From Fairfax:
Fresh from firing the starters’ gun on a gruelling 15-week pseudo campaign, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is manoeuvring toward an election platform that will necessarily project his plans for the future while defending his government’s first term legacy.Problem is, there’s a big, proud and increasingly loud guardian of that legacy – the man Mr Turnbull ousted just six months ago, Tony Abbott.
…The niggling presence of the Member for Warringah forces the PM to look both forward and back. And he’s come up with a catch-all phrase to deflect any of that non-sniping and non-undermining – “continuity and change”.
“As you go from one Liberal prime minister to another, you have continuity and you have change and there has been a lot of change,” Mr Turnbull told the ABC on Monday. “The bottom line is there is continuity and there is change,” he repeated in the next day’s radio interviews.
The problem is that there is no change, only continuity. Turnbull can dress it up all he likes but underneath it he is salting the earth of reform around the economy, tax and social policy to get himself elected. Not only is he Tony Abbott’s beatch on policy, these are classic Tony Abbott political tactics. Turnbull has become Tony Abbott.
All he had to do to win the election by miles was be the great policy mind that we all know he is, but he didn’t have the ticker.
