Malcolm Turnbull looked vaguely blindsided on Monday when he sat down at a Lifeline function for a conversation with the television journalist Mike Munro.
Perhaps the prime minister had prepped assiduously for mental health policy questions.
What Turnbull got was mild psychoanalysis with bonus anecdotes: his parents’ divorce and the horrors of boarding school, Kerry Packer and death threats, whether he remembered sacking Munro one evening at the Nine network (Turnbull didn’t), whether he remembered getting Munro out of a professional jam involving a covert recording (that, Turnbull did: “I remember keeping you out of prison”) and what, if anything, the prime minister had learned from the ignominy of colleagues dumping him as opposition leader in 2009.
Stranded a long way from formulations and talking points, Turnbull began the exchanges with Munro mildly discomfited, but ended expansive.
Boarding school was bracing. “I went to boarding school when I was eight and my parents were in the process of splitting up and I was very lonely.”
Had boarding school helped the prime minister develop coping skills to deal with pugilists in the parliament?
Sensing danger – there is, self-evidently, one very high profile and very unhappy pugilist to consider – Turnbull stepped round that one carefully.
Agility, agility, agility. Life was full of lessons, and the important thing was to keep on learning, he noted.
What had Turnbull learned from Kerry when he served as the mogul’s lawyer? A great deal, apparently. Packer was a person who exhibited “every emotion” from volcanic rage to incredible generosity.
To anyone who has seen Turnbull’s irrepressible volubility – his enormous fondness for talking – this may seem difficult to believe, but apparently Packer taught the prime minister to listen.
Packer seemed to recall “pretty much everything he ever heard” and that taught the lawyer the value of receive as well as send. Strategic listening was very important.
Did Packer really threaten to kill him?
In 2009, Turnbull revealed somewhat sensationally the mogul had threatened to kill him when their business relationship went sour during the bidding for Fairfax in 1991.
But the Turnbull recollection in 2009 seemed sharper than the recall of 2015. On Monday, Turnbull couldn’t recall precisely whether he’d received the death threat. If Packer had, in fact, threatened to kill him it would have been a sign of “endearment.”
Did losing the Liberal party leadership chasten him? “It did, enormously. I was very glum about it all.”
Turnbull told Munro if you are able to pull yourself out of adversity, it is possible to emerge stronger and more self-aware. You can, through adversity, learn the art of self-criticism. You might not be 100% of the problem, but wisdom comes from understanding “you are a big chunk of it”, he said.
The segue to Tony Abbott was obvious, and Munro was quick to the link.
But Turnbull declined the opportunity to reflect on his vanquished colleague, given anything he would say about Abbott and the art of personal resilience was likely to be “misinterpreted”.
He would, however, cut to the chase.
Turnbull has been flat out since mid September telling voters there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian. Not only voters – Angela Merkel got the excitements in Berlin and Barack Obama got them in Manila.
But now, with Mike Munro, he would actually own the mantra. “There has never been a more exciting time to be prime minister,” Turnbull said, with a Cheshire Cat-like grin.
