How I (almost) got the scoop on Turnbull that would have destroyed his career
WHEN Charles Firth interviewed Malcolm Turnbull decades ago, he said something embarrassing that was never published.
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THE first time I met Malcolm Turnbull I almost got a scoop that would bring down his prime ministership today.
It was September 1993 and I was a writer for my school magazine Tiger and a few other students and I had scored an interview with the then head of the Republican Movement in the offices of Turnbull and Partners, the merchant bank he founded and eventually sold to Goldman and Sachs.
As I walked into the bank, I remember thinking, rather naively, “This isn’t what it seems. It isn’t really a bank.” It had no tellers, no signs of cash changing hands. It was just some very plush offices. “Sounds great to call it a bank, but really: it’s not a bank.”
By then, Malcolm Turnbull was already a towering Old Boy at my school, Sydney Grammar. He had won a prestigious oratory award, cleaned up at debating and the final exams, become a Rhodes Scholar, and then gone on for a distinguished career as a barrister, the highlight of which was the Spycatcher trial, which turned an egregious breach of the Official Secrets Act by his client, into a wholesale attack on the British establishment.
By the time I walked into the boardroom of Turnbull and Partners, tape recorder in hand, the young journalist in me was pretty keen to cut this tall poppy down to size.
The thing that most fascinated me was what Turnbull had achieved as an undergrad at the University of Sydney. As he told it, Turnbull had fallen in with the Nation Review crowd, and then been picked up as a copywriter for John Singleton, who’d introduced him to Kerry Packer.
That Turnbull had then had the gall, or brilliance, or shamelessness to haggle with Packer until he picked up a column at The Bulletin was surely the pinnacle of his career.
(For those born after about 1985, The Bulletin was the news.com.au of its time, but printed on paper and distributed through newsagents, which in the olden days used to sell more than just transport cards and lottery tickets.)
Turnbull had used some of the money from the Bulletin column to then pay a fellow student to take notes for him in lectures, so that he didn’t have to attend himself. This was everything I aspired to do all wrapped into one. Especially the part about not having to attend lectures.
Unfortunately, the whole interview couldn’t dwell on his past. It was supposed to be about Turnbull’s latest venture: making Australia become a republic. Luckily, Turnbull didn’t hold back. “Our Constitution,” he told us (and which we faithfully transcribed into the October 1993 issue of our magazine), “is a drab and misleading document.”
I remember at the time, feeling that this was the scoop for Tiger. A republican tearing our constitution to shreds? What a revelation! And indeed, it was the feature article in the October 1993 issue.
But why could a republic not wait until all the old people died? “Change is only inevitable as long as there is someone to champion it,” he told us, clearly implying that he was the champion in this scenario. “The danger is that we will say the republic is inevitable and stop fighting for it. If we stop fighting, it won’t happen.
“We need change now because people feel alienated and hostile to our system of government,” he told us.
At that point, I felt we now had a piece for Tiger in the bag. I distinctly remember that Turnbull then went on to talk about how the Labor Party was the only viable agent of change. That only the Labor Party had the necessary progressiveness to carry the nation through such an important shift in our outlook as a nation.
Of course, at the time, this stuff all seemed a bit boring. Who cares about Malcolm Turnbull’s love of the Labor Party?
Last week, I contacted the archivist at Sydney Grammar (yes, they have an archivist, and yes I apologise unreservedly for going to a school that can afford an archivist) and asked her to send me a copy of the article.
My hope was that some of Turnbull’s quotes about the Labor Party had made it into the final edit of the Tiger interview. Sure, it was 23 years late, but digging up actual published quotes about his love of the Labor Party could finally deliver me my first journalism scoop that I’d so longed for.
As it turns out, those passages never made it into the final edit. There was, in my youthful judgment, no scoop there.
This may well explain why, 23 years later, I still haven’t made it as a columnist for The Bulletin.
That said, a close read of our interview still offers some crumbs. Turnbull’s own forewarning about the dangers of not fighting seems an eerily prescient skewering of his own political problems. He’s given up the fight against the more bigoted factions in his party, and it’s causing him headaches electorally.
In the same way his bank didn’t seem like a bank, his passion to achieve change for those “alienated and hostile to our system of government” was strangely evanescent as soon as it became clear it was a losing cause.
Perhaps my first impression that “this isn’t what it seems” was not as naive as I thought.
News.com.au contacted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s office and he declined to comment.
Here is Charles’ article for Tiger in full:
Charles Firth is editor of The Chaser Quarterly and brother to former NSW Labor minister Verity Firth. The election issue is in stores this week, and the The Chaser’s Election Deskstarts Wednesday, June 8 on ABC.
Originally published as How I (almost) got the scoop on Turnbull that would have destroyed his career
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