Piers Akerman: So where is Malcolm’s star-spangled manner

THE Australian American ­Association handed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull a real trump card with the icebreaking meeting with The Donald at its inspirational commemoration of the Battle of the Coral Sea aboard the USS Intrepid in New York.

Piers Akerman

THE Australian American ­Association handed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull a real trump card with the icebreaking meeting with The Donald at its inspirational commemoration of the Battle of the Coral Sea aboard the USS Intrepid in New York.

The battle did turn the tide against the Japanese war ­machine — thanks largely to the warriors of Australia and America and the team of code breakers who cracked the Japanese cyphers and gave the combined allied navies the winning edge.

The glittering occasion ­attended by the leaders of the Australian business community in the US was an undoubted triumph as were the genuine expressions of friendship and support from the two leaders.

They were real but as Turnbull should know, too often what happens on tour, stays on tour. As wonderful as the Trump’s warm welcome was, he will still find it chilly in Canberra this week and he has yet to demonstrate he has the skills to negotiate the domestic political hazards.

As Parliament resumes tomorrow for the Budget session, conservatives can only wish that Turnbull garnered something from his contact with Trump during their meeting.

Sadly, it seems a forlorn hope as he seems incapable of learning from anyone with any real world experience and has surrounded himself with a claque of warmed-over Labor advisers and wet-behind-the-ears staffers who remember nothing and have learnt nothing in the Canberra bubble.

Though he is a disappointment to even his longest supporters the thought of tossing Turnbull is such an anathema to the Liberal Party they blanch at the thought of leadership change even as Bill Shorten and his charming wife, Chloe, contemplate their redecoration plans for the Lodge.

Without change though there must be vigorous debate — as former prime minister Tony Abbott has encouraged — and the party room must confront Turnbull with the ­reality that he is a dud who must reform himself, though there is but a slim chance that he will understand that he must present himself as a real leader. Borrowing policies from Labor as he did last week with his debatable Gonski 2.0, without taking the notion first to the party room, gives no confidence he understands politics.

Has he really forgotten how well his support for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s farcical plans to kill Australia’s mining and energy industries went down when he backed Rudd’s moronic vision without telling his party room colleagues?

The best argument against Gonski 2.0 is the same as that was applied to Labor’s plan — it would do nothing to increase educational outcomes.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham will be the next casualty of an under-the-bus accident when this Turnbull initiative turns pear-shaped.

It shows about as much forethought as that displayed by the stupid student protesters who gathered, shrieking, outside Turnbull’s Edgecliff electorate office on Thursday to demand free education their way. Had they shown any ­intelligence, they would have known that he was then en route to Manhattan for his meeting with Trump.

My colleague Miranda ­Devine has suggested that it might pay to neutralise Abbott by appointing him Governor-General when Sir Peter Cosgrove’s term expires but conventionally G-Gs’ terms run for five years, which would take him to 2019. In any case, Abbott, at 59, is far too young to take the role as the Father or Mother of the nation.

It’s not surprising though that some Liberals wish Abbott would shut up — they are angry because his thoughtful contributions and national ­debate inevitably invite comparison between him and his successor.

And Turnbull doesn’t dazzle and nor do those who would wish Abbott go into exile ­exactly shine.

But the Liberal Party should welcome the opportunity to debate ideas.

Socialists and communists rejoice in silencing their opponents, not Liberals. Curiously, there are a couple of members of the Warrnambool branch of the Liberal Party who think they are contributing to political discourse if they could only influence members in Abbott’s Warringah electorate to silence him by refusing to endorse him as their local candidate.

That information comes from Niki Savva, who aired the effort by Warrnambool locals Peter Herbert and Adam Kempton in The Australian last Thursday. Herbert is a self-admitted political naive, Kempton was a one-term state Liberal backbencher when the Victorian Liberals were in ­opposition during John Cain Jr’s first-term in office.

Of all the attacks on Abbott, the promotion by Savva of the political nonentities’ bid to ­unseat Abbott could scarcely be more ridiculous.

Anyone would have thought these self-professed worthies might have made their first call for action against their idiotic Labor state government rather than targeting a backbencher in a safe seat in a Liberal-held state on the basis that former PMs shouldn’t speak out on matters of policy and principle. If Abbott was such a dismal performer then let him run off at the mouth and embarrass himself.

The problem is that those who deposed Abbott have still to mount a coherent ­argument for their decision apart from wishing to save their own skins when panicked into action by Turnbull’s constant undermining of the elected leader.

There are really only two issues on which he attracted criticism for not taking them to the party room — his Paid Parental Leave scheme and the Duke of Edinburgh’s knighthood. How petty does the censure of his knighthood decision look in the light of the record of service republished last week when it was announced that Prince Philip was retiring from public duties? Turnbull’s Coral Sea victory is worth celebrating but his war has a long way to run and he has yet to break his opponent’s codes.