Turnbull’s injection of new blood: his last hope of sparing his own

Federal Liberal MP Dan Tehan has been promoted into cabinet as social services minister. Picture: David Geraghty

Malcolm Turnbull has pushed the reset button on his government and his leadership. In doing so, the Prime Minister has signalled the territory and the terms on which he intends to contest the next election. National security, energy security and economic security.

The test will be whether an instinctively moderate Liberal leader can deliver on the promise of a return to traditional centre-right Coalition government.

Turnbull’s reshuffle is significant. It addresses two of his most serious concerns — an increasingly fractious internal constituency and an electorate that appears to be locking in its poor assessment of his leadership.

The new Home Affairs architecture is the clearest evidence that he is acutely aware of the dilemma. Peter Dutton’s influence on Turnbull’s decision-making is manifest with the entire national security space having been handed over to the conservative bloc.

NSW MP Angus Taylor and Victorian Alan Tudge — two of the rising stars of the younger centre-right grouping — add serious firepower as deputy ministers to Dutton on citizenship and security. Their promotion also serves to address the demands of the conservatives for a greater carve-out of the frontbench. This troika will keep Turnbull honest on borders and national security and bring new faces to one of the government’s most critical policy areas where it has its most commanding edge over Labor.

Turnbull has also realised that, above all, he must deliver on his long-held promise of a coherent economic agenda and narrative — the substantial basis on which he claimed and staked his leadership.

He has broadened the coverage of economic-based portfolios with talented performers, adding Michaelia Cash and Zed Seselja to a team already served well by Scott Morrison, Mathias Cormann, Kelly O’Dwyer and Michael Sukkar. Also in this space is another portfolio that will be critical to pressing the fiscal as well as fairness agenda: welfare reform. Turnbull has elevated Victorian Dan Tehan and West Australian Michael Keenan, both into cabinet. In their junior portfolios they had been among the government’s best performers.

The internal politics that are of less significance to the government’s broader electoral problems are nonetheless critical to Turnbull’s leadership. This was always going to be fraught.

Considering political capital was in short supply, Turnbull has managed to cleverly navigate the problem of a squabbling junior party in the Nationals — leaving Barnaby Joyce to explain the dumping of Darren Chester from cabinet — while appeasing state-based numerical demands and a feral Queensland branch threatening again to split if it didn’t get its way, addressing country Liberal exigencies and attending to the demands of the conservatives. He has even thrown a bone to the moderates with the promotion of NSW MP Craig Laundy.

Nevertheless, Turnbull still goes to Christmas trailing miserably in the polls. His injection of new enthusiasm into the frontbench and presenting a new face to the public next year gives him perhaps his last and only hope of addressing this most fundamental of problems.