Opinion: These are the qualities we need our Prime Minister to have

MALCOLM Turnbull has embarked on a perilously long unofficial election campaign. If master politician John Howard couldn’t exploit a long campaign, what hope does he have?

NOT three years ago a victorious Tony Abbott promised Australia competent, trustworthy, purposeful, steadfast and methodical government.

It was the opinion of the Australian people and, more tellingly, of his own party that he was unable to live up to his proclaimed principles.

But any fair summation of his prime ministership would have to concede that those five qualities have been largely absent from Australian governments for a decade.

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When did they start to evaporate and where do we draw a line between stability and volatility?

There were ominous hints when John Howard resorted to core and non-core promises and, according to internal critics, his government was seen as mean and sneaky.

The government steadied, so a good a time as any is 2006 when Labor leader Kim Beazley was, to quote Abbott, “beset by ambitious careerists who will neither mount a challenge nor rule one out’’.

Students of irony will savour Abbott’s unconscious prescience.

When the challenge did come, from Kevin Rudd, it was quick, brutal and successful.

Rudd was able to convince his party and the electorate that he could deliver on those qualities just as Howard’s government began to suffer its slow death by hubris.

In governmental terms, those qualities seemed to dissipate during the final year of the Howard government.

It was a period marked by leadership instability as careerist treasurer Peter Costello sulked and dithered, and by intransigence from Howard himself.

Even Howard suffered from a lack of purpose until he settled on a November 24, 2007, election giving him an official campaign of 41 days in which to close the opinion poll gap.

But his campaign was scrappy and marred by “negativism”. The result was shattering defeat.

But, in reality, the election had begun when Rudd seized the Labor leadership, beginning what was dubbed the “never ending campaign’’ and ended when he pledged to be “a prime minister for all Australians’’.

From then the story is drearily familiar. Rudd was able to deliver for a period but it went pear-shaped as his character peculiarities took him ever further from those five principles.

John Howard had an official campaign of 41 days in which to close the opinion poll gap. But his campaign was scrappy and marred by “negativism”. The result was shattering defeat.

We endured the revolving door leadership of Julia Gillard and Rudd, with but occasional glimpses of those qualities as they were hammered out of shape by Abbott’s relentless negativity. What was seen as a campaign blunder for Howard was a winner for Abbott.

But Abbott was unable to make the transition from the master of the negative to the prime minister of the positive, making his election night promises risible in retrospect.

So it came to pass Malcolm Turnbull pushed the revolving leadership door and promised to lead us forward into the broad, sunlit uplands of competent government.

The fall from spectacular opinion poll highs to level pegging with Labor suggests he has not been entirely successful.

And, without a cushion of poll preferences, he has embarked on a perilously long unofficial election campaign. If master politician Howard could not exploit a long campaign, it is a huge challenge for Turnbull.

Tony Abbott was unable to make the transition from the master of the negative to the prime minister of the positive, making his election night promises risible in retrospect.

He first has to convince the public that this is a double dissolution worth having.

The expensive charade over the re-establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission smacks of opportunism and doesn’t exactly sing in campaigning terms.

Like Howard, Turnbull seems to be embarking on a journey with little in the way of emotive policies in his baggage. He seems stymied on taxes, budgetarily confused, single-minded on union bashing, grudgingly half-hearted on financial transparency and reform, vulnerable on health and education, wedged on sexual and social reforms and susceptible to embarrassment from a gaffe-prone ministry.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten keeps plodding along, gradually gaining poll favour and connecting with public opinion.

Having exhausted itself with leadership plots, the ALP seems to have granted him a period of tranquillity and unity but he still has to carry the idiocy of people like Senator Stephen Conroy.

He has set the agenda and wedged the Coalition into standing against public opinion on issues that are popular, even if of debatable merit. He has pushed the Government into directions it didn’t want to take.

However, he faces a monumental task in winning 19 seats to form a government and there is no guarantee he can maintain his equilibrium and upward mobility for two-and-half months.

The odds are narrowing but the Coalition and Turnbull still have the edge.

But for all the policy juggling, the side that can demonstrate competence, trust, purpose, steadfastness and method will turn chance into certainty.

After an uncertain decade, we need and deserve those qualities. In spades.

Originally published as Opinion: These are the qualities we need our Prime Minister to have