Malcolm Turnbull is not the smartest person in the room. Quite the opposite

Extract from The Guardian

all

Essential poll

Opinion

Peter Lewis

Two issues central to our prime minister’s personal brand conflict have dominated politics recently: marriage equality and climate change

Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull speaks during house of representatives question time at parliament house in Canberra, 23 October 2017. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

Contact author

Tuesday 24 October 2017 12.50 AEDT Last modified on Tuesday 24 October 2017 15.08 AEDT

One of the current hits in the pod-sphere is a parody called “Dexter Guff is Smarter Than You”, a Spinal Tap-does-inspirational-thought-leader car crash of a production.
Dexter is a “think-fluencer” who spends his time in his “thought palace” promoting his books and vitamin range, interviewing fellow hucksters about the importance of building his personal brand as the “everyman multimillionaire”.
Inside Dexter’s aural bubble he is king, manipulating the content to drive his personal agendas, such as avoiding being sued for the side-effects of his Guff-pill or pursuing Carol, a thought leader he connected with at the “Crushing it in Sacramento” conference.

Yes, it’s a piss-take, but no less than the one currently being perpetrated on the Australian public by our own Dexter Guff, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.
After establishing himself as Australia’s own leather-jacket-clad everyman multimillionaire, Dexter, er, Malcolm, has got himself caught between the promises he made to his conservative backbench and the expectations of the personal brand he cultivated so lovingly.
The last three months of politics have been dominated by two issues that lie at the heart of our prime minister’s personal brand dissonance: marriage equality and climate change.
On marriage equality Malcolm has had to lock smarts with Tony Abbott to embrace a process designed to frustrate progress. While Turnbull held his postal survey up as a sort of new shiny model for democracy, it has been more like his NBN, delivering the message through old copper wires.
Despite these barriers, according to this week’s Essential Report, of the 75% who say they have already participated in the survey, marriage equality is significantly ahead. So far ahead, that it’s probably time to call it for the yes case.

But don’t expect that Tony’s team will leave it as that. The survey they designed is nonbinding and non-definitive. As soon as the ABS releases the results of its expensive piece of fieldwork, expect the focus to shift now to a messy internal debate on the wording of the legislation, particularly the need to “protect” religious freedoms.
This debate risks forcing a rerun of the nonbinding plebiscite within the parliament giving conservative MPs an excuse to ignore the public will and throw around a whole new array of diversions and stereotypes.
Of course, if the vote gets through despite itself, you can bet Malcolm will be there with bells on, claiming this is what he intended all along and expecting to be recognised for his leadership.
It’s the same with energy. Starting with his refusal to lead a party that was not serious about climate, Malcolm has been on what Dexter would characterise as a “personal journey”.
On this journey Malcolm has certainly grown. He’s grown a deep respect for the power of the coal industry, he’s grown a scepticism about the future of renewables and he’s grown a greater awareness of his own political mortality.

But the lesson he has really learned is that hardly anyone understands how the energy sector works. That’s why he called a group of boffins to come up with a mechanism so conceptual, with so little detail, that people can read into it just about anything they want.
The national energy guarantee (Neg) isn’t a policy for the future of the energy industry, it’s a framework for a mechanism that is yet to be designed.
But that was enough for the PM to claim victory last week – brandishing the Neg like a lamp that would grant the holder three wishes – lower prices, energy security and, what was the point of the exercise anyway?
And if confusion was the objective, this week’s Essential Report shows that the Neg is working a treat with nearly half of us being unable to form an opinion about whether it will be good, bad or just another set of acronyms that never see the legislative light of day.

But while the public hasn’t rejected the plan outright, there is deep scepticism around key elements, principally the internal sell job that the government was ending support for renewable energy.
As we have reported previously the vast majority of the public see renewables as the future, with even a majority of Coalition voters supporting Labor’s commitment for a 50% renewable target by 2030.

Worse still for Malcolm, the public doesn’t buy the idea that the plan will do anything to reduce energy prices. Despite the hype around the $150 per annum, non-modelled savings, 50% of us think prices will either continue to rise or stay at their current high levels under the Turnbull plan.

In other words the best that can be said about the Turnbull plan is that it is broad enough to allow people to read into it what they want – as long as it’s not any form of price or market mechanism. Which is actually what it is.
As I argued last week, despite his bluster, the cards remain stacked against the prime minister delivering a viable energy policy, but if he does, it will only occur as a negotiated outcome with the Opposition.

But here again, Malcolm is smarter than you and me. Not content with pulling a swift one on his own backbench, the prime minister also thinks he can use the Neg to bludgeon federal Labor and the state premiers into submission by accusing them of “ideology and idiocy”.
Think about it, a mechanism requiring the support of the states, aimed at ending the culture wars, being deployed by Turnbull as a political weapon against his opponents. That would make it the string theory of political science.
The problem that both Dexter and Malcolm ultimately face is that by setting themselves up as the smartest person in the room, they expose themselves as the opposite. Socrates in reverse.
As for a personal brand – how does “professional disappointment” sound?