Australia's new PM: Liberal party stands back to watch the 'Malcolm experiment'

Extract from The Guardian

The voters’ preferred prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is a gifted and motivated self-made millionaire who has not spent his life planning a political career. The question for the Liberal party is whether he has learned from his impetuous past.

Malcolm Turnbull faces his first question time as prime minister of Australia on Tuesday. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Lenore Taylor Guardian Australia political editor

@lenoretaylor

Tuesday 15 September 2015 20.24 AEST 

The Australian Liberal party once talked about the “Malcolm experiment” – the unpredictable act of installing the brilliant, impatient, ambitious Malcolm Bligh Turnbull as its leader.

Now they’ve done it – again, this time not while in opposition but in government – so the “Malcolm experiment” is about to play out in real time as he leads the nation.
Turnbull took the Liberal leadership, and with it the prime ministership, in the kind of sudden late-night party room coup used by Labor to oust both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. Once again Australians woke to find they had a new prime minister, the fourth in a little over two years – during which they had voted in only one general election.
But Turnbull is unlike most other politicians, and almost the antithesis of the prime minister he replaces, Tony Abbott. Turnbull has been the voters’ preferred prime minister for many years, his popularity holding steady as voter disillusionment with Abbott and his government rose.
As Abbott’s communications minister, Turnbull has been biding his time and biting his tongue (for the most part), building support within the party and trying to prove to his colleagues that he had learned from the impetuousness and errors of judgment made during his brief stint as opposition leader in 2008 and 2009. At the same time Abbott was wearing out his colleague’s patience, with broken promises – including an attempt to make big cuts to health and education when he had promised not to before the election – and poor “captain’s pick” judgments, such as reintroducing knights and dames and then bestowing one on Prince Philip to the utter astonishment of most Australians.

The 29th prime minister of Australia is sworn in. Link to video.

But the public preference for Turnbull over Abbott wasn’t shared by his conservative colleagues, who were wary of his moderate views, and turned to him only after 30 opinion polls in a row pointed to a rout in the election due in 2016.
Turnbull waited with the air of a man barely containing his impatience, struggling to hide his ambition and his tumult of plans and ideas.
And Turnbull is quite genuinely motivated by ideas. Abbott overthrew him as opposition leader, in 2009, because Turnbull would not abandon what he believed to be the best available climate change policy – an emissions trading scheme he had negotiated with the then Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd – even when he knew it was going to cost him his leadership.
At first he blasted Abbott’s climate stance, writing in a blog that the Coalition government’s lack of policy had “descended into farce” and that “any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott, ‘bullshit’. Moreover, he knows it.”
He has railed against Abbott’s “dumbing down” of politics and when finally unleashed on Monday to openly declare his ambition to his colleagues and the nation promised he would “respect the intelligence” of the electorate and abandon Abbott’s endlessly repeated three-word slogans such as “stop the boats” (asylum seekers trying to reach Australia) or “axe the tax” (the aforementioned and now repealed emissions trading scheme) in favour of persuasion and explanation.

Malcolm Turnbull says Tony Abbott ‘has not been capable of providing the economic leadership’ Australia needs. Link to video.

Unlike many in the Australian parliament, Turnbull has not spent his life planning a political career, instead becoming a self-made millionaire with a series of pre-politics careers. He was a journalist, a lawyer (best known for representing former MI5 agent Peter Wright and the principle of freedom of speech when the British government tried to ban Wright’s book Spycatcher), a businessman (founding internet service provider Ozemail) and a merchant banker. He ran the unsuccessful campaign for Australia to become a republic in 1999, and when it failed accused the former Liberal prime minister John Howard of “breaking the nation’s heart”.
“My commitment to the republican movement was pure and simply patriotism, a love of Australia ... a desire or passion that all of our national symbols should be unequivocally and unambiguously Australian,” he has explained.
But Turnbull was not born into privilege. He was raised by his father, Bruce, after his mother, academic and author Carol Lansbury, left when he was 10. He has described his relationship with his father, who was killed in plane crash in 1982 as “very close ... more like a big brother, little brother”.
He studied law, won a Rhodes scholarship and married Lucy Turnbull, daughter of a prominent QC when he was 25 and she was 21. She is a former lord mayor of Sydney and the couple have always pursued parallel careers. They have two children, Daisy and Alex, and one grandson and Turnbull says their partnership is part of his identity.

Lucy was by his side during the black months after his defeat as opposition leader, when he decided to quit politics and return to his business career. But before the ink was dry on his political obituaries, he changed his mind – after advice from Howard and others, and learned to live with not knowing whether another chance to lead would ever emerge.
He admitted that losing the leadership the first time had been a searing experience.
“Getting poleaxed the way I did, unless you are utterly lacking in any kind of self-awareness, it does a lot of damage to your self-confidence. These are shattering blows, you can’t pretend they are not, so you have to regain your confidence, and I am confident I can make a continuing contribution to Australian public life. But I have learnt not to plan too far ahead, just to do the task at hand as best I can,” he told me in 2012.
The biggest hurdle now for the Turnbull experiment is the compromises he has had to make to achieve his resurrection.
Turnbull has promised his colleagues he won’t make wholesale changes to the party’s climate policy, he even extolled its virtues during his first prime ministerial question time.

'I am confident I can make a continuing contribution to Australian public life.'

Malcolm Turnbull in 2012

He has agreed to maintain Abbott’s commitment to hold a plebiscite on marriage equality after the next general election, an Abbott tactic that marriage equality supporters believe was a tricky excuse for a delay.
He has repeatedly reassured colleagues that he understands his party is a “broad church” of moderates and conservatives and that he will respect the views of all.
His challenge will be to keep faith with voters who liked him because he was different, a conviction politician, a more authentic, moderate, modern man (although at 60 he is actually older than Abbott) and to also retain the support of the party room who elected him and could depose him at any time.
Australians have high hopes for the Turnbull experiment. A snap poll on his first day as prime minister suggested he is the preferred PM for 70% of the nation. He has at most a year to vindicate the voters’ confidence and also to justify the wrenching decision made by his colleagues on Monday – to do what they had always criticised the Labor party for doing: overthrowing a first-term prime minister in the dead of night.