Turnbull’s middle way on NDIS, climate policy could backfire

The PM may be able to claim the middle ground, but triangulation could upset the Coalition’s conservative base.

Malcolm Turnbull will have a plan. Few may know what it is; he is unlikely to have trusted his cabinet with a full outline. But he will be pondering it endlessly, second-guessing it, talking incessantly to others about specific aspects of it, and working to it.

As best we can see his strategy reaches back two decades to the “triangulation” and “third way” tactics that proved successful for Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

George W. Bush, too, was tempted to claim the middle ground through triangulation before his chief political adviser, Karl Rove, swore off it to mollify the Republican base (there might be something in that for Turnbull). The question is whether the Prime Minister’s plan can work.

So far his strategy has failed to deliver the budget repair and economic narrative he promised, taken him perilously close to losing last year’s election and kept him trailing on the self-imposed fortnightly biopsies of Newspoll.

The main trait of the Turnbull prime ministership has been a softening of differences with Labor. Between rolling Tony Abbott and calling the election he was overtaken by inaction and indecision. His best day was when he outlined his union accountability measures as a double-dissolution strategy. But in the election campaign he promoted a formless message on jobs and growth, and was frustratingly reluctant to pick a fight with Labor on fiscal repair, border protection, national security or climate and energy policy.

Turnbull barely clung to power and has done nothing to sharpen the contrast since. He has adopted Labor’s Gonski formula and doubled down with a Medicare increase to help pay for Labor’s other unfunded dream, the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

With Scott Morrison he has largely surrendered to a troublesome Senate and forestalled meaningful budget repair, banking on elusive economic growth to do the heavy lifting. He has not dared attack Labor as a risk on borders and immigration or called out its timidity on Islamist extremism and national security. The Prime Minister seems just as happy to avoid these issues as Bill Shorten.

So this is the triangulation method at play: skirting the left-right divide and aiming for goals that unite us in higher aspirations. Presumably the plan is that if Turnbull delivers on Gonski and NDIS, he will have provided something all voters can support: an outcome above partisan politics, going a long way to claiming the middle ground electorally.

If Labor scraps and opposes yet Turnbull achieves his aims with the Greens and Senate crossbenchers, he will be bolstered by a triumph that leaves Labor on the sidelines. But even if Labor compromises, co-operates and tries to claim some of the credit, it will be Turnbull who delivered.

He already has taken this path of least resistance on fiscal repair, lowering his budgetary ambitions in favour of competence in delivering something. Clearly he is hoping for the same on climate and energy policy.

Turnbull wants to marshal the body politic to deliver the least worst outcomes. He wants no blockages and few arguments. He will be happy to deliver outcomes that displease the green-left and hard right while he invites the centrists to coalesce around him.

He is a transactional politician. He looks to make deals, like a merchant banker. It has characterised his political career from the start. He lost his leadership trying to construct a deal with Kevin Rudd on climate policy, and he assumed the prime ministership by carefully piecing together a consortium of party colleagues.

And he is picking his way through some treacherous policy conundrums — many of which would have presented monumental challenges at this time for Abbott if he had survived — by negotiating individual deals. Not outcomes that will achieve ideological goals or satisfy political convictions but compromises that will get through parliament and allow him to move on.

It was Abbott who ceded ground in opposition on Gonski and NDIS, but only with funding for the forward estimates. Four years later was bound to be the crunch time.

Likewise on climate and energy; Turnbull has to deal with the next stage after Abbott embraced the renewable energy target and international emissions reductions targets. It is too late to undo either of these without creating undesirable political, diplomatic and economic conse­quences.

Business will delay energy investments until it knows there is some certainty. In the absence of consensus it will assume a price on carbon. This is a terrible dilemma where highly questionable policy is required to meet the demands of the zeitgeist. Turnbull needs to repair the damage caused by the RET while keeping it in place. He needs to keep the lights on but — for all its costs and global futility — reduce emissions.

Capping the RET would be ­superfluous, according to Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg, because within months all available generation will be contracted anyway. Still, the Coalition ought at least to announce it will not be extended — leave it at 33,000 gigawatt hours forever.

That way we know any additional renewables must pay their own way and Labor can be left to push for its expansion, perhaps accentuating a policy difference in this area. Turnbull needs to fiddle with energy sufficiently to put downward pressure on prices and protect against supply crises such as those seen in South Australia. But if he delivers a package agreeable to Labor he has lost a crucial point of difference over energy pricing and security.

As with most of us, Turnbull’s strengths also can be his weaknesses. While deal-making is essential in politics it cannot be everything. If governments aim only for what the parliament will readily embrace, they will achieve government of the lowest common denominator. At some stage they must stand for something and practise persuasion.

Where is the product differentiation with Turnbull? Is he saying he can adopt a more responsible version of Labor’s agenda or a more achievable version of the Coalition’s agenda? And is there much difference?

This is the friction between conviction and the third way, or triangulation. The architect of triangulation for Clinton was Dick Morris. “Get rid of the garbage of each position that the people didn’t believe in,” Morris explained, “take the best from each position, and move up to a third way; and that became a triangle, which was triangulation.”

The theory is that you can maintain support from loyalists and win over wavering voters and some from the other side. Blair talked about the same process. “The third way stands for a modernised social democracy, passionate in its commitment to social justice and the goals of the centre-left but flexible, innovative and forward-looking in the means to achieve them.”

It is instructive these tactics were employed by the left in the post-Cold War era. Blair and Clinton were looking at ways to take old leftist parties to the economically rational centre.

Bush and Rove found it didn’t work so well from the right, where core convictions of rational economics, personal responsibility and nation-states remain unchallenged. Shifting left from that strong standpoint can make the conservative base very nervous — as Turnbull has seen.

This column noted long before polling day last year that Turnbull risked losing by not attacking Labor in crucial policy areas such as border protection, climate and fiscal repair, and late last year warned that the sensible centre of politics was wedded to the Coalition’s prescription in those areas: “Turnbull messes with that compact at his peril.”

The Prime Minister still continues to surrender policy differentiation from Labor. If Turnbull claims the centre and wins, he will be hailed a saviour. But the Opposition Leader is proving adept at maintaining a contrast in the populist, politics-of-envy areas of his choosing.