New PM man of many phases
Just after lunch on Tuesday Australia’s Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, the first man to be knighted by Tony Abbott, invited the Prime Minister-elect to take the oath of office.
Turnbull’s words filled Yarralumla’s drawing room when suddenly his only grandson, toddler Jack TurnbullBrown, started gurgling the tune from the ABC TV children’s show Peg + Cat.
An unfortunate choice perhaps, given the elderly and urban mythic claim that Turnbull once killed a former girlfriend’s cat but nothing was ever going to stop this republican dead cat bounce.
‘‘I, Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, do swear that I will well and truly serve the people of Australia in the office of Prime Minister and that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to her majesty Queen Elizabeth II, the Queen of Australia, so help me God.’’
It’s been a banner week for political leaders who stand for one thing but believe something else.
Britain’s new Labour leader, the staunchly anti-monarchist Jeremy Corbyn, came under withering fire for standing in silence while God Save the Queen was played during a Battle of Britain remembrance ceremony at St Paul’s Cathedral.
But Turnbull’s dexterity in fusing monarchist and republican values passed mostly unremarked.
It was another day in Turnbull’s inexorable cavalcade of achievement and who would dare rain on the parade, especially as he had just started his political honeymoon?
Right now between 61.9 and 70 per cent of Australians see Turnbull as the preferred prime minister to Labor’s Bill Shorten, according to diverse opinion polls.
He is every Labor supporter’s favourite Liberal, but not that popular among parliamentary colleagues and only a handful of votes away from oblivion.
Australians watched with fear, loathing, sadness or joy as Abbott spent the year engineering his own selfdestruction, but after nine months of madness Turnbull only got his job by 54 votes to 44, after arguing he was a superior communicator and better salesman.
Turnbull may be the darling of middle Australia, the Q&A television crowd, the big end of town and embody the victory of elites over populism, but his prime ministership remains a slim creation of MPs disinterested in their man and concerned solely with retaining government or their seats.
The right of the Liberal Party has him locked in on all the contentious issues.
Essentially Turnbull is to sell the same product. The satirists John Clarke and Bryan Dawe caught the zeitgeist perfectly on their weekly segment, calling Turnbull’s arrival ‘‘a seamless transition in our sales division’’.
However, the very things that make Turnbull a crowd pleaser – his charm, his stark counterpoint to Abbott and the party ideologues – must be balanced against the imperative to turn himself from the brilliant individualist into a consensus politician.
The question is: can Turnbull stop being Turnbull?
Many are already wondering whether any material changes to government policy will eventuate, when they might occur, or if they will occur at all.
To date, Turnbull PM appears committed to backing the party line.
He has flagged there will be no changes to the same-sex marriage policies which could see gay unions kept on hold for at least two years.
Ditto climate change with the emissions target remaining both futile and an international joke.
Turnbull’s decision to return water policy to the thirsty National Party is construed as the price of admission to The Lodge. Similarly locked in are $100,000 university degrees, the moneyless month for young dole seekers, cuts to funding for domestic violence services, cuts to the ABC, and the continuation of the MH370 search.
However, a major reversal of plans to send submarine building contracts overseas appears to be in the wind with Abbott acolyte Kevin Andrews backing the move and trailing his coat to retain the Defence Minister post.
Christopher Pyne is mentioned in dispatches for the defence job to help retain his Adelaide-based seat.
University of Melbourne political scientist Associate Professor Sally Young wonders whether Turnbull can juggle the expectations of swinging and progressive voters attracted to his small ‘‘l’’ Liberal stand and his conservative party colleagues, some of whom backed him as the best chance at the next election.
‘‘Opinion polls are trickling through showing that people really like him,’’ she says. ‘‘There are big expectations and with big expectations come big problems. We saw that with Rudd, we saw that with Blair, we saw that with Obama. The more popular you are, the more people expect things from you . . . and you often disappoint them.’’
Young thinks the leaking to Fairfax Media of a sensitive cabinet document showing Turnbull was the Abbott government’s worst-performing minister in appointing women to boards was emblematic of the problems the newly minted Prime Minister faces from within.
‘‘Mr Turnbull has to placate not only conservatives within his own party, the Nationals, and the conservative media – which hasn’t been very supportive in him taking over from Mr Abbott – so there’s really a lot in the mix,’’ she says.
‘‘It is very likely that he’ll disappoint people because that’s what political leaders tend to do. The challenge is to take the middle ground. That is what wins and loses in Australian politics. Rudd took it. So too did Abbott, but they both drifted.’’
Not unexpectedly, business, both big and small, welcomed Turnbull’s arrival, especially as he said Australia needed a style of economic leadership ‘‘that respects the people’s intelligence; that explains these complex issues and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take and makes a case for it’’.
Tax reform, an overhaul of superannuation and a shake-up of industrial relations are at the top of the business community’s wishlist.
‘‘Reform is daunting for politicians but I think they’ve got the right idea. What they’ve been missing is the rhetoric so they can sell these ideas to the Australian people,’’ former BHP Billiton chairman Don Argus told journalists. ‘‘It’s a huge challenge for whoever gets in. The debt levels at a national and at a state level are too high. Consumer debt is too high. We need a government that creates jobs. Can Malcolm do it? I don’t know. Tony didn’t.’’
Just as the rise and rise of Bob Hawke was a national soap opera, Turnbull’s fortunate life has been conducted under the klieg lights.
Everybody in Sydney seems to know a Turnbull story. Famously non sequitur, his ability to chop and change or represent disparate positions is both his charm and Achilles heel.
He has changed religions; a feminist, he negotiated Kerry Packer’s deal with Hugh Hefner to publish an Australian edition of Playboy magazine in 1978; no sooner had he vanquished Abbott, than Labor stalwarts scurried to claim the man who was once nearly theirs.
Former Labor NSW general secretary John Della Bosca recalled discussing Labor preselection with the ageing tyro when the pair were involved in the Australian Republican Movement in the 1990s.
Former New South Wales premier Bob Carr, who shared bylines with Turnbull on Packer’s Bulletin magazine, thought he was a Liberal but remembered hearing he aspired to the job of federal secretary of the Australian Workers Union.
Incongruously perhaps, the musician Steve Kilbey riffed on Turnbull’s youthful Labor days.
The lead singer/songwriter with Australian rock band The Church, Kilbey was a school debater who represented the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and remembers Turnbull in 1971 as both a legend in school debating circles and a ‘‘huge’’ Labor man. ‘‘I mean he was a staunch lefty,’’ Kilbey wrote in his 2014 memoir Something Quite
Peculiar.
Maybe there was something in the blood: George Lansbury, the great-uncle of Turnbull’s mother Coral, led the British Labour Party during the Depression. But the variously attributed aphorism ‘‘if you aren’t a socialist at 20, you have no heart, and if you are a socialist at 40, you have no head’’ may well explain the dichotomy of Turnbull.