The author of “Born to Rule: The Unauthorised Biography of Malcolm Turnbull”, Paddy Manning, penned a damning critique of Malcolm Turnbull in The Saturday Paper:
Turnbull was an elitist who would have trouble thinking outside his Point Piper bubble, trouble understanding the everyday concerns of most Australians. In those heady days of November–December, I may as well have been pissing in the wind. Now the gale is blowing the other way…
During the federal election campaign… Turnbull had nothing interesting to say – the agenda was threadbare – and beyond the obvious strain of repeating himself, it seemed he hardly tried… We were to elect Malcolm Turnbull because he was Malcolm Turnbull… When the verdict came back, too close to call, in his graceless election night performance, Turnbull hid and sulked and even called on the police to investigate. He pointed the finger of blame everywhere but at himself. That’s arrogance. That’s born to rule. That’s Turnbull…
Turnbull’s detractors say nothing has changed and his prime ministership is an exact repeat of his failed leadership of the opposition. A honeymoon, followed by an almighty comedown… who could have predicted the combination of gutlessness, vacuity and incompetence that this prime minister has delivered?… As Tony Windsor says: Malcolm Turnbull is like the dog that caught the car. Having sought the job all his life, he doesn’t know what to do with it, now that he’s got it…
Turnbull’s prime ministership to date shows one thing: that intelligence is overrated. What counts, in a leader, is courage and conviction, something Malcolm Turnbull once had in spades but now seems to have lost entirely…
Before the election, when Turnbull told Annabel Crabb that being prime minister was the most fun he’d had in his life, I had to wonder, “Which bit?” Was it the premature surrender on every principled cause that defined him in the public mind? Was it the excitement of watching the polls dive as the public worked out they’d been had?
You can read the whole article here.
I think Manning’s article sums up Turnbull’s reign as Prime Minister well.
The demise of Turnbull seems almost inevitable now. Like most people I was initially thrilled when Turnbull took over the Prime Ministership from Tony Abbott, believing that we had a leader that would place good policy over short-term political opportunism. He even promised us such an approach:
“Ultimately, the prime minister has not been capable of providing the economic leadership our nation needs… We need a different style of leadership. We need a style of leadership that… respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets out a course of action that we believe we should take… We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people. We need to restore traditional cabinet government [and] put an end to policy on the run and captain’s calls”.
– Malcolm Turnbull, launching his leadership challenge, 14 September 2015.
Yet, in the year since becoming Prime Minister, Turnbull has been largely devoid of policy, while performing a U-turn and going against many of the things that he previously stood for (e.g. climate policy, reforming property tax concessions, etc), in part because he has failed to control the policy luddites in his own party.
Any legitimacy Turnbull once held has now evaporated. He seems to be a dead PM walking.
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