PM’s khaki moment a bad look

Malcolm Turnbull should sort out this incredibly messy business of misusing ASIO to enforce political uniformity on the coalition. He should make some statement about the non-political nature of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and he should equally make it clear he welcomes respectful but wide debate about all aspects of extremism and terrorism.

This has been a remarkably untidy episode by Turnbull, but it also signals deeper problems, especially an uncertainty, a lack of instinctive touch and feel by the Prime Minister for security issues.

Tactically, it has been a shambles. Consider what might loosely be described as the official narrative. The PM, you understand, never asked ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis to ring any Liberal politicians to tell them to toe the PM’s line on Islam.

Lewis and the backbencher, Andrew Hastie, were well-known to each other — so the apologists for Lewis’s extraordinary actions attest — so an admonishing phone call from the former to the latter was absolutely routine.

Imagine the ASIO director-general’s surprise when he couldn’t find Hastie’s number.

Who to ask? The Prime Minister, of course; it’s not as if he has anything else to do with his time.

So the PM texted Hastie’s number to Lewis so Lewis could ring Hastie and tell him to fall into line. But this, you understand, does not constitute the PM asking the ASIO chief to ring Hastie.

This has been an incredibly clumsy and unwieldy episode, poorly handled by Turnbull and Lewis. At his press conference in Tokyo, Turnbull was left arguing that because Lewis was a former general, and had actually fought against terrorists, people should not disagree with him. Really?

The PM was really evoking the moral authority of khaki to settle a political argument?

This is not agile; this is 19th- century, or perhaps at best World War I political rhetoric; Turnbull as Billy Hughes.

Turnbull knows many things intimately, but he is very unsure on security issues. On his first day as PM he seemed to flag a change in policy towards boatpeople detained on Nauru and Manus Island. It was big news, but within a couple of hours he had to issue a phalanx of inelegant corrections making it clear he would be just as tough as Tony Abbott after all.

His instincts are slightly populist, slightly Centre Left, pretty heavily zeitgeisty, and that combination doesn’t work in national security.

Some of his staffing decisions haven’t helped. Where is the ­national security grey beard, the hard head, someone who can blend the policy and the politics, in his inner circle?

The hostility in the Liberal Party and Nationals to Lewis’s politicised actions, of which phone calls were only a part, was not driven by Abbott v Turnbull sentiment. Some of those most unhappy about it voted for Turnbull.

But there is a suspicion that the actions of PM’s office to deploy the security agencies in this political argument came partly from a dangerous and destructive desire to drive a stake through Abbott’s political heart.

Inexperience in national security, a lack of a clear, consistent, deeply thought-out political outlook on the matter, combined with a desire to endlessly put ­Abbott to the sword, is not a good combination in national security in a Prime Minister’s office.

Both the PM, and the D-G of ASIO, clever men that they are, can do much better than this.