Malcolm Turnbull is marking his first year as prime minister. We take a look back at the major moments of the past 12 months.
Advocacy: not slogans. Catharsis of the leadership change
On September 14 2015, Malcolm Turnbull strode into a parliamentary courtyard and declared he was moving against Tony Abbott. The Coalition had been behind Labor in 30 consecutive Newspolls, a fact Turnbull noted in his rationale for the leadership change.
His pitch was simple. Abbott had proved himself incapable of providing economic leadership. “It is clear enough that the government is not successful in providing the economic leadership that we need. It is not the fault of individual ministers. Ultimately, the prime minister has not been capable of providing the economic leadership our nation needs.”
And there was a promise of grown-up government. “We need a different style of leadership. We need a style of leadership that explains those challenges and opportunities, explains the challenges and how to seize the opportunities. A style of leadership that respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take and makes a case for it. We need advocacy, not slogans. We need to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.”
The effect was immediate. Turnbull’s oft-repeated optimistic declaration that there had never been a more exciting time saw the Coalition recover in the polls. Turnbull changed the national tone instantly on issues like national security, moved quickly to produce a science and innovation package as well as reopening a tax reform debate that had stalled under Abbott and Joe Hockey.
‘If something isn’t working as well as you want, chuck it out’
One month after taking the leadership, Turnbull did his first round of sit-down media interviews. He was keen to project a sense of pragmatism and compromise, to draw a contrast with the unrelenting conflict atmosphere promulgated by his predecessor. “If something isn’t working as well as you want, chuck it out,” Turnbull said during a conversation with Guardian Australia on 23 October. “I’m not afraid of people saying, it’s a backdown, or a backflip. An agile government is prepared to abandon policies that don’t work.”
Turnbull was flagging that he would have a high tolerance for floating and then killing various reform proposals – a tendency which was, in some respects, a welcome change from the highly controlled, scripted modus operandi of most prime ministers – but a tendency that would get him into political trouble as the tax reform debate began to gather pace early in 2016.
Turnbull during his opening gambit also acknowledged that the political conversation around budget repair needed to address equity – again an explicit point of contrast with the 2014 budget, which was a political disaster for Abbott. “We should never cease trying to make changes in the social welfare area fairer,” Turnbull said. “Fairer is what is it all about. Fairness has got to be the key priority.” He gave his first signal about where the government would ultimately land with the controversial superannuation reforms it would unveil in the May 2016 budget. He suggested tax concessions for the wealthy had to be pared back as well as government spending programs primarily benefiting the lower paid.
The first summit season
Two months after the leadership change, Malcolm embarked on his first summit season. His first stop was Jakarta – an investment in improving the bilateral relationship with president Joko Widodo. The relationship with Jakarta had been battered and bruised over asylum boat turnbacks and also the revelation that Australia’s spy agencies had attempted to listen-in on the calls of the previous Indonesian president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, and his inner circle. Much was made of the attempted rapprochement and rebalancing in the relationship early in the new Turnbull term.
Turnbull went on to Berlin and was in the German capital when the Paris terror attacks unfolded on November 14. He flew on to Turkey for the G20 gathering, which was dominated by the worsening security situation in Syria. Turnbull met the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, at the Antalya gathering – the first substantial contact between Canberra and Moscow since Tony Abbott had famously threatened to “shirtfront” the Russian president. Turnbull noted a political solution in Syria would require the inclusion of Sunni groups that had felt disenfranchised by the Assad regime and had consequently been left vulnerable to overtures from Islamic State. In Turkey he met the leaders of Japan, Singapore, the EU, India and China.
Turnbull then winged his way to Manila and the Apec summit, where he had his first substantial bilateral with the US president, Barack Obama. Obama invited Turnbull to visit Washington and courted Australia’s support in the hotly disputed region of the South China Sea, where Australia had resolved to walk a middle course diplomatically, carefully balancing the relationship between most important strategic ally and largest trading partner.
