Turncoat Turnbull: ghost returns to haunt Libs’ poll battle

That Malcolm Turnbull has betrayed his former colleagues in the Liberal Party is about as surprising as last year’s news Warner Brothers were rebooting Batman, writes James Campbell.

That Malcolm Turnbull has betrayed his former colleagues in the Liberal Party is about as surprising as last year’s news Warner Brothers were rebooting Batman.

That he would wait until the last weeks’ of the campaign had also been predicted, which was why in private at least one MP had advocated getting in early and expelling him before the election was called.

And by choosing to deliver his jeremiad against Liberals at the Harvard Club of Washington DC, whose membership is confined to graduates and students of one of the world’s most elite universities, Malcolm has shown us he’s still got the dazzling political skills that got him where he is today.

Betrayal....Former PM Malcolm Turnbull. Picture: David Caird

Leaving aside Turnbull’s awful ingratitude to Liberals those Liberals who overcame their reservations to make him PM, what is striking about his advocacy for the teal independents, is how perfectly it plays into the hands of a right wing of the party that he fears is on the March.

According to the advance transcript of the speech given to the SMH, Turnbull will tell the Harvards “if more of these ‘teal’ independents win, it will mean the capture of the Liberal Party will be thwarted by direct, democratic action from voters”.

Err, no it won’t Malcolm.

Turnbull had previously declined to say if he would vote for Liberal MP Dave Sharma against rival Independent candidate for Wentworth Allegra Spender. Picture: Richard Dobson

The consequence to the Liberal Party, and by extension Australian democracy, of the severing of the moderate wing of the Liberal Party in the teal seats, will be the acceleration of its radicalisation as a right wing populist force.

What Turnbull doesn’t seem to have grasped are the numbers.

If you look at the electoral map it quickly become obvious that Wentworth, North Sydney, Kooyong, Higgins, Curtin and Goldstein, that is to say seats where people have got time on their hands to worry about climate change federal anti-corruption commissions, are more than matched by Labor seats such as Macquarie, Eden-Monaro, Dobell, Gilmore, Greenway, Hunter, Parramatta, Shortland, McEwen, Corangamite, Dunkley and Hawke, where they’re more worried about cost-of-living and interest rates and views about trans issues are much closer to Katherine Deves’s than Trent Zimmerman’s.

A Liberal Party devoted to winning these places, along with more suburban Melbourne seats such as Bruce, Holt, Hotham and Isaacs, is the dream of many in the right-wing of Liberal Party.

Far from thwarting the Right, Malcolm T is hurting those Liberals whose views are closest to his own and acting as its’ useful idiot.