TONY JONES: The obvious takeaway, political takeaway in Australia, is that you don’t believe your leader, Tony Abbott, your party, your conservative party, has vision.
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Oh, no, I think there is a lot of vision. It’s just a question of whether you agree with it, or whether you find it appealing. And that’s something that, you know, obviously people will decide at the next election.
There is a lot I like about Turnbull, but he sure is prone to brain explosions. Imagine if he was just a little bit pragmatic.
A couple of years ago I was in someone’s office where there were a lot of politicians’ biographies on the shelves. I was idly glancing over them when I suddenly noticed Turnbull’s face on the spine of a fat biography. What? I looked again and saw it was another Malcolm – Fraser.
But they don’t look alike, do they? They do! They have the same head up, chin out, private school, born-to-rule look.
I have to say, though, that Turnbull does seem to be becoming more likeable – or less dislikeable.
There are many Julia Gillards, but there’s only one Tony Abbott.
Some people like him, some people don’t, but everyone knows what he stands for.
Yes Tel has an excellent memory.
you know what tony stands for.
On climate change he was against a carbon tax/ETS and then for it and then against it.
He was completely for a GST which had a much bigger impact on the economy than any proposed carbon tax. surely if he ‘believes’ what he is saying about the implications of a carbon tax then he must have been against the GST!
I could go on but there is little point.
Tony is as ‘flexible’ as Julia who are as equally flexible as John Howard was
Tel, everyone knows what Tony Abbott stands for: he stands for Tony Abbott being prime minister. What he would do were this to happen, well, we’re not so clear on that.
He professes to believe whatever his current audience wants him to believe regardless of whether that is diametrically opposed to what he professed to believe 5 years or 5 minutes beforehand.
I do not remember a single other politician being so consistently inconsistent yet seemingly able to get away with it.
Mark, do you remember last Christmas? What about last week? Tricky thing remembering sometimes.. ;)
It’s clear Tony Abbott does stand for something, we all know (roughly) what it is, but he also knows that Opposition is no time to let it get in the way of one’s political strategy. Unfortunately, if you want to become PM that’s the way it has to be played given the nature of the media and us humangoes (as Dr Hewson showed us). If you want a technical term for the problem, I guess it comes down to – salience bias.
Just think, if John Hewson had won in 1993 our country would be a very different – and IMO much better – place.
I dunno about that, Nic – if Dr Hewson had won he would beyond doubt have been only a one-term PM. We might have ended up with a better designed GST than we have, but that’s about it. And we would have missed out on a lot of the very valuable things PJK’s government did.
Certainly I reckon we would have been run by the big business lobbies even more than we are now. Hewson never saw a merchant banker he didn’t like.
1) I think Hewson would have got at least two terms. We wouldn’t have ended up with all the nastiness of boat people etc.
If the Libs had lost we might have had Kim Beazley PM for a while. Not necessarily the greatest thing since sliced bread but surely better than what we got.
Nicholas – I often wonder what would have happened if Kim Beazley had beaten John Howard in 1998.
I’m pretty sure he would have taken Australia into the war in Iraq. But what effect would that have had on Australian politics?
He is against it, you know it, I know it. Sometimes the language changes (you might have to watch for the wink).
Don,
Yes, he would have gone into Iraq, but one hopes in the way Hawkie went into Gulf I, in a pretty token way – still you couldn’t be sure with the bomber. I also think he would have fluffed around as PM as he did as Opposition leader, but you never know. He may well have grown in the job – he’s a person of substance I think.
Nicholas – Do you think Beazley’s position on the war would have been different from Tony Blair’s?
Who knows. I think Blair got some attack of megalomania from his idea of his special relationship with the US and Bush and it seems destroyed his PMship. I doubt Beazley would have acted so strangely, but I’m sure he would have moved heaven and earth to do whatever necessary to stay in Bush’s good books. Blair went well beyond that apparently wanting co-authorship of the whole catastrophe.
I think Beazley is a nice, smart fellow – perhaps lacking guts (unfortunately). Blair’s a smarmy, ego-maniacal smart fellow who it turned out didn’t lack guts (unfortunately) and thus was prepared to roll the dice on his PMship and a few hundred thousand Iraqi’s lives and wellbeing.
But who knows . . .
Why do you say that Beazley lacked guts?
The old Socrates treatment huh? Perhaps I’m just parroting John Howard’s line about ticker, but Beazley never really stood out. He got to the position he got to by being the most able and electable of the followers of Hawke and then Keating – he even managed the switchover between them fairly well, having staunchly (and in hindsight correctly IMO) supported Hawke. But what did he ever stand up for against others in his party? (The one thing I can remember is backing his department against Keating and the Treasury in a – successful – effort to screw up telecommunications reform for another generation.)
He also had no mongrel about him – which may be equated with guts. Politics is a dirty business. As Paul Keating said, if you see a nick in the fence, you’ve got to pop through it – they don’t open up often. In the 2008 GST election there were a million Australians who would be substantially worse off – smokers. I can’t imagine any other serious contender of either side who wouldn’t at the very least have tried to milk their resentment. Beazley didn’t do it – or I didn’t see him do so. I doubt it was out of principle, it was a view that it would be indecorous to go there – and the opinionistas would disapprove. Who knows, perhaps Beazley’s pragmatic political judgement was right, but I doubt it. I think he could have used it to win. I doubt many people were comfortable with Howard effectively breaching international law over the Tampa, but he saw a nick in the fence and through he went. That showed guts – not to do anything I approve of but guts nevertheless – both in terms of political courage and political ‘gut’ instinct.
The other thing I kept noticing is that he seemed even more than magnanimous in his concession speeches. He seemed kind of exultant in ‘coming so close’ in 2008. Well if your opponent has put in such a shocking performance in his first term – remember how bad Howard was in his first time, he was completely out of place in the reform minded culture of government that the Hawke and Keating Governments had nurtured. Then Howard was promising a 10% tax on everything. I mean not really seriously aspiring to win in those circumstances? I don’t know if it shows a lack of guts or just aspiration, but they’ve both got to kind of run together in an Opposition Leader. He kept giving those kinds of concession speeches, in which he seemed radiantly happy and relieved that it was all over, and the party would regroup and come again.
He even gave a beaming concession speech for Latham’s debacle. At least Latham had the decency to be devastated.
It sounds like you’re saying Beazley wasn’t opportunistic enough to succeed.
Except that, like I said, I doubt there was too much principle involved, which suggests something else – what do you think it was?
I never formed a strong impression of Kim Beazley.
I remember being surprised at the way the Prime Ministership changed perceptions of John Howard. I didn’t get the impression it changed John Howard much, but once he was PM his supporters raved about how strong and capable he was and his opponents how devious and cunning.
I wondered whether something similar might have happened if Beazley had become PM.
Yes, I think that’s entirely possible. If you look at the list of PMs I know something of, you wouldn’t have picked them.
You’d expect Whitlam to have been good – he wasn’t.
You’d expect Hawke to have been bad – he was good.
People expected Keating to be good – but he wasn’t (IMO)
People expected Howard to be pretty useless, which he was most of the time, but quite steely and he had a huge effect changing the atmosphere of the place (sadly for the worse).
People thought Rudd would be good . . .
I expected Gillard to be good . . .
Anyway, like I said above Beazley “may well have grown in the job – he’s a person of substance I think.” If he had done so he’d have been an improvement on what we got.