Donald Trump’s wake-up call to Malcolm Turnbull

THE really important part of Donald Trump’s vow to dump the TPP deal on his first day in office is not in the way it will kill the deal, but the message it sends about the post-2016 global reality, writes Terry McCrann.

THE really important part of Donald Trump’s promise to dump the TPP — Trans-Pacific Partnership — deal on his first day in office is not in the way it will kill the TPP stone dead before it even gets off the ground, but the much bigger and broader message it sends about the post-2016 global reality.

On one level I can’t get too fussed about the dumping. It’s like someone announcing we would be abandoning daily flights to Mars. That’s to say abandoning something that hadn’t even started and would seem and indeed would be completely divorced from most people’s everyday reality.

The deliberately misleadingly named TPP would have been both “no big deal” for us and yet another hugely oppressive intervention into the way we run our own affairs.

It was a direct, if disguised — and essentially unrewarding — assault on our national sovereignty; and the one big, but very big black mark on the otherwise outstanding record of our most successful trade minister, Andrew Robb.

The contradiction flows from the way it would have done little to increase access for our exports into Pacific markets — over and above the one-on-one trade deals we have already done with all our important trade partners: China, the US, Japan, New Zealand, Korea, Thailand, Singapore etc, etc.

In passing, I would note that those deals were decidedly mixed. On some we didn’t win much at all; indeed in some cases we were dudded. But the best way to fix that is to get the one on ones reworked, not by naively hoping that a grand deal covering “everyone” can patch up the holes.

And certainly not a grand and grossly defective and indeed harmful deal such as the TPP. The title was deliberately tricked up to sound all nice and Kumbaya-like hand-holding: who could possibly be against a “partnership” that “spanned the Pacific”.

Except it was very little of a “partnership” and much more of an imposition of an oppressive and opaque supranational body of regulators and regulations that would actually have made the United Nations look like a beacon of hands-off libertarians.

It also was conspicuously not a “full partnership”. It excluded quite deliberately the elephant in the Pacific room and most especially in our living room — China.

Now take out the US and the only “big guy” left would be Japan — a country which is a wonderful partner to Australia, but is also, quite frankly, a geriatric economic and trade player.

The other 10 remaining “partners” are, also quite frankly, nonentities: no Korea and no Indonesia.

So the TPP is dead. Long live its replacement: the world according to The Donald. That’s the message we need to hear; and we better hear it loud and clear and quickly.

Malcolm Turnbull, pictured with US President Barack Obama, went Peru for dead-on-arrival trade talks, writes Terry McCrann.

But again, quite frankly, we have a prime minister, who has demonstrated a total incapacity or unwillingness to hear those drums beating out from Trump Tower.

I wrote in the Weekend Australian how Malcolm Turnbull completely failed the “Trump test”. His speech to the Business Council annual dinner last Thursday was almost as if the US election a week earlier either hadn’t happened. Or ever more tin-eared: we were all now waiting for the arrival of “Obama II’ in the White House in January — Hillary Clinton.

Turnbull was still boasting about the government’s modest reform ambitions. Not only does he have much to be modest about, they’ve all been rendered instantly “yesterday” by the Trump victory.

To take the one big example I nominated: Turnbull promises to get the company tax rate down from 30 per cent to 25 per cent. In 10 years. Trump promises to go from 35 to 15 per cent, bang.

Sure, we will have to see how much of that he actually gets to deliver and how quickly, but exactly the same applies to the Turnbull promise. Indeed, there’s almost zero chance of Turnbull cutting the rate at all, except for the smallest companies.

WHAT Turnbull should have done in his BCA speech was to, first, recognise the fact the world had changed with the election of Trump; and then secondly, to have seized aggressively on the opportunities and challenges that presented for Australia and for his government. And indeed, for his leadership.

Not only was there none of that but Turnbull then set about doubling down on “yesterday”. And doubling down embarrassingly and indeed cringingly, by going to Peru for dead-on-arrival trade talks (at APEC which was itself supposed to achieve what the TPP is supposed to be having a second go at).

Then, Rudd-like, he poured treacle by the bucketload over Barack Obama, climaxing with that infamous selfie.

Knock-knock Malcolm, you do realise Obama will be gone on January 20, and between now and then he is going to be the lamest of lame duck presidents? So lame, he would make the Daniel Day-Lewis character in My Left Foot look like he could match it with Fred Astaire.

Has anyone told Malcolm that “sucking up to Barack” is probably not going to be the most effective way of winning friends and influencing people in the Trump White House over the next four years?

That “real politic” aide, we have to face the post-2016 reality in the Pacific of Trump’s America and China. We have to carve our place between them.

Vice president-elect Mike Pence. Picture: AFP

POMPOUS LEFTIST LECTURERS

DONALD Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, got pompously lectured from the stage by the cast of Alexander Hamilton in New York on the weekend.

He should consider himself lucky he wasn’t accused of literally, personally, cold-bloodedly, and of course falsely, killing some poor sod.

That’s exactly what happened to our Peter Costello at the hands of playwright Hannie Rayson, back in 2005.

Rayson produced a piece of agitprop, pretending to be a play, which attacked the then Howard government’s asylum-seeker policy from its first minute to its closing scene.

Its title was Two Brothers.

One brother, the central character, was a “senior politician in the government”, who personally, cold-bloodedly, kills an asylum seeker. The other brother, was the very opposite, working on their behalf.

There was not the slightest intention, claimed Rayson, of drawing any parallel between Peter Costello and his brother, Tim, Baptist minister and lifetime worker for the disadvantaged.

Oh yeah?

I was reminded of this not only by the Pence incident, where the cultural Left, as utterly confident of its own moral superiority as it totally lacks the slightest element of any self-awareness, pompously assumes the right to lecture “Ex Cathedra”, so to speak.

But also by Ita Buttrose’s ludicrous — and again, totally lacking in the slightest sense of her own absurdity — claim on TV this week that the Australian of the Year award hadn’t become a platform for leftists to lecture ordinary Aussies.

Again, oh yeah?

Adam Goodes lecturing us on our racism. Current holder David Morrison lecturing (only “the guys”) on our sexism. Etc, etc.

The complete unknowingness of Buttrose and her fellow travellers is just another classic down under “Pauline Kael moment”.

Originally published as Donald Trump’s wake-up call to Malcolm Turnbull