Renaissance Man’s rapier skewers Cave Man’s club… but can it last?

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Abbott Turnbull Renaissance

I woke up this morning with a nice sense of calm that Abbott had gone. And I’m not too worried about Turnbull.

Unless Turnbull cuts a big swathe through the Abbottistas, and their policies, he won’t succeed. He’ll just be the caretaker Prime Minister.

Turnbull made his money with a serendipitous investment in Ozemail. Hey, good luck to him. He had $500k to spare, put it all on the internet, and won.

I still have an Ozemail account, one with “ozemail.com.au” in it. I must be one of the few left from the old days where all you had to do was pick up a free Ozemail CD at a trade show (or, as in my case, have a mate who brought you one saying, “D’ya know what this is for?”), a phone modem, and five minutes to spare, and you were on-line.

It was a brilliant marketing scheme and Turnbull made a killing, selling out at the top of the market to the ill-fated Tyco (who then went broke in one of the bigger Dot.Com crashes a few years later).

You only need one Ozemail investment in your life to live the rest of it on Easy street. That’s what I would have done. Malcolm chose to “further his career in public and professional life”. The rest is connections.

Malcolm had the connections and the savoir faire, and he made the best of them.

I don’t think you needed to be a business genius to get yourself shoe-horned into a merchant bank and turn over money, with a decent amount of it falling into your pocket each time the investment merry-go-round completed a cycle. If you had the money to start with, making more was easy. Once again, good luck to him. I can only wish…

I guess what I’m saying is that Turnbull had a lot of luck in amassing his pile, not particularly a lot of business savvy. He DID have style, though, which is important… once you’re in the driver’s seat.

As for his career as a lawyer, the Turnbull legend is only based on winning one case, the local franchise version of Spy Catcher, not the big game in the UK. Another serendipitous win that stood Malcolm in good stead.

He has an amazing head for detail There’s no doubt he’s very intelligent. I can still remember him going brain-to-brain with Tony Jones (no slouch in the quick-wittedness department) over something to do with coal industry, during an interview one evening on ABC TV. Jones had copious notes in front of him and quoted something that someone-or-other had said, or perhaps it was some statistic.

Turnbull had only his memory, and contradicted Jones on the quote. Jones looked up his notes and (sort-of) conceded that Turnbull was right. Jones was wrong. Now, THAT is a good head for detail from Turnbull, no risk about it.

Unfortunately though, there’s the Turnbull ego. They say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and you can see it in the breezy, almost friendly, almost hesitant way he corrects people. It’s almost like he’s patting them on the head. Apparently in private he’s a little more pointed in his contradictions.

There are a lot of fools in the ranks of the Liberal Party.

They have had 5 years of slogans and total war. They gotten used to winning with sheer aggression and a veritable gale of media sycophancy behind them, with toadies waiting for them at every port, ready and willing to do anything to get them into and keep them in power. “Dead.Buried.Cremated”… the über 3-word slogan of the Liberal Party, 2009-2015.

Policy? Who needs it? There was always a scandal that could be drummed up: Ipswich Inc, Godwin Grech, Thomson, Slipper,Pink Batts, School Halls, Gillard’s bathroom, Bill Shorten’s AWU days, and a hundred more. The shock jocks went feral and nasty, even feraler and nastier than they had ever been. A stench started to come up over the Australian polity as it laid waste to itself.

It was so easy to cut someone down, so you could stand taller than them.

The better way, of course, was to raise everyone up. You could still be taller, because they’d hoist you onto their shoulders and cheer you. But that was not the Liberal way. They had it too easy.

Turnbull, like all his colleagues, fell for it and came a cropper on Gretch. If it hadn’t been Gretch, it would have been someone else who swindled him.

Turnbull is the show pony who’s been forced to corral in with the pit ponies. There may be some among his colleagues he respects and admires, but probably not too many.

The others? They will want to continue playing dirty. It’s become a habit. It won’t suit Turnbull’s breezy “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-on” style. I think he’ll be torn down by the Liberal cavemen simply because he has vestigial scruples, the last reserve of decency that Abbott did not have. Turnbull doesn’t have the killer instinct that the modern Liberal Party needs and has gotten used to having in Abbott. No-one should underestimate the capacity of today’s Liberal Party for stupidity and boorishness.

Turnbull’s faith in his party is touching. But he’ll not only have to rewrite their policies to get some sense out of them.

He’ll have to rewire their DNA as well, which will be a vastly bigger ask.

628 thoughts on “Renaissance Man’s rapier skewers Cave Man’s club… but can it last?”

