Piers Akerman: PM Malcolm Turnbull may survive the Newspoll but won’t be resurrected

IT IS unlikely the latest Newspoll will give Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull the popularity bump needed to turn the tide running against him, Piers Akerman writes.

LATE this evening the results of Malcolm Turnbull’s 29th Newspoll will be available to the media.

On probability it is unlikely that they will give him the popularity bump needed to turn the tide running against him and after Easter he will almost inevitably suffer the enormous indignity of falling short of the measure he personally gave as justification for the political assassination for his prime ministerial predecessor Tony Abbott in September 14, 2015.

His next Newspoll will mark the 30th but though he and his team of inadequate advisers may have planned some form of words to meet the tide of well-warranted demands for an explanation of why the public should not now apply the metric he set for Abbott to himself, nothing he could possibly say will blunt the reasonable criticism that he is hypocritical and duplicitous.

“The one thing that is clear about our current situation is the trajectory. We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott’s leadership,” he said that day.

Will Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull regain popularity in the latest Newspoll? Picture: AAP Image/Danny Casey

What was so clear to Turnbull then is not so clear today and certainly won’t be made clearer when the 30th Newspoll arrives. Turnbull now in office for 2½ years, should have had Labor’s Bill Shorten locked in a political box.

Shorten is one of the worst Opposition leaders Labor has ever presented. He is a political throwback to the years of class war, he is divisive, he is contradictory. He presides over a party which has turned a blind eye to criminal activity at the highest levels in the unions like the CMFEU upon which it relies for contributions.

Just last week he has stood by ALP national secretary Noah Carroll, identified by the Victorian Ombudsman as the co-author of the “rorts for votes” scandal which saw 21 Victorian MPs elected after illegally using taxpayer funds at the 2014 state election, and he has not condemned the $1 million Victorian Labor spent fighting the Ombudsman.

He has a history of depriving some of the lowest paid union members of increases and of favouring employers who have contributed to his personal political campaign chest. Neither he nor his team have any notion of the most basic economic reforms which were once championed by real Labor warriors, reforms which delivered genuine better living standards for workers.

Turnbull has not pandered to criminal elements but he is as guilty as Shorten in ignoring the reforms of recent leaders.

“Bill Shorten is one of the worst Opposition leaders Labor has ever presented,” Piers Akerman says. Picture: Michael Franchi

Where Shorten disrespects the Hawke-Keating government, Turnbull rejects the Howard model.

He seems to believe there is an inexhaustible well of conservatism within the electorate that will continue to support the Liberals no matter how much the party’s leadership debauches the party’s principles.

Australians are fortunate in that the founding documents of the Liberal Party can be accessed through the speeches broadcast by Bob Menzies in 1942 and they can measure the current leaders by the yardstick he left.

Recently republished by the Menzies Foundation, under the leadership of the prescient Nick Cater, (I disclose he is a former colleague) the speeches are well written and as resonant today as they were when Australians first heard them 76 years ago.

In his Forgotten People address — which really laid out the groundwork for the party — Menzies defined his audience as “this middle class”.

He said it had a “stake in the country” which he defined as “responsibility for homes — homes material, homes human, and homes spiritual”.

He deliberately excluded those we would now call the elites saying he didn’t believe the real life of the nation was found in “the luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses”.

“It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race.

“The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole.”

Nothing has changed there but our politics are dictated not by those who are “nameless and unadvertised” as Menzies said, but by television commentators, and pressure groups who shamelessly ­advertise their virtue by embracing every fad that emerges.

But do any talk of the home as the foundation of sanity? No. As we saw at Sydney University last week, where the student debating society has decided that the normal is to be ostracised and the deviant is to be promoted, normalcy must be outlawed through so-called affirmative action.

He foresaw the generations of non-contributors who would discourage ambition, envy success, to distrust independent thought, to sneer at and impute false motives to public service.

“One of the great blots on our modern living is the cult of false values, a repeated application of the test of money, notoriety, applause. A world in which a comedian or a beautiful halfwit on the screen can be paid fabulous sums, whilst scientific researchers and discoverers can suffer neglect and starvation, is a world which needs to have its sense of values violently set right,” he said.

Who can talk like this today? For all his faults Abbott is the only one with the ability to talk to the forgotten Australians because he’s got conservative instincts deep inside his guts. Turnbull can’t because his instincts point him to the left and Peter Dutton, Andrew Hastie and Angus Taylor still need more time — and inspiration from their leader.

Labor has long forsaken the middle class in Australia but the Liberals, under Turnbull, have shown they are ready to follow the same path but by the scenic route.

The attacks on superannuation by both major parties seem to bear out Menzies warning: “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will die, and if it chances you don’t die, the state will look after you; but if you don’t eat, drink and be merry and save, we shall take your savings from you.”

Turnbull may survive the poll after the Easter weekend but he won’t be resurrected.