PM Malcolm Turnbull expresses sympathy for outsing Tony Abbott
EXCLUSIVE: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he sympathises with Tony Abbott after ousting him as leader, but has vowed to quit politics if he loses the Prime Ministership.
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PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull says he sympathises with Tony Abbott after ousting him as leader, but has vowed to quit politics if he loses the Prime Ministership.
Speaking exclusively to NewsCorp on the first anniversary of his narrow election victory, Mr Turnbull said he understood the difficulty Mr Abbott has had adjusting to life as a backbencher after losing the Liberal leadership.
“It is a big wrench going from being leader to not, I understand that,” he said.
Asked if he had sympathy for Mr Abbott after toppling him as leader, Mr Turnbull replied: “Absolutely.”
And the Prime Minister knows what it’s like to lose the leadership, having been rolled in 2009 by Tony Abbott as Liberal leader, when the party was in opposition.
Mr Turnbull said he went through a dark time after losing the party’s top job but stuck around because he thought he could continue to make a positive contribution.
“I had a bleak period and then I thought to myself, ‘I can continue to make a contribution’,” he said.
“Ultimately you can only get yourself out of that. You’ve got to reassess the situation and work out what you want to do. I put my head down and got on with it.”
Despite trailing in recent polls, Mr Turnbull said he had proven his critics wrong, claiming he made the right decision in calling a double-dissolution election last year because the government had passed more legislation through the parliament in the past 12 months than in the three years prior.
But on the election anniversary, the Prime Minister admitted his party had made some potentially disastrous mistakes during last year’s campaign. It was one year ago today that hundreds of Liberal faithful gathered at Sydney’s Sofitel Wentworth hotel to celebrate a predicted victory for the Coalition.
As blue seats turned red the thinning crowd waited to hear from the man most likely to be PM.
Television reporters gathered outside the Prime Minister’s Sydney house as former Liberal Premier Jeff Kennett and shock jock Alan Jones demanded Mr Turnbull leave his house and “face the people”.
“It is a big wrench going from being leader to not, I understand that.”
It was after midnight when an irritated Mr Turnbull finally emerged from his Point Piper home to address those left waiting.
He now admits that was wrong.
“I was disappointed,” Mr Turnbull said. “With the benefit of hindsight I should’ve come in at about 9.30 to 9.45pm.
“We kept on getting advice that they were just on the point of finalising the count in the key seats so that’s why we waited, we were waiting for an outcome.”
The Prime Minister said MPs, campaign strategists and the media underestimated the impact of Labor’s “Mediscare” campaign, which he said was “extraordinarily effective in the last week”.
“It was so outrageous that we underestimated it and a lot of people in the media discounted it as just being outrageous — it showed that you can’t make those assumptions.”
He said the 2014 Abbott-Hockey budget, which slashed education and health funding, allowed Labor to exploit the Coalition’s vulnerabilities and contributed to his government’s poor election result.
“In every campaign you’ve got to do two things: say ‘here are the reasons to vote for me’, and ‘here are the reasons why my opponent is a risk and you shouldn’t vote for him’,” he said.
“We did not do enough to highlight the risk of Labor.
“Clearly that was something we should’ve done more of.
“Having said that, we had very limited resources and if we had spent more of our advertising money on the negative then we would have less on the positive”
But one year on from polling day and after a week of instability and divisions, Mr Turnbull insisted his leadership was safe and his government was strong. “We have got more through the parliament in the past year than we have done in the previous three years,” he said.
“All the criticism that we would be in office but not in power has proved to be quite wrong.”
While Labor maintains a strong lead over the government in the polls, the Coalition has put a few runs on the board in recent months, including long-awaited reforms to school funding and childcare.
A recent infrastructure spending spree, which included Snowy Hydro 2.0, had also boosted morale within the government.
But this week tensions boiled over when former prime minister Tony Abbott, who promised “no wrecking, no undermining and no sniping” released his own policy manifesto and criticised the government’s submarine program.
Mr Abbott continued his damaging interventions yesterday, urging conservative members of the government to take back control of the NSW branch of the party.
While he refused to comment on whether Mr Abbott should leave the parliament, Mr Turnbull pointed to the resignation of former New Zealand prime minister John Key — who exited the parliament months after standing down from the top job — as an example of a good political exit.
“When I cease to be Prime Minister, I will cease to be a Member of Parliament. I am not giving anyone else advice but I just think that’s what I would do.”
But, at 62, the Prime Minister has no plans to retire any time soon, describing himself as a “happy Prime Minister”.
He said getting enough exercise and sleep helped him to deal with the gruelling schedule which will see him travel to Europe this week for the G20 summit in Germany.
But in those rare moments at home he is just Baba — a name given to him by his firstborn grandchild Jack, 3, who has only recently started to discover his grandfather’s double life. “The first grandchild gets the naming rights, so I am Baba and Lucy is Gaga,” Mr Turnbull said.
“It’s Baba and Gaga.”
To complicate matters, the Prime Minister’s granddaughter Isla — who stole the spotlight during his recent visit to Singapore where she lives with her parents — calls the Prime Minister YeYe, which is the Mandarin name for a paternal grandfather.
Mr Turnbull said he still found time to watch ABC Kids and read books, including Peggy Parish’s No More Monsters for Me!, with his Sydney-based grandchildren Jack and Alice.
He said becoming a grandparent and having “a little boy scampering around” had made him feel younger.
Recently he was forced to “lay down the law” to Jack at daughter Daisy’s request.
“I said: ‘Now Jack, I am the Prime Minister and the law is that when you cross the road you must hold Mummy’s hand’.”
The empathy and compassion he has garnered from being a father and grandfather served him well in recent months when he picked up the phone to call the two Australian mothers who lost their daughters in the London Bridge terror attack.
“It is very tough for them and my job is to provide firm, wise leadership but also show the compassion and the love feelings of the nation.
“We are very strong and we are very resolute, but we also have very big hearts.”
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