Piers Akerman: PM Malcolm Turnbull has zero to show after a year at nation’s helm

PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull may well be the most over-qualified underachiever ever to occupy the Lodge, Piers Akerman writes.

Piers Akerman.

PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull may well be the most over-qualified underachiever ever to occupy the Lodge.

After a year in the position, he has failed to initiate a single effective policy.

The Malcolm-in-the-middle or the Malcolm-in-the-muddle tags are painfully apt.

He was gifted Opposition leader Bill Shorten before the last election yet, despite Shorten’s truly grubby trade union record, only narrowly scraped home. Though barely winning what should have been the unlosable election, the Turnbull-led Liberals suffered a 3.35 percentage first-preference swing against them in the House of Representatives vote.

On the national two-party House of Representatives preferred vote, the swing against the Liberals was 3.13 per cent, the same as the swing towards Labor. The Turnbull Liberals were saved by the small .32 per cent swing to the Nationals.

Turnbull’s presidential-style election campaign ignored traditional conservative Liberal voters, many of whom ran to cast their votes for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party which benefited from a 1.12 per cent swing lower house vote and a 3.76 Senate vote swing.

Since the election, Turnbull has continued to ignore traditional conservative issues — notably dismissing any attempt to repeal or reform Section 18C of 1975 Anti-Discrimination Act, bizarrely equating the government’s efforts to spend on infrastructure as some sort of substitute for championing free speech, one of the most critical underpinnings of liberal democratic thought.

When asked this past week to nominate a single achievement of the Turnbull government over the past 12 months, numerous senior figures, including former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, demurred.

PM Malcolm Turnbull at the ASEAN summit in Laos. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Turnbull’s hollow campaign rhetoric may as well have been road-tested on inner-urban hipsters for all the meaningless rhetoric it consisted of.

Former treasurer Peter Costello gave an address to a packed breakfast audience of leading Australian businessmen and women on Friday.

I asked him whether the Liberal Party was becoming a party of the centre left or the centre right — a question he neatly and diplomatically dodged by saying he hoped it would be a “party of the sensible centre”.

Unfortunately, that’s not what it is now perceived as by increasing numbers of former Liberal supporters.

As the Greens increase their vote — they received a lower house 1.58 per cent swing on July 2 — the Labor Party has steadily lurched to the left in its vain attempt to recapture deserters who seek a more pure political path despite Gough Whitlam’s 1967 prescient warning to the lunatic left Victorian ALP — “certainly, the impotent are pure”.

Unfortunately, Turnbull’s entrepreneurial style of leadership lacks such a political compass and instead of drawing a conservative line in the sand, he has vacated that space and permitted so-called moderates to follow Labor and the Greens to the left on critical social issues.

It would be instructional for Turnbull or his gaggle of advisers to look at some hard numbers before uttering further platitudes designed for a Q&A audience and not the voters who count — the middle-class lifters across Australia.

Michael Sukkar, a young Victorian Liberal who won the then-marginal seat of Deakin with a 2.01 per cent swing in 2013, held the seat with a first preference swing of 4.15 per cent. Sukkar, who has Lebanese and Danish heritage, is a strong social conservative. He has fought against the socialist state of Victoria’s noxious and falsely named Safe Schools Coalition, pointing out how the Andrews government’s Marxist-­inspired campaign to insert family-destroying agenda into primary schools will have far-reaching effects on free speech.

Certainly his forthright views on this topic didn’t hurt his electoral fortune.

He was also, with similarly conservative-aligned Liberal senator Cory Bernardi, well ahead of his party’s leadership in identifying the contemptible request made by shamed Labor senator Sam Dastyari that a Chinese company pick up the bills for not only a private debt but also a legal debt incurred by the NSW ALP.

While the Liberal HQ dithered about the possible repercussions, Sukkar and Bernardi nailed Dastyari and led Turnbull’s belated outrage by days. They offered leadership where it was lacking.

While there is little real prospect of a split in the Liberal Party at the moment, or any move to replace the underachieving Turnbull, the disaffection must be recognised and dealt with.

It is not enough to say that the Liberal Party is a broad church with room for all, it must reassure its traditional supporters that it has not abandoned them. Turnbull’s support for homosexual marriage and the republican cause does not endear him to the heartland.

While he is globetrotting, he would do well to think upon the recent collapse in support for German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s ruling CDU party in her home state Mecklenburg-West Pomerania where at last weekend’s election the centre-right party was beaten into third place.

It was beaten by the Alternative fuer Deutschland (AfD) party, which took just under 21 per cent of the vote behind the centre-left SPD.

The AfD, which is ­opposed to Islamic immigration, has picked up support across Germany since Merkel opened the floodgates to more than a million refugees. It is not as rabid as generally left-wing media point out and reflects the views of growing numbers of Germans (and ­Europeans generally) as Islamist influence ­increases on the Continent.

The rise of the AfD in just three years demonstrates how rapidly the disenfranchised can be organised if they feel scorned and neglected.

Turnbull would do well to consider those he has rejected and ignored as he marks this first anniversary.

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