:
He’d been selling medical equipment to small business people in a capital city recently. He had both Russian and Chinese gear and the Chinese gear was one-fifth cheaper.
Of the score of business owners he contacted, not one had bought the Chinese equipment – ‘on principle’. He still can’t move it.
Please read on, as much for the prose as for the reporting. Wakefield writes beautifully.