Malcolm Turnbull has one last chance to save his prime ministership and party

MALCOLM Turnbull — and even more the “dead men (non-gender specific) walking” sitting on the backbenches behind him — has one last chance, writes Terry McCrann.

Malcolm Turnbull should wake up and smell the prevailing winds of change.

MALCOLM Turnbull — and even more the “dead men (non-gender specific) walking” sitting on the backbenches behind him — has one last chance.

To seize it he must personally, and I do mean personally, ring Andrew Bolt of this paper today to ask for a full hour of his Sky News program later this week, to both go one on one, head — no holds barred — to-head, and to lay out a comprehensive, cohesive, freedom-focused policy and political agenda.

For the last year since he knocked off Tony Abbott, Turnbull has been “hiding under his desk” so far as Bolt is concerned. He’s both outright refused and even more mindlessly failed to seek to go on his program.

In the privacy of his sophisticated complete lack of both self and general awareness, no doubt he’s rationalised his cowardice on the basis that it would be below both his intellect and his social conscience to “validate” Bolt.

Yes, in the election campaign he did finally countenance stooping to engage both with a similar “lesser” in Sydney radio’s Alan Jones, and through him, all those “down under deplorables” in strange, foreign places like the western suburbs.

But that was his hometown and Jones is the top-rating program; he could rationalise his clear preference for the Fairfax and ABC — radio and TV — “comfort zones” over the smaller numbers on Sky.

And just as he didn’t have time to “think about free speech” in the privacy of his own self-delusions, he could claim not to be able to fit both Jones and Bolt in among all those ABC appearances.

But in truth, to misquote Oscar Wilde, while one Jones is enough for any Sydney sophisticate to have to take in a political lifetime; two of Jones and Bolt would start to look like arrant carelessness of precious ABC sensitivities.

In the wake of the “Trump-quake” Turnbull can either “get careless” and quickly, to wake up and smell the prevailing winds of change, or continue to “comfort zone” himself and even more of his backbenchers, on top of the ones he already “offed” in the election, into eventual inevitable oblivion.

He could start such a Bolt appearance with actually welcoming Trump’s victory — and perhaps even more, welcoming the defeat of the truly deplorable Hillary Clinton. This was not just a victory for what is purportedly his side of politics, but what should be — granted, in the broad — market-based policies that he purports to believe in.

Instead, as Bolt noted last week, Turnbull gave a hysterical speech as if the election result were tantamount to the outbreak of global conflict; almost literally urging Australians not to panic.

He also chose quite deliberately to ratify the Paris climate change (non) agreement on the same day.

In such a Bolt appearance Turnbull should be very specific about a freedom agenda. For example, the government would demonstrate both its bona fides and its understanding by immediately moving to repeal the anti-free speech Section 18C in full, along with the then superfluous 18D.

For good measure he could detail precisely why he and his government not only had no confidence in Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs but that she had rendered herself unfit to continue in that position.

Longer term, the government would consider major changes if not outright abolition of the HRC itself.

Spanning the divide between leftist inanity and the most basically rational policy, Turnbull should tell Bolt the government will reverse its ratification of the Paris climate agreement; that like India, China and Trump’s US, the government will give Australian consumers the cheap, plentiful and reliable power that only coal can provide.

ON the economic policy front, he would make it clear that it was the full company tax cut — for big as well as small companies — and accelerated to a much shorter, perhaps 4-5 year time frame, or nothing.

The government would abandon its ill-thought-through attack on superannuation; it would move immediately with the legislation to reinstate the anti-union thuggery building commission; and again, longer term, move to develop a broader market-based industrial relations system.

He would take all this, and more, aggressively and unashamedly to the next election.

Tony Abbott is the most realistic alternative as prime minister.

I could go on at considerable length — as indeed could a true leader of a Coalition government, such that even, un-Turnbull-like crisply spoken, the full hour would be insufficient to cover all the necessary policy and political territory.

For instance, what needed to be done to achieve real tax-lowering tax reform; moving to a coherent immigration policy that abandoned the value-sapping and infrastructure-overloading “population Ponzi”; breaking up and selling the ABC, as a taxpayer-funded media megalith made no sense in the world of the 21st century (to say nothing of its anti-freedom, illegal, bias).

But I won’t, for just maybe you might see my drift: this is all pure, unadulterated fantasy. There is no way on God’s — and carbon dioxide’s — Green Gaia that Turnbull would do any of this. It’s not simply all utterly foreign to him, if he believes in anything he believes in the exact opposite.

So, I was inclined to conclude by stating that absent such a “Turnbull-Bolt event”, unless by the end of next week Tony Abbott was once again prime minister, even though the election was two years away the fates of PM, cabinet members and backbenchers would be sealed.

I would still suggest that Abbott is the most realistic alternative. But he is flawed on both policy and political grounds. One of his biggest weaknesses in any return to the leadership would be the absence of Peta Credlin, so literally indispensable in both the Opposition days and for most of his premiership.

So I’ll leave it more general: Turnbull’s non appearance on Bolt will confirm he needs to go and go quickly. Apart from anything, could anyone seriously countenance another Turnbull election campaign wasteland?

INSTITUTIONAL INANITY

ONCE again, major Australian institutional investors have gone out of their way to advertise their fundamental incoherence, if not outright stupidity.

Last week at the CBA AGM, many of them voted to take the first step to sacking the board of directors, while at the same time almost unanimously endorsing some of those directors.

The three directors standing for re-election all scored 99 per cent “yes” votes. But their — the directors — remuneration report got only 50 per cent. A similar vote next year would trigger a third vote, on whether to go to a fourth vote, to spill the entire board.

Yes, it can be argued that the two votes can “stand together”; that the vote to reject the rem report is to “send a message” to directors.

It is actually a fundamental statement of lack of confidence in those directors, as management and its remuneration is a board’s absolutely key task — and responsibility.

If you vote against the rem report you should vote against at least one director, Sir David Higgins, chairman of the rem committee. If you endorse him you should endorse his report.

Originally published as Malcolm Turnbull has one last chance to save his prime ministership and party