Malcolm Turnbull not good at negative politics, needs an attack dog

PARTY GAMES: There’s one thing Malcolm Turnbull isn’t good at, and he really needs an offsider to do the dirty work for him.

MALCOLM Turnbull is not a good attack politician — he doesn’t have the bloodthirsty look or that venomous vocabulary. He would rather slay someone with a bon mot than a Keatingesque linguistic rapier.

After all, it’s impossible to think someone would say that Tony Abbott employed an “Aristotelian symposium approach (and not) a Socratic approach”.

This is how the classically educated Attorney-General George Brandis QC describes his boss in the new account of Turnbull’s life and times, Stop at Nothing by Annabel Crabb.

Turnbull has been employing some negative rhetoric against Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, mocking him for putting all his spending promises on a “spend-o-meter” (the Labor leader actually used this phrase to describe his running total which can only be called a whoopsie) and challenging the ALP’s commitment to border protection.

The danger for Turnbull is that he could blacken his own sliding personal standing by going negative on his opponent. It’s a solid rule of politics that you dirty yourself somewhat when you sling mud at the other guy.

Shorten has been doing the opposite — smiling as much as he can and leaving the dirty work to his parliamentary tactician Tony Burke — and is enjoying the spoils we see in rising approval ratings and an improved preferred-prime-minister score.

Turnbull needs someone to “go the mongrel” because it is hurting him to play the bad guy — and it’s a role he can’t carry off with any conviction or success.

While we can judge Turnbull as not being nasty enough to carry off political brutality with any of the requisite bite and bile, we shouldn’t mistake this for any lack of kill-or-be-killed determination to win.

As Crabb says in her new book, Turnbull’s ambition is boundless. “He came to the job of prime minister determined to change not only the government and the way it did business, but the nature of politics itself,” she writes.

Turnbull’s problem is he’s in the middle of the one political thing most resistant to change or transformation: an election campaign. He might not be comfortable all the time, but he still believes.

Originally published as Malcolm Turnbull not good at negative politics, needs an attack dog