Turnbull the great contradiction

Malcolm Turnbull could reshape the Liberal Party and, ultimately, Australia, writes JACK WATERFORD MALCOLM TURNBULL has all it takes to be a great, and ultimately successful, leader of the Liberal Party. He has ambition and drive. He has a tremendous ego - fancy him calling the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, vain - but also a considerable capacity to harness it and anything else that matters to him to an ultimate end. His mind is working and calculating all of the time; but he is more strategic than tactical and, if possessing a great retentive brain, more a grand vision man than a detail man. All his grand visions involve himself on centre stage. Focused, he is hard to distract. He reads, and has a considerable capacity to master a brief and fight without restraint for the objectives he has set. He has a considerable personal fortune which helps prevent his being distracted, any more, by the merely venal. If he lacks a compelling philosophy, he is liberal and decent in his instincts, and sound by either Labor or Liberal standards on public policy and social philosophy. He is young (53), and his ambitions go beyond mere occupation of the Lodge, which may help him be patient. He also has the resources, public and personal, to make his way there through well-tested strategies, which will inevitably include ruthless bastardry and opportunism but will probably earn him as much admiration as it will reflect on his character. No one expects leaders to be namby-pambies and, as Peter Costello has demonstrated, no one ever gets to be leader either by waiting for a delegation from one\u27s colleagues or by execution of a well-thought-out party succession plan. Unlike John Howard, he does not live and breathe politics alone. His relative breadth, his other lives and his wider interests, may soften him and make less predictable, just as it makes him less dependent on the structures, forms and history of the Liberal Party. Yet that very three-dimensionality, and contempt for obstacles, can make his fire far hotter when it is all focused. Turnbull is, like Rudd, always focused even if, unlike Rudd, he is not distracted by the imperative of day-to-day survival. On paper, indeed, he has the potential to resemble a Menzies in both longevity and achievement. He does not come from patrician stock, as did Gorton (via a bar sinister), McMahon, Fraser and Peacock. He\u27s no mere try-hard, as was Snedden; avuncular lieutenant not up to the big job, as was Holt; or moral and intellectual vacuum trying to please everyone, like Nelson. He\u27s not what the Trots would call an entrist, as Hewson was, to a degree. Nor a patient, dogged and cunning ordinary guy with a tight and narrow bundle of ideological ideas. No Howard, he. Because Turnbull has qualities complementary to, rather than resembling, Howard\u27s, he is an ideal long-term successor, in just the same way that many businesses operate well by having, alternately, martinets followed by easygoing managers, or visionaries after consolidators. He will also be more difficult for Labor to touch. He has a history, of course, but not much of a political history, and most of his history (except so far as it touches his personality) does not tie him down. He may prattle about free enterprise and personal choice, but he is no conviction politician, ideologue nor ancient class enemy. Nor is he predictable. And, being able to see further through a brick wall than most, he is less likely to be tied to losing positions, or sentimental about party shibboleths or the record. And he is agile, with some capacity to attack from the side, or the rear. He is not conservative about mere notions such as King, country, Church and convention. Nor does he pander to less worthy manifestations of these tendencies. These qualities could make Turnbull great, and reshape the Liberal Party, and ultimately Australia, for a long period in office in the 2010s. That period, which could well embrace the transition to a republic he has championed, could see Australia a very different country, but not in ways that would make many Australians feel uneasy. But they are also the very qualities that could bring him down. His strengths contain great potential weaknesses. Now he must wrestle with his political opponents mostly in his own party, of course in an effort to shape them to his will. That will be more difficult because he has never cared much, before, how bruised, battered and resentful he has left those he trampled over. Yet he will depend on many of them for his survival. The Liberal Party usually (but not always, as Brendan Nelson will attest) allows its leaders great latitude, and depends upon its leader as much as its party structure for winning strategies. But that power depends, at the end of the day, on being in power. Turnbull’s less attractive qualities are well known, even to himself. He has no common touch, though he is rather more closely rooted to the way of thinking of the common man than, for example, a Gough Whitlam or a Bob Carr. Nor in politics, at least, has he ever learnt to relax or, for that matter to relax others. He is not a good listener, even if he is a good interrogator who hears and processes what he thinks important. His political apprenticeship has forced him to pretend to listen and to be patient, but his impatience is generally manifest. Many who have wanted urgently to tell him something have left him feeling frustrated, and angry because he was lecturing, not listening. He demands great loyalty, but has never been famous for giving it, except to clients. Even then, he has fought with many of his clients in the end. He has never wanted for admirers; but has never been famous for followers, nor assiduous about their interests. Not only can he demand and process great quantities of information, and follow-ups to it eighteen hours a day, but his intellect is so formidable, and his contempt so withering, that many good people find working with him, in any subservient capacity, too daunting. His staff, in short, will be very good, but in primary part because they are well paid rather than because they have been inspired to join him on his journey. In much the same way, those who attach themselves to him, or to his journey, in hopes of achieving some of their own agendas on the way, are pretty much doomed to disappointment. Many with his background in the law, and advocacy, have not succeeded, as some had hoped or expected in politics, because the part of persuading a judge, or a client, is by no means the same as persuading one’s colleagues or the wider public. Some great racehorses, moreover, are too brittle to be caught in the pack. Turnbull, however, showed from the first - for example, with his relentless undermining of Nelson - that he had the appetite and capacity for the elbowing, fouling and scrabbling for position, as well as some judgment about when to make the break. And, for that matter, when to back himself. His formidable business career began at the top. He’s never been much of a one for the team, and has earned no great reputation as a manager whether of people, or of resources. That’s been for minions working to his instructions. For one from his background who was fast promoted in politics, he acquired no particular reputation as an able administrator of his department, or champion of the policies he or it pursued in cabinet. An advocate in the class of his father-in-law, Tom Hughes, he has never dazzled in parliament and, to date, no one has ever entered the chamber just to hear him speak. Perhaps the greatest contradiction is that no one could ever articulate, beyond vague references to a republic, what he believes in and what he stands for. Apart from himself and his manifest destiny, that is. For Brendan Nelson, the same problem saw him described as a chameleon, a chancer and a bit of a fake. No one says this about Malcolm Turnbull, but they have as little idea about what is actually banging around in his head. • Jack Waterford is editor-at-large of the Canberra Times, where this article first appeared