Early concessions to conservative enemies
Turnbull lost the leadership of the Liberal party in 2009 for two reasons – he was seen by colleagues as dragging the Coalition in too progressive a direction and his leadership style was regarded as high-handed.
Turnbull entered the leadership in 2015 determined to be more consultative and he vowed to restore good cabinet processes, which was partly an explicit apologia about his own mistakes in the past and a more contemporary acknowledgement that one of the things that had undone Abbott as prime minister was a “command and control” leadership style out of the prime minister’s office.
Early in the piece Turnbull made it clear he would keep the plebiscite as a means of resolving whether to legalise same-sex marriage, even though he was a supporter of a parliamentary vote. He also made it clear that there would be no change to the Coalition’s climate change policy before a planned review in 2017, despite broad criticism about the effectiveness of the Direct Action scheme.
After a brief backbench storm over the Safe Schools anti-bullying program in March, Turnbull and fellow moderate, the education minister Simon Birmingham, offered up a number of concessions, such as requiring parental consent for student participation and requiring the agreement of parental bodies to decide whether, and how, a school will participate in the program.
One of the chief critics of the program, the LNP backbencher George Christensen, later declared victory. “It’s all going,” Christensen said. “Boys in girls’ school uniforms, girls and boys using the same toilets, classroom role plays where kids imagine they have no genitalia or they’re gay ... I doubt the Safe Schools Coalition – who came up with with the weird and wonderful elements of this, attempting to instil queer theory, sexual liberation and Marxism into classrooms – will accept this. And if they don’t, the funding will be cut.”
The concessions to the conservative right set a definitive trend for Turnbull and, progressively, they corroded his personal standing with voters. Voters had welcomed the leadership change, believing that Turnbull would be less ideological than his predecessor, would move the Coalition back to the political centre and was a politician prepared to sacrifice ambition for principle.
Tax reform debate: the brief life of a GST hike, and competitive federalism
Reopening the government’s stalled tax reform debate was an early marker that the prime minister intended to prosecute a broad-ranging economic policy discussion. A possible rise in the GST had been, as Turnbull liked to say, “kicked off into the long grass” under Abbott. The new prime minister elected to put the GST back on the political agenda.
The treasurer, Scott Morrison, opened the political new year in 2016 by softening Australians up for an increase in the GST, arguing that reform needed to be on the table if voters want personal income tax relief and a cut to corporate tax to boost economic growth. Two state premiers, Mike Baird in New South Wales, and Jay Weatherill, the Labor man in South Australia, were resolved to give Turnbull political cover.
But Labor had spent the summer working up a marginal seats campaign for the election year predicated around opposing the GST and that rattled the government backbench. While Morrison continued to roll forward, Turnbull began to roll back. It was the first sign that the relationship between prime minister and treasurer wasn’t entirely harmonious.
A GST increase was dumped formally in February. “After you take into account all of the compensation that you would need to ensure the change was equitable, it simply is not justified in economic terms,” the prime minister told reporters.
A second phase of tax reform played out somewhat chaotically in the lead-up to a Council of Australian Governments meeting in late March 2016. Turnbull floated the idea that state governments would be able to levy a portion of income tax and service delivery would be devolved back to the states. The premiers shot the concept down in flames. Turnbull put the defeat more delicately. “There was not a consensus among the states and territories to support further consideration of the proposal that would enable states to levy income tax on their own behalf,” he said.
A budget, Senate reform and a sprint to a double dissolution
Having turned into an election year, and with political momentum clearly on the wane, Turnbull set about putting together reforms to the Senate voting system that were designed to reduce the chances of micro-party candidates being elected on small percentages of the vote. This change reflected the government’s frustration with a Senate crossbench that had worked to thwart many of the government’s proposals for cutting expenditure since 2013.
The reform was widely seen as a springboard to a double-dissolution election that the government would call as a consequence of being unable to pass two pieces of industrial relations legislation: restoring the Australian Building and Construction Commission and the registered organisations bill.
