Tim Blair: Malcolm Turnbull’s effectiveness now makes even Bill Shorten look good
TURNBULL’S effectiveness at undermining Abbott hasn’t translated to the job of running the country. He makes even Shorten look good, says Tim Blair.
Opinion
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LATE in 2015, some weeks after Malcolm Turnbull’s successful coup against Prime Minister Tony Abbott, I found myself in conversation with a senior Liberal MP. It was a casual, private chat. We skated over a few topics before the MP offered an unbidden opinion on Turnbull’s prospects as PM.
“Malcolm,” the MP predicted, “will f. k this up.”
This seemed a bold call. After all, Turnbull’s polling figures at the time showed he was significantly more popular than food. Many right-wing Coalition members were gleeful that Turnbull had all but guaranteed their re-election. Squishy left-leaning Libs, a revoltingly large group, were even happier than when they’re sucking up to multiculturalists and Muslims.
Similarly delighted were leftist media types. “After a few weeks, the country feels different,” The Sydney Morning Herald’s Elizabeth Farrelly gushed. “The air has a new edge. And that edge has a name. Intelligence.”
Air with an IQ! Unknowingly, Farrelly had perfectly defined Turnbull and his hypnotised followers as masses of inert speech-capable gas. Elizabeth continued:
“Malcolm — who like Beyonce is known universally by his first name — will be the longest-serving prime minister since Menzies. Possibly ever.” Like Beyonce. This is perhaps the only time an Australian prime minister was compared to a Texas-raised singing daughter of a xerox sales manager.
Do carry on, Lizzie: “Malcolm has occupied the middle ground so thoroughly that Bill Shorten, who against Abbott looked almost plausible, is suddenly Mr 15 Per Cent, and shrinking.”
Let’s not be too hard on Ms Farrelly, who for a while seemed right on the money. By early 2016 Labor staffers were privately conceding that their party would lose last year’s federal election and lose it big time. Tentative strategies were discussed about a leadership change.
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Then something happened. Little by little, voters realised that the skills deployed by Turnbull to become prime minister — talking in broad platitudes, attempting to please everybody, being Mr Nice Guy — weren’t the skills required of a prime minister. For the rest of last year Turnbull’s electoral support gradually fell away. By the time of July’s election it had dropped to such a point that Turnbull scraped in with a one-seat victory.
Turnbull had, as our Liberal MP accurately predicted, f ... ed it up. And he’s continuing to do so. Consider Turnbull’s blathering last week about excessive gas prices. “When the market is in balance, when it is adequately supplied, wholesale prices should be not materially different from the export price,” he said last week.
“I stress this is a wholesale price for gas in Australia today, if it was based on the export price, would be less than half $20 (a gigajoule). Now this is not saying all gas prices will be halved as a result of these changes,” the Prime Minister went on. “If you’re a family the wholesale price of gas is between 15-20 per cent of the cost of your gas bill because the gas company obviously has a whole pipeline distribution network and many other costs also.”
What was all that about? Turnbull was slightly clearer when interviewed on Melbourne radio: “The measures I’ve undertaken, the government’s announced, will put downward pressure on the wholesale price.” Slightly clearer, but note the phrase “downward pressure”. Turnbull’s channelling former Labor PM Kevin Rudd, whose mastery of waffle set a perfect example for politicians to avoid. Instead, Turnbull is copying it.
Besides the polls, there was another reason why that Liberal MP’s prediction might have appeared pessimistic. Bill Shorten carries more baggage than Qantas and should have been easy work for a prime minister with surging popular support. Yet Shorten has proved to be a far more effective opposition leader than was Turnbull when he led Coalition forces against the Rudd government.
Shorten’s policy positions are mostly garbage, but he’s nevertheless able to express those positions in a reasonably direct and often impressively combative manner. I’ve had one or two arguments with the Labor leader. He doesn’t make a lot of sense, at least to me, but he doesn’t back down. And he sticks to his points.
This approach is terrifically effective against someone who wasn’t a good opposition leader and isn’t a good prime minister. It turns out that Malcolm Turnbull’s only significant political ability is undermining his own party leader. Beyond that very narrow talent spectrum he’s at a loss.
If Turnbull was a Formula One driver, he’d be excellent at sitting in the pits while everyone else does the hard work of changing tyres and fixing wings. Driving the car to the pits and then driving it away, however, are outside his range.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump — the man whose campaign staff Turnbull declined to approach during his American visit last year — continues to demonstrate the virtues of telling it straight and addressing enemies head on.
His Pennsylvania speech on Saturday night to mark 100 days in office was a superb piece of Trumpian theatre, complete with gags about incompetent media and applause for security guards who ejected hecklers.
The Prime Minister’s meeting next week with US President Donald Trump will be a study in absolute opposites. It might be Turnbull’s most awkward moment as PM since his post-midnight election meltdown. There’s every chance he’ll f..k it up.
A NATION IN THRALL TO A FRICKIN’ IDIOT
The usual suspects emerged last week to defend Yassmin Abdel-Magied following the Muslim activist’s Anzac Day Facebook slur.
Critics were infringing on Abdel-Magied’s right to free speech, they claimed, seeking to diminish her critics’ own right to free speech. Critics were racist, screeched a few other Abdel-Magied fans.
The most intriguing line, however, was that critics were being mean to someone who is just young and not very sharp. Fairfax’s Jacqueline Maley led this particular argument, writing that while Abdel-Magied’s “ill-considered comments” were “lazily expressed” and “eye-rollingly undergraduate”, they didn’t warrant “institutional bullying from men in government”. Maley even found support from an unnamed defence force member. “As it was discussed between my colleagues and me, this woman is what, 26?” the ADF member told her. “I was a frickin’ idiot at 26, still am, but luckily nobody listens to my Facebook feeds.”
So we’re in agreement, then. Abdel-Magied is a frickin’ idiot.
And she dresses as though she walked into Ken Done’s studio when he’d run out of canvas. But surely the kid’s stupidity isn’t just a reason to discount her Anzac Day outburst. If anything, it’s a sound reason to call into question Abdel-Magied’s absurd political and media prominence.
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why is she the tax-funded host of an ABC program? And why was she invited to be a member of the ABC’s Q&A panel in February?
That was the show where Abdel-Magied proved her frickin’ idiocy by claiming that Islam was “the most feminist of religions”, a stance only slightly undermined by her subsequent online contact with those feminist hardliners at Hizb ut-Tahrir. “How can I do better in the future inshallah? I am young, and willing to learn, inshallah,” Abdel-Magied wrote. “Trying to do the best with the platform I can, Allah willing.”
Allah and Australian taxpayers. If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why was she invited to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s Iftar dinner last year? Why was she at the PM’s table?
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why is she on the Council for Australian-Arab Relations?
And why has she previously served as a member of the Australian Multicultural Council, the Federal ANZAC Centenary Commemoration Youth Working Group and the 2014 Youth G20 Summit?
If Abdel-Magied is such a frickin’ idiot, why did the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade sponsor her book tour last year to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan, the West Bank, Israel, Egypt and Sudan? For that matter, why does a frickin’ idiot get a book deal in the first place?
For an idiot, Abdel-Magied sure has a lot of people clamouring for her opinions.
Why?
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