Trump, Turnbull call reveals PM holding line

Asylum seekers at the Oscar compound in the Manus Island detention centre, Papua New Guinea.

A key moment in Malcolm Turnbull’s conversation with Donald Trump comes when the Prime Minister suggests a way to save a refugee swap agreed a year earlier with Barack Obama.

“You can certainly say that it was not a deal that you would have done, but you are going to stick with it,” Turnbull tells Trump. This is exactly what the US president ended up telling his own people to justify the deal.

Trump’s fury at the deal comes through in every line of the eye-opening transcript revealed by The Washington Post, but what also comes through is Turnbull’s repeated attempt to hold the line on the deal against a volatile and angry president.

Turnbull will face a certain domestic attack for some of his statements in the transcript, revealing his thinking about refugees and his own approach to politics.

“I am a highly transactional businessman like you and I know the deal has to work for both sides,” Turnbull says at one point, a statement likely to be used by those who claim he stands for nothing.

He argues that a Nobel genius could arrive by boat but would still have to be turned away, an argument refugee advocates despise. He backs the US alliance in a way that is routinely criticised in Australia: “You can count on me. I will be there again and again.”

Turnbull also provides ammunition to those who dislike the deal to send refugees from Manus Island or Nauru to the US. “It requires, in return, for us to do a number of things for the United States — this is a big deal,” Turnbull says at one point. What are those things?

At one point Turnbull says he will “hold up our end of the bargain” by taking “31 [inaudible] that you need to move on” — a genuine mystery. This could easily be a transcription error because Australia’s agreement to take refugees from Central America is certainly for more than 31.

The Prime Minister also concedes the key point his critics have argued for months — that there is no obligation on the US to take any of the refugees at all.

But here is a key point: Turnbull kept the deal alive. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop won the support of Vice President Mike Pence for the deal but it was up to Turnbull to cement this. It was not easy. In the end, Turnbull got Trump to agree to the deal against the president’s will.

The admission that the US does not have to take any refugees at all was a statement of the obvious. The final intake is up to US Homeland Security officials. There would be no intake at all if Trump tossed the agreement in the bin.

The final verdict will depend on whether anyone is ever transferred from Manus and Nauru, but at least the US officials have continue the vetting of the refugees in the months since the phone call.

Was Turnbull right to save the deal whatever way he could? Of course. Refugee advocates have called for years for the Australian government to find a way to get people out of the Nauru and Manus camps. Turnbull found a way by convincing Obama to accept 1250 refugees, subject to vetting.

Everything in the conversation is in keeping with what Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have said for years — that asylum seekers who arrive by boat will not be settled in Australia. Yes, even if they are “Nobel” geniuses. Trump labels Turnbull “worse than me” for turning away boats but this is no risk to the Coalition’s search for political advantage over Labor in advocating a harsher asylum seeker policy.

The response to the transcript on social media highlights the dynamic that is often at work in the criticism of Turnbull. He is attacked from the left for kowtowing to Trump and attacked from the right for trying to hold the US president to a deal he does not want.

But what is the benchmark for measuring a conversation like this? Is there really any shock that two national leaders talk in robust terms about whether to honour an agreement? No transcript at this level has ever been revealed to Australians before.

It is ludicrous to express shock that the Prime Minister says “you can count on me” to the US president. What would the transcripts show about decades of conversations between Australian and US leaders?

What is most revealing in the transcript is the difficulty for the Australian side in dealing with Trump. The fact the transcript has been revealed in Washington DC is a serious problem: how can Australia deal with a US administration that leaks the conversation?

This should be no surprise to anyone watching the Trump madness from afar. The transcript is sobering all the same.