But the other springboard for the election was to be the budget of 2016, which was handed down in the week Turnbull called the eight-week winter election. The budget was styled not merely as a budget but pitched rather more grandly as an “economic plan” for the nation, where cuts to business taxes would generate more economic growth and jobs (although the fine print on the tax cut made it clear the growth dividend was small and would take many years to arrive). Somewhat bravely for an election budget, there were no goodies for people on average incomes between $37,000 and $80,000.
The winter of Malcolm’s discontent
By the conclusion of budget week, Malcolm Turnbull resolved Australians would go to the polls for a double-dissolution election on 2 July. Looking over the heads of colleagues to the voters, Turnbull told people watching on Mother’s Day he was seeking a personal mandate. He was “seeking the mandate of the Australian people to continue and complete [the government’s] national economic plan, because that is the key to us achieving and realising the great opportunities of these exciting times”. The pitch went to the crux of what Turnbull required to steady his political fortunes – an affirmation from the voters that they wanted him to be prime minister.
It was an unusual election campaign at a number of levels. Despite the polls all suggesting the outcome was on a knife-edge, there were no substantial new policies unveiled over the eight weeks, just an extended policy conversation about the “plan” (which was more a proposal, contingent on future Senate support), versus the Labor alternative.
Coalition MPs contesting marginal seats fretted about the presidential nature of the campaign, the lack of content to connect with ordinary voters and problems with the campaign headquarters. A bubble of discontent about one of the budget proposals, a move to wind back tax concessions for high-income earners, surfaced but didn’t catch fire. The campaign machine rolled on.
Labor had campaigned aggressively on health and the threats to Medicare but the length of the contest meant many voters only tuned in late in the piece. The major parties both saw a substantial swing in their internal tracking poll in the middle of the final week of the campaign to Labor, which carried through to election night. Labor would not pick up enough seats to govern in majority but, for a time, it wasn’t clear that the Coalition would be able to command a majority in its own right.
The Senate had not been cleared out, many crossbenchers were set to continue their careers and two new protectionist blocs had emerged in the upper house – the Nick Xenophon Team with three senators and Pauline Hanson with four. Turnbull had declared in advance Hanson would not be welcome back in the Australian parliament – an analysis promptly ignored by disaffected voters.
On election night Turnbull’s personal frustration with the sum of events finally boiled over. “The circumstances of Australia cannot be changed by a lying campaign from the Labor party,” Turnbull thundered to supporters, who had waited until after midnight for the prime minister to appear. “The challenges, the fact that we live in times of rapid economic change, of enormous opportunity, enormous challenges, a time when we need to be innovative, when we need to be competitive, when we need to be able to seize those opportunities – those times are there.”
The election aftermath: never a more uncertain time
Malcolm Turnbull went into the election seeking a personal mandate. He emerged on the other side of the contest with his authority under challenge. On the Sunday after the election, conservatives lined up for the first of many sorties that would follow the less than decisive election result. The Liberal senator Cory Bernardi warned the Coalition needed to “take a deep breath” after Saturday’s election and hasten slowly with a proposed marriage equality plebiscite.
This escalated into an internal fight over the Coalition’s superannuation policy, which thus far remains unresolved, and a renewed push to water down protections in the Racial Discrimination Act. Post election, the former prime minister, Tony Abbott, has also been making his presence felt.
Turnbull is trying to steady the government’s political fortunes and push on into the new 45th parliament but he faces enormous challenges given internal opponents are clearly intent on elevating disagreements into brutal face-offs. Apart from the internal tensions, Turnbull is also exhibiting some signs that the Coalition has heeded the voter backlash at the recent election – speaking increasingly about the need to ensure that the benefits of globalisation are distributed fairly.
Recently Turnbull nominated his “clear economic plan” as the major achievement of his first 12 months as prime minister. But, unfortunately for Turnbull, the biggest question being posed on the occasion of his first anniversary as prime minister is – will he last until his second?
