Terry McCrann: Wake up Malcolm, it’s 2017, not 2015

HAS Malcolm Turnbull slept through the last three months or so, asks Terry McCrann.

Terry McCrann says Malcolm Turnbull must have been asleep these past three months. Picture: AP

HAS Malcolm Turnbull slept through the last three months or so?

For he seems to be the last person on the planet who has not woken up to the fact that not only did Donald Trump win the US presidential election all of 11 weeks ago, but that he has actually moved into the White House and taken up where Barack Obama left off signing executive orders.

That 11 weeks, by the by, is about 7 per cent of an entire Australian parliamentary term, just dozed away by an intellectually if not literally somnolent prime minister, with his extended nap interrupted only by having to deal, stutteringly and incoherently, with the (literal) peregrinations of his then, now former, health minister.

Those 11 weeks should have been all the time in the world for a competent — or at least an awake — prime minister to develop some sort of proactive response to the coming of Trump; even if such a response was just the mere acceptance of its reality.

Better, hopefully, would have been that just as President Trump was always going to hit the ground running on January 21, so also should have the Australian PM and Cabinet.

Trade Minister Steve Ciobo. Picture: AAP

No, they didn’t have to hit the ground running in total parallel with the new US administration.

But they most certainly should not have been standing in the way of the steamroller; or arguably worse, still tucked up figuratively asleep in bed.

That is exactly what was suggested by what we got yesterday: not only a PM completely unable to present a considered, coherent policy response to Trump’s icing of the TPP trade deal, but a refusal to even accept that is exactly what Trump had done and indeed was always going to do.

It was as if Turnbull — and indeed his trade minister Steve Ciobo — had closed their eyes back on November 8 and had expected to wake up in 2017 in an “international political-economy and global diplomatic-junketing business-as-usual world” under a president Hillary Clinton.

Incidentally, to borrow from a former US vice-presidential candidate: I knew Australia’s greatest trade minister, Andrew Robb: Steve, you’re no Andrew Robb.

Read my lips PM (and minister) — the TPP is “dead, buried and cremated”. It can’t even be revived zombie-style — you need at least a corpse to do that.

As even Japan, the last big country (sort of) standing in the TPP grouping accepted yesterday: without the US there is not and cannot be a TPP.

The 12 countries that were intended to comprise it made up around 40 per cent of the global economy. But nearly two thirds of that — about 25 of the 40 percentage points — was the US. And Japan is the lion’s share of the rest.

President Trump was always going to hit the ground running on January 21, so also should have the Australian PM and Cabinet. Picture: AP

To say that the PM and minister were “grasping at straws” by suggesting yesterday China could be brought in to replace the US would be charitable.

Could someone in the bureaucracy explain to the PM and minister that the TPP was designed to specifically exclude China because of its state-controlled economy? To “invite” China “in” now, would be to invite it into a “not TPP”.

Now, we could spend the rest of the year debating the merits or otherwise of the TPP.

But it would be as pointless as discussing the merits or otherwise of the pre-World War I European empires. They’re gone; it’s gone. They are just dusty history; it is as well.

Bad enough and just as pointless are the PM and minister’s desperate efforts to keep flogging the TPP dead horse, much worse are the way it speaks to the broader and utterly depressing Turnbull ineptitude.

The past three months should have been spent not just preparing for the Trump ascendancy but building an aggressive, creative and indeed optimistic, but most critically a realistic political and policy dynamic based on that reality.

IS there seriously anyone, even in the Canberra Press gallery, who believes there’s the slightest prospect of that? That come the PM’s “landmark” opening speech to the Press Club next Wednesday, we will get anything other than typical and increasingly whiskered Turnbull innovation pabulum?

The TPP response was effectively the third strike — of non-acceptance of the Trump reality — and the PM should be out.

The first came on the day after the US election when Turnbull went out of his way to ratify the Paris climate agreement that Trump had said he would walk away from just like the TPP.

Turnbull should have been walking away from the Paris agreement, not embracing it — not just to accept the Trump reality, but to walk back from the insane policy which will increasingly hurt every Australian to say nothing of the national economy.

The second was his abysmal performance at the single most important dinner any PM speaks at each year: the Business Council annual dinner just days after Trump won.

Again, Turnbull should have seized on the timing to up the ante on his — quite simply, pathetic — company tax proposal. Trump says he will take the US down to 15 per cent; Turnbull and Morrison say we might go to 25 per cent, in 10 years.

Then came Tuesday’s “considered” response to the TPP icing.

Back last April I wrote that Turnbull was a complete dud. Would anyone now seriously deny I was being too kind?

Rio Tinto chief executive Jean-Sebastien Jacques.

SENDING COAL TO CHINA

RIO’S sale of a big chunk of its residual coal assets should be a precede to far more sales/rationalisation across the sector.

For a variety of reasons this will be more in the energy coal rather than met (steel-make) coal spaces.

The main driver is the ownership competition between the natural owner — China Inc — and conventional corporate rationalisation.

Indeed this was demonstrated exactly in the Rio deal.

The competing buyers were an arm of China Inc and Ivan Glasenberg’s Glencore, the last big conventional global energy coal group.

Arguably, the most interesting “sale” should be the sale of its coal assets by Australia’s biggest retail group, Wesfarmers.

What on earth is the biggest retailer in the country doing owning coal mines, you might well ask?

For while the idea you might be able to get people to pick up their weekly load of briquettes with their weekly supermarket shopping might have had some currency to a dynamic late-19th century, or even early-to-mid 20th century retailer, it’s not exactly 21st century.

Since it made the decision to become a retailer with its $20 billion splurge on the Coles Group, Wesfarmers has had one clear opportunity to maximise its departure from coal, at the height of the post-GFC resources boom when coal prices rocketed.

It’s got a second chance to do it now, but it needs to be quick. Not because the Chinese are going to go away but that there is limited opportunity to add price pressure from competition from conventional corporate rationalisers.

A failure to sell into this mini-boom, which is already ebbing, would be a second strike. You wouldn’t want to be betting you’d necessarily get a third opportunity.

And this is not the time for distraction. Some of the magic has gone out of Coles. It still has to get Target “right” and it’s at the start of the Bunnings push into the UK.

Originally published as Terry McCrann: Wake up Malcolm, it’s 2017, not 2015