Indifferent Turnbull lets down top Coalition performers

Some ministers in the Turnbull government have been slogging away this year, putting together policies that could lift the government’s fortunes. Others outside the ministry have worked equally hard to that end. So who in the government performed well, and who bombed, in 2017?

Two unsung heroes are Christian Porter and Alan Tudge. As Minister for Social Services and Minister for Human Services, respectively, they are transforming welfare in Australia around genuine liberal values. Bit by bit, not by revolution, they are introducing greater integrity, individual responsibility and transparency into the delivery of welfare.

The financial case for welfare reform is clear enough given welfare payments account for one-third of the total federal budget. Significantly, Porter and Tudge have also prosecuted the moral case for welfare reform, revealing Labor as hypocritical when it claims the compassion mantle.

Under Tudge, a cashless debit card has been rolled out into communities that are seeing positive outcomes: 40 per cent of people drink less, fewer people take drugs, people gamble less and fewer are turning up to hospital. More communities will be offered the same opportunities next year despite Labor’s opposition.

Getting people into a job best confronts the toxic costs of intergenerational welfare dependency and heads off the debilitating low expectations that attach to sit-down money. A job provides dignity and a sense of individual worth that a handout never can.

Under Porter, Tudge and Employment Minister Michaelia Cash, the Coalition has put more Australians into jobs and reduced the number of people on income support to 15 per cent, the lowest level in 25 years. Both Porter and Tudge deserve As for the year. And Cash scores a B — the fact Labor attacks her so regularly, without landing a serious blow, is recognition of her effectiveness as a minister.

Energy policy has been the totemic political issue of the year. It could decide the next election. Perhaps unhappy with last year’s B grade, Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg deserves an A for swotting hard this year. He settled and is tirelessly selling the government’s national energy guarantee announced in mid-October.

This is a paradigm shift from past policy, providing for reliable energy at a lower cost. In a country blessed with cheap reliable energy sources, it’s a crying shame that it took so long for the Turnbull government to value reliable energy over climate change targets.

The failed experiment of high renewable targets in South Australia should have been better ­exploited, with earlier differentiation between the Labor and the Coalition; and the Finkel report was a waste of time because it recommended more handouts to rent-seekers in the renewables industry.

After a decade of botched policy where the climate change tail wagged the energy policy dog, Frydenberg has put energy at the forefront, maintaining support for coal, bringing subsidies for renewables to an end and promising no carbon taxes. Gas supplies have been lifted and electricity companies have been instructed to provide better deals to customers.

Peter Dutton deserves a B for continuing to perform strongly in immigration. Despite another year of empty emoting from the Greens, sections of the Labor Party, the ABC, refugee activists and most recently the deluded grandstanders at the UN, border protection remains government policy clearly articulated to evil people-smugglers.

Dutton doesn’t back away from a fight. This year he exposed the empty sanctimony of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal’s attempts to overturn ministerial decisions that ordered the deportation of fake refuges. The no-nonsense Queenslander may not win personality contests but his convictions make him a standout minister.

Health Minister Greg Hunt earns a B for neutralising health as an issue this year, no easy task given Labor’s relentless dishonesty with Mediscares and the like. Julie Bishop gets a B for consistency, rarely setting a foot wrong except for briefly ruffling a few New Zealand Labour feathers.

Barnaby Joyce also deserves a B because he’s back in parliament after a record by-election victory. He remains a great plus for the government when he’s being Barnaby, the straight-talking Nationals leader.

Attorney-General George Brandis deserves kudos — and a solid B — this year for his carriage of same-sex marriage in the Senate and for trying to make the case to bolster religious freedom when other Liberals didn’t. New laws that will better equip national ­security agencies to combat foreign interference and espionage helped pile pressure on Bill Shorten to censure Chinaman Sam, leading to senator Dastyari’s resignation yesterday.

Mathias Cormann remains a solid performer for the Turnbull government. He could rise from B to the A grade of his predecessors in the finance portfolio, men such as Nick Minchin. But fiscal prudence requires a trio of convictions from Finance Minister, Treasurer and Prime Minister.

On that front, Scott Morrison has fallen to a C from last year’s B, for a budget of mangled messages with new taxes, higher taxes and increased tax revenue, rather than spending cuts, doing the heavy lifting for a projected surplus in 2020-21. He has been marked down too by his nanny-state laws that discredit a Liberal treasurer.

Riding the same wave of illiberalism, Minister for Revenue and Financial Services Kelly O’Dwyer has put in a lacklustre performance too, scraping in with an end-of-year C.

Minister for Defence Industry Christopher Pyne earns a D this year for making headlines for the wrong reasons. Few know about his portfolio policies, and maybe that’s best. He’s in charge of spending $50 billion on ships to prop up his electoral prospects.

Pyne is better known for bragging about his winner’s circle and his internecine political games in South Australia and the federal parliamentary party. Meanwhile his state is represented in Canberra by a mangy rump compared with the glory days of the past. The defection of Cory Bernardi is a reminder of the poisonous politics that Pyne oversees as the most senior Liberal in SA.

While Pyne and others play politics, some have worked hard to defend core liberal principles. Senator James Paterson and lower-house MPs Russell Broadbent, Nicolle Flint and Andrew Hastie are among a growing group of determined Liberals trying to realign the party as something more than Labor-lite.

Others are simply in the wrong party. Victorian senator Jane Hume deserves a special mention this year. Again. As the only Liberal backbencher in the Senate who didn’t support reforms to the Racial Discrimination Act’s section 18C, she still hasn’t taken that refresher course on free speech, pursing her lips over Milo Yiannopoulos for the cameras rather than having a go at those who wish to shut him down. She joins a growing list of LINOs, Liberals in Name Only, causing the Liberal Party to lose its brand power.

Despite the efforts of good ministers to deliver sensible policies this year, the Turnbull government hasn’t dominated on any front. A-grade polices translate into A-grade politics only when a prime minister makes them his own, bringing the strands together to explain why the government is better than the other side. Up against the polished insincerity of the Opposition Leader, a Liberal leader with clear convictions and skills in retail politics would thrive.

Alas, welfare reform isn’t the Prime Minister’s thing. The energy policy doesn’t fit with Malcolm Turnbull’s past attachment to climate change. He hasn’t led on economic management either. Turnbull’s social media feed the past few days is awash with him luxuriating in his only signature win — same-sex marriage.

That earns the Prime Minister a footnote in history. But it won’t win the next election.

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