  3. Yep.
    We in SA were sold out by Turnbull moving Water Resources out of Environment and giving it to the Nationals, who represent Big Farmer, Not, for example, your struggling small dairy farmer. Gina with her investment in mega-milk production, or Chinese horrendous factory-cow milk producion process is more Barnyard’s idea of ‘rural industries’ Ditto for any other farming and grazing sector.

  7. Et tu, Brute?

    Former Queensland premier Campbell Newman has echoed Tony Abbott’s criticism of the media in helping set what he said was a “template” for political coverage that led to their downfalls.

    Newman decried the advent of a “reality TV” style scenario in which the community, mainstream and social media, and politicians themselves, were complicit in leading political debate into “a cold dark place”.

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/sep/18/campbell-newman-says-media-partly-to-blame-for-his-queensland-election-loss

  8. Do all these Press Gallery typoes get up every morning and find the day’s mantra ready and waiting in their inboxes?

    I ask because I’m more than sick and tired of the whole pointless, gormless pack all saying the same thing.

    On Tuesday it was ‘Tony was such a great bloke’. All week we have had ‘Shorten is in trouble/has to be replaced’. Today it’s ‘Canning is a sure thing for the Liberal Party now Tony has gone’ and a bonus ‘Malcolm has to be reformist’.

    Who send them this stuff? Rupert’s minions? The fairies? Can’t any of them think for themselves?

  9. This little black duck

    So CanJoh, like his mate Tones, tries to tell us “Not my fault. Nothing to do with me Those guys over there were to blame for it all. ”

    Quite a cheek really when you consider how many tummy rubs and foot massages they received from the media lizards.

  10. My last word for a few days.
    If we are to believe this latest poll and its finding that 27% of ALP supporters would prefer Turnbull as PM over Shorten then I have a simple message for those people. Fuck off!!!
    Stop using the ALP and assuaging the guilt you feel in your closeted support of the born to rule libs. Stop trying to hide behind progressive and fair policies that the ALP have implemented because you are rightly ashamed to admit your a selfish and uncaring arse hole who feigns concern for others but really only cares for themselves.
    Just admit you’re a selfish and heartless prick and vote liberal. The ALP needs no more selfish and fair weather ‘supporters’
    Have a good weekend everyone at the Pub and let us all continue to keep up the fight against the born to rule mongrels and the media sluts and sellouts who support them.

  16. Money for favours. What’s new?

    The Sprout being chucked to the chooks.

    An almost-$1000-a-head Liberal Party fundraiser was the scene for a meeting between the Immigration Minister and property developers fighting for a multimillion-dollar contract for the new Australian Border Force headquarters.

    The dinner at Canberra’s exclusive Boat House by the Lake restaurant in early September was hosted by ACT Liberal senator Zed Seselja, with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton the main drawcard.

    The ABC understands it was attended by at least 10 people, six of whom were developers.

    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-18/party-fundraiser-scene-for-dutton-meeting-with-developers/6787244

  17. What the likes of Abbott and Can-do dislike so much about social media, is the democracy of it!…unlike the “good ol’ days” of mogul media ownership and news / views ditatorship, social media cries “BULLSHIT YOU BASTARDS!!” and it gets heard all over aust’ and all over the world !!
    So f#ck Murdoch!, f#ck the MSM. , f#ck the LNP. and it’s crawlers..we now have our own voice and it will not be silenced!

  18. Abbott leaves Canberra –

    andrew meares ‏@mearesy 6m6 minutes ago
    Former PM Abbott walks past PM Turnbull’s RAAF VIP BBJ as he departed Canberra in a smaller RAAF VIP Challenger

  19. That lying bastard Hastie says Labor didn’t have his back when he was in Afghanistan.

    I’d like to draw his attention to an MPI on defence pay that was debated in the senate on Wednesday and then he can decide which government was more supportive of our defence forces. Hint – it’s not the current government.

    The PRESIDENT ( 15:50 ): A letter has been received from Senator Lambie:

    Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:
    The Coalition Governments failure to debate in the House of Representatives private members legislation that has been passed by the senate guaranteeing future pay rises for member of our ADF are linked to the pay rises of members of parliament or CPI whichever is highest.
    Is the proposal supported?

    More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places

    http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;db=CHAMBER;id=chamber%2Fhansards%2Fe32f7c8c-0087-4580-abd4-e03d80c33290%2F0099;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansards%2Fe32f7c8c-0087-4580-abd4-e03d80c33290%2F0000%22

  22. Old Roman saying..: “You live by the “Gladius”, you die by the “Gladius”….(Google : slang term for roman sword ; Gladius ).

    Serves you right Tony !

  23. Abbott is still on a VIP Jet not shoved back into cattle class or left to drive 2 hours up the Federal and Hume Highways to Sydney in his family car.

    Has Credlin vacated PMO yet?

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