Send me a postcard, drop me a line
Stating point of view
Indicate precisely what you mean to say
Yours sincerely, wasting away
Give me your answer, fill in a form
Mine forevermore
Will you still need me, will you still feed me
When I’m sixty-four?
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will turn 64 in only two months and one day, but the question of whether we still need him at that age has been answered. I don’t know about the postcards, but certainly during the last week our country’s leader has received much feedback from colleagues and constituents indicating precisely what they mean to say. Suffice to say that it was clear before today that the odds of him still being Prime Minister come October are about as the same as The Beatles reforming.
Only one thing is surprising. When I wrote last November that Turnbull’s leadership was terminal, I thought the end would come sooner. But that time is now. His decision on Monday to call a leadership spill was done with the intention of taking the fight to his rival Peter Dutton, yet rather than give the impression of confidence he appeared spooked. His 48-35 ‘victory’ was a pyrrhic one, and from then on he remained leader in name only.
.@TurnbullMalcolm: What we've witnessed is a very deliberate effort to pull the @LiberalAus Party further to the right. The only way to stop insurgency is to give in to it.
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) August 23, 2018
FULL COVERAGE: @Foxtel channel 103 & https://t.co/UFTF06werJ #auspol #libspill pic.twitter.com/zuBcj9Ak4I
Turnbull’s press conference this afternoon was very much a case of spiteful manoeuvring. His refusal to call a party meeting until he receives a petition with the requisite 43 signatures is not just officiousness; rather by delaying the meeting his intention is to fast-track the legal advice over Dutton’s constitutional eligibility in order to poison his candidacy. His declaration that he would immediately resign from Parliament in the event of losing the leadership is payback poorly disguised as ethical purity, as is his statement “The public will be crying out for an election, clearly”. He is not just abandoning the party: he is also throwing several hand grenades over his shoulder as he leaves.
No PM under siege has raised stakes higher than this before:
— Troy Bramston (@TroyBramston) August 23, 2018
- asks insurgents to sign a letter
- orders advice on Peter Dutton’s eligibility to be an MP
- buys time with a party room meeting Friday
- will resign as MP if toppled - so govt loses majority until by-election#auspol
Sadly for Turnbull his name will rank alongside Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd and Billy McMahon. Just think: the decade has still got more than a year to go yet soon it will have seen six prime ministers, and by all likelihood another following next year’s election. Remember when we laughed at the Italians because they changed leaders so often?
Ultimately Turnbull’s unhappy legacy will be to reinforce a lesson one would thought was obvious. The leadership debacle of 2010-13 demonstrated the instability and fracturing that result from dispatching a Prime Minister in his first term of government, especially one who had led his party from Opposition to an overwhelming victory. For the duration of her three unhappy years as leader, Julia Gillard was tainted with accusations of duplicity, treachery and opportunism over her displacement of Kevin Rudd. That Turnbull would commit this same folly only five years later and not expect a similar reaction is incredible.
Why a man of Turnbull’s formidable intelligence would act so can only be explained by his ambition and his arrogance. “It was never a case of him saying ‘I want to be Prime Minister one day’,” a friend who had gone to university with Turnbull told me ten years ago. “Even back then he was saying “I will be Prime Minister one day’.”
How he would achieve this had little to do with political ideology and nearly everything to do with expediency. As The Australian political columnist and former federal minister Graham Richardson said this week, an unabashed Turnbull asked him in the early 1990s to be put on the Labor Senate ticket. This was no mere dalliance. In 2009, former prime minister Bob Hawke stated that in 1999 Turnbull had approached a number of ALP figures, including himself, seeking their endorsement to join the party. Only five years later he won preselection as Liberal candidate for Wentworth. You would be naive to think the rapid turnaround for the then 49 year old was due to an ideological conversion.
.@SkyNewsRicho: It's hardly a surprise. They should've done this a year ago, but they just hoped and prayed things would get better. It didn't. @TurnbullMalcolm's zero political intelligence is now shining through.
— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) August 21, 2018
MORE: https://t.co/j25meFGniq #pmlive pic.twitter.com/KHFFel0RDI
When he made his move against Abbott in 2015, Turnbull was enchanted by the flattery of left-wing commentators, the fawning of ABC’s Q&A viewers, and the praiseworthy letters of inner-city sophisticates. The fact that most of these people would never vote for the Coalition and were duchessing him only because they despised Abbott was lost on him. “Relief is what I feel, like the southerly buster after a 40-degree day,” wrote Fairfax’s Elizabeth Farrelly after Abbott’s demise. “It says my inner child was right,” she added, predicting that Turnbull “would be the longest-serving prime minister since Menzies”.
Farrelly is not the only one to act on the impulse of their inner child. When Turnbull first ran for Opposition Leader, in 2007, he narrowly lost to Brendan Nelson, an outcome that led him later that day to barge into the office of the new leader and yell at him. His contempt for the affable Nelson verged on irrational; on at least one occasion he allegedly poked him in the chest as he berated him.
His mercurial nature and an inability to conceal his true feelings have long defined him, as has his petulance. As Opposition Leader he lost the confidence of his party due to his support for Labor’s emissions trading scheme.
“Any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott, ‘bullshit’,” he wrote on a public blog less than a week after Abbott wrested the leadership from him. “Tony himself has, in just four or five months, publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and, if the amendments were satisfactory, passing it, and now the blocking of it. His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with ‘Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weathervane on this, but …’.”
Instead of accepting the party’s decision with good grace, Turnbull gave vent to a near fatal whine. In April 2010 he announced he would retire from federal politics, only to reverse his decision the next month. “I reckon that Tony Abbott wouldn’t be popping any champagne corks tonight,” observed then Treasurer Wayne Swan of Turnbull’s about-face, at the same time making the only accurate forecast of his career.
Paradoxically, the inner mongrel that helped him realise his ultimate ambition deserted him when he became top dog. Despite the unpopularity and mediocrity of the Opposition Leader, Turnbull failed to inflict any serious damage on Bill Shorten. Using the Australian Building and Construction Commission bill to trigger a double dissolution election in 2016, he bewildered voters by belatedly and perfunctorily campaigning on the issue.
On the night of the election — when the likelihood of his government’s return appeared in real doubt — Turnbull dismayed supporters by holing up in his mansion and giving the appearance of brooding. It was only after midnight that he fronted the cameras. He was both angry and sullen, and in his terse speech he failed to empathise with the many Coalition MPs who had lost their seats under his leadership. Shorten’s speech, by comparison, was robust. “[Mr Turnbull] will never again be able to promise the stability which he has completely failed to deliver tonight,” said the Opposition Leader ominously.
Ultimately the cause of Turnbull’s demise was a time bomb that he himself set but could not defuse. “We have lost 30 Newspolls in a row,” he said on the day he challenged Abbott for the leadership. “It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr Abbott’s leadership.” By April this year Turnbull ignominiously drew level with his predecessor in that respect, a reverse benchmark that amounted to a self-indictment.
His attempts to distract from this were both futile and transparent. As is typical of politicians who do not have the ability to strike up a conversation with the average punter, his forced projections of bonhomie were painful to watch. So too was as his tedious predilection for taking selfies with world leaders, a trait that only reinforced accusations that he was self-centred. When the High Court last year ruled that then Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Nationals Deputy Leader Fiona Nash were in breach of section 44 of the Constitution and thus illegible to sit, Turnbull’s attempt to maintain morale was excruciating. “I have never had more fun in my life,” he declared, in effect being to the prime ministership what the fictional character David Brent, played by Ricky Gervais, was to the TV mockumentary The Office.
“I’m not sure that I’m really suited to the democratic process,” a young Turnbull told Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend in 1991, ruling out a political career. That is a question which has now been well and truly answered.
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