Saviour Malcolm Turnbull has turned out to be `a dud – and is headed for electoral defeat

OPINION: Malcolm Turnbull, who was supposed to lead the nation out of the policy wilderness, has proven only that he is a dud – and is heading for defeat at the election, writes Terry McCrann.

Malcolm Turnbull will be the guest speaker at this event. It is a combined chamber of commerce event with the chambers of commerce of Ingleburn, Narellan, Campbelltown and Camden. At Wests Leagues Club. Pics Ian Svegovic

BLUNTLY, and to put it quite simply, Malcolm Turnbull is a dud.

No, that’s not an acronym for a three-word slogan. But as “Dr Google” tells us: “A thing that fails to work properly or is otherwise unsatisfactory or worthless.”

Some other alternatives are: “a malfunctioning or failed idea; an unfulfilled expectation; something that does not do what it is supposed to do.”

You would think that after the last six months — and most particularly, last week — this would be an unexceptional statement. That the expectations, indeed the dreams — fantasies — of last September, would by now have completely evaporated.

Turnbull was supposed to lead the nation out of the policy wilderness and in the process save the Coalition government from the political perdition to which Peta (Credlin) via Tony (Abbott) had supposedly condemned it.

Instead he has revealed himself as not simply a political dud but also — his supposed strength — a policy dud as well. He is quite simply floundering completely out of his depth and without the faintest idea of how to even just touch bottom again.

Well, when I say “revealed” except not, it would appear, to the “intelligentsia” more broadly and to the Canberra Press Gallery more narrowly, very narrowly.

That is to some extent understandable. The Gallery is both emotionally and ideologically invested in Turnbull as primarily “the non-Abbott”.

He is the very model of their ideal prime minister — someone who not simply occupies the broad centre, but believes in all the “right things” that they do, and could sit easily in either of the major parties; as indeed he essentially has done over the years, at least, intellectually. The parallel, you might say, of a Donald Trump.

Bill Shorten may win the election by default. Picture: Peter Ristevski

This fundamental appeal — to the Gallery — of the “idea of PM-Turnbull” has survived the “reality of PM-Turnbull” because it has also directly intersected with another “accepted wisdom” held all but universally by both the Gallery and the broader intelligentsia.

This is that the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, is unelectable. For as soon as you concede that Turnbull is not just seriously but perhaps even terminally flawed as a politician, you have to entertain the idea of Shorten actually winning the election, even if just by default.

Today’s Newspoll in our sister paper The Australian should provide us with a fascinating update.

But I’ll state my assessment now: Turnbull is heading for defeat, whether in July or September.

As a sort of defence mechanism to the explosive consequences of the two realities colliding — the dud PM with the unelectable opposition leader — the leading lights of the Gallery are easily persuaded that each Turnbull policy failure is a political masterstroke.

The latest, stunning and — to anyone outside “the circuit”, the road that circles Parliament House, our version of Washington’s “Beltway” — embarrassingly obvious example, was his effete effort to force the states to impose their own income tax.

After its failure, Turnbull claimed it was a moment of great “clarity” — that, in essence, the states had been exposed as not wanting to raise the money they wanted to spend on schools and hospitals.

What completely bypassed the Gallery was that he was claiming this “moment of clarity” in a media grab of totally mixed messages, that will nevertheless provide all too much “clarity” to voters.

For on the one hand he was saying that a Turnbull government was not in favour of higher taxes. Yet he went on to immediately demand that the states increase their taxes.

Now the Gallery might be and indeed was impressed by this as a sophisticated debating point, but to the average voter it — and indeed the whole saga — would translate as a very simple, disastrously double-edged message.

That the Turnbull government is responsible for poor or inadequate hospitals and schools, because it is depriving the states of money; and that PM Turnbull wants to introduce double — read, higher — taxation.

Turnbull might want people to call him — politically pointlessly, I might add — the “innovation PM”. The opposition will definitely be calling him the “double taxation PM”.

It should now be apparent that Turnbull has been like the proverbial dog who “caught the car”; that after getting what he’d always wanted, becoming PM last September, he really had no idea what to do next.

Sure, he had those “big ideas” — the republic, gay marriage, innovation and so on; but he had not the slightest idea of what to do to functionally run the country, far less optimise its real-time here-and-now performance.

There was clearly no sense of “hitting the-ground running”, Jeff Kennett-style. What was seen, especially by the Gallery as a virtue in — “everything’s on the table” — inclusiveness, was actually an announcement of a prime ministerial empty vessel.

That really came to something of a climax last week. Let’s tackle “vertical fiscal imbalance” — simply put, the way Canberra tends to do the taxing and the states tend to do the spending, and so money has to be redirected from Canberra to them.

That’s fine and has been discussed endlessly and pointlessly for decades. But what you want from a political leader and in particular from a PM, is not another simplistic “thought bubble”, but a well thought-through and deliverable/imposable actuality.

It might be a cliche but the first thing voters want from a political leader is, well, leadership. That is fundamentally necessary to achieve the only thing, without which it’s all to no point: winning the election.

Ambushing the Senate crossbenchers over the possible double-dissolution election might have been “clever”, but how exactly does it win the election?

Turnbull was supposed to be great on policy. Well, you can well and truly forget that. He was supposed to be the great communicator. Oh yeah? He’s shown himself to be no Kennett or Keating; he’s not even a Rudd, even whose “program specificity” begins to look like cut-through clarity in contrast with Turnbull’s measured but endlessly extended waffle.

And does anyone seriously suggest that all this will be rendered academic by Turnbull as the peerless retail politician?

That we will see him mixing with the ordinary men and women of Australia in pubs and shopping malls, with the easy intimacy and naturalness we saw on display in his “walkout” with treasurer Scott Morrison last Friday?

And doing so every day for the eight weeks minimum of an election campaign, that he’s “brilliant” (sic) Senate coup has condemned him (and us) to?

I have exactly the same sense of the Turnbull government sliding in a catatonic state, frozen, unable to correct, to its inevitable fate, as we saw with the Napthine government in Victoria in 2014.

Actually, that word “dud” applied to Turnbull could also be an all-too ominous acronym: Do Until Dead, politically speaking, of course.

Peta Credlin, contrversial chief of staff to former PM Tony Abbott.

RBA WORDS CRITICAL

SO, no interest rate cut today, unless Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens pulls one of his classic — but in this case, unlikely, very, unlikely — “surprises”.

So what is actually said in the RBA’s statement becomes the critical thing about today.

Again I doubt that after “moving the needle” last month, that Stevens will move it even further to an all but announcement of a May — uniquely, Budget — Day rate cut.

If the RBA is “contemplating” a rate cut then, it would actually like to take the month to, well, “contemplate”.

TD Securities’ Annette Beacher put an interesting and useful slant on this: that, taking an unchanged rate decision as “done”, the most likely (90 per cent) dovish statement might see the Aussie and the Aussie bond rate edge higher.

It would take a “very dovish” statement to send the Aussie down to US75c.