Andrew Bolt: Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull playing to his strengths
I’VE considered Malcolm Turnbull a bumbler with few deep convictions but this Budget confirms something strange is happening — his weaknesses are turning into his strengths, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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I’VE considered Malcolm Turnbull a bumbler with few deep convictions. What does this Prime Minister really believe in, apart from himself?
I’m not alone. To the Left, Turnbull is a sellout who hasn’t followed through on the global- warming beliefs he once noisily promoted.
To the Right, he’s a cuckoo — a Leftist running and ruining a conservative party by me-tooing Labor policies.
But something strange is happening and this Budget confirms it. Slowly, Turnbull’s weaknesses are turning into his strengths.
So Turnbull has no real convictions?
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Well, that may infuriate those of us who reckon Australia has problems that need a real leader to fix — a smash-through leader like Donald Trump or John Howard in his first term. But that’s not really how Australians work.
We tend to be suspicious of the Man with a Plan. We don’t like politicians who seem beyond our control — driven instead by ideology, religion, economics, unions or vanity.
Labor leader Arthur Calwell lost elections after being tagged as the puppet of party bosses — the infamous “Faceless Men”.
Liberal leader John Hewson lost the unlosable election after producing a Fightback! manifesto that had him skewered by Labor as the “feral abacus”.
Labor prime minister Julia Gillard was destroyed because her broken promises — “there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead” — made voters think they’d been treated like fools.
Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott was dragged down by seeming driven more by God and inner convictions than by voters. Remember the Prince Philip knighthood?
Howard, Australia’s wiliest prime minister, realised this danger just in time.
In 2001, he seemed finished in the polls, but then changed his mind on something he’d firmly thought was in the national interest — an indexed petrol tax to pay for better roads. Howard cut the excise on fuel and also scrapped the indexation which made it rise with inflation.
“I was plainly wrong in not understanding some of the concerns held by the Australian people about the price of petrol,” he announced.
“The priorities that (the government) thought were right were not necessarily, on this issue, the priorities given by the Australian people.”
Call that populism, but Howard won two more elections.
Turnbull is too arrogant to confess he’s got much wrong, but he’s shown a Howard-like ability to scrap policies that are killing him — even if he usually waits too long to do it.
Turnbull did finally drop his opposition to calling a royal commission into financial institutions, and last month dumped the rise in the Medicare levy he’d promised last year.
In this Budget, there was more backtracking. Last year, the government promised to use any windfall revenue to just pay down its debt, but now it’s instead spent half the $35 billion extra it has unexpectedly collected.
But do voters mind? Sure, every backtrack makes a politician look less reliable, but some just make the politician seem the voters’ servant rather than their master.
By that measure, Turnbull is a leader for the times — not loved, but not feared.
He is being bashed into shape as an average prime minister readier to do what you want rather than exactly what you need, and Tuesday’s Budget shows it.
No one can claim the Budget is fundamentally shaped by high convictions, like Abbott’s 2014 spending-slashing Budget.
Yes, it should have cut spending more, but you would complain if it had.
It should have paid down more debt, but Turnbull figures you’d rather have tax cuts.
There’s nothing radical. There’s something for everyone, not everything for someone.
It shows Turnbull is now determined to seem steady and safe and if he can sneak through a reform here or there, that’s a bonus.
The big prize is simply being re-elected, and now I can’t rule out he will be, after all.
For one, Turnbull looks more like a prime minister than Labor leader Bill Shorten.
And two, Shorten now looks ratty, having yesterday had the High Court rule that one of his MPs, Senator Katy Gallagher, must quit parliament for not having tried hard enough to renounce her British citizenship.
That decision made three other Labor MPs appear ineligible, too, despite Shorten’s past claims that there was “no cloud over any of our people”.
But most of all, it’s now Shorten’s turn to answer: whose tune does he dance to?
His own, his union masters’, or the Labor Left’s?
It’s a question Shorten is struggling with, because whoever’s bidding he’s following, too many voters aren’t sure it’s theirs.
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