Federal election 2016: Can Malcolm Turnbull play a winning hand?

DENNIS ATKINS: Malcolm Turnbull looks too much like the smooth-talking, snake oil salesman at the moment. That’s not a winning hand to play.

SHORT term, medium term and longer term are ideas that Australian voters grapple with at the best of times.

When you start throwing in numbers that come in the billions you’ve got as much chance of keeping people’s attention as if you’re explaining quantum physics.

Today Bill Shorten and his finance guys Tony Burke and Chris Bowen outlined about $7 billion worth of savings with plenty of so-called “zombie” cuts which relate to tens of billions of savings Labor thinks it can pocket because they are spending plans that will never see the

light of day — mainly because of the intransigence of enough crossbench senators — likely to include Jaqui Lambie, Pauline Hanson and Derryn Hinch.

These are inveterate practitioners of saying no, especially when you have a trade-off between tax cuts for the big business and payments for childcare card and Medicare.

If the last Senate looked like dog’s breakfast this one of shaping up as an exploded Thermomix.

Turnbull wants to be prime minister in his own right — to have a fresh mandate which will set him up for what he dreams of as 10 years in the prime-ministerial suite.

Turnbull has told people this goal and he’ll get there hell or high water. If he has to deal with the devil, he will and if he needs to sell out his supposed core principles, they can go too.

It’s like the great Mississippi blues guitar player meeting the devil at the intersection of Highways 61 and 49 and trading his soul for the magic to be able to play.

But here’s a newsflash that should alarm Turnbull — although his self-belief is so strong and his sense of destiny so profound, he’s unlikely to realise his own shortcomings.

His agenda — his jobs and growth package which no one has been yet able to define — is not the deal with the devil he might hope it to be.

It remains a mystery to most who want real jobs and hanker for something they can hold on to. Sweet music is after all just sweet music. It doesn’t sustain you for an eight week campaign when that devil is sitting on the porch waiting for that payday.

Can Turnbull make the payments and does he have the resilience of Robert Johnson is a question for the times.

Just now he looks too much like the smooth-talking, snake oil salesman. That’s not a winning

hand to play.

Originally published as Federal election 2016: Can Malcolm Turnbull play a winning hand?