by Aaron Patrick

Published by HarperCollins Publishers

2022

Aaron Patrick ends the final chapter of his book of Malcolm Turnbull’s rise and fall from the lofty of heights of Prime Minister of Australia with this description;

“Like many men and women who have achieved great professional success, Malcolm Turnbull is thoughtful, charming, erudite and intelligent. He is a wonderful speaker, a man with acute ability to set the right tone, in substance and delivery. He can flip between aggression and praise, and explain complexity in simple terms, without sacrificing sophistication .”

Earlier in the book he describes “the great promise of Turnbull’s leadership was lost in the pointless dissipation of its political capital by decisions not taken… having squandered the handsome parliamentary majority bequeathed  to him by his predecessor, Tony Abbott… Turnbull’s humiliation was compounded by what he saw as the calibre of his replacement: a party apparatchik and second-tier industry lobbyist.

How did it all go wrong for the brilliant speaker, journalist barrister, and very successful merchant banker? Patrick by this important account of comparatively recent history attempts to explain what proved to be a political train-wreck.

I first met Turnbull when we were both first year Arts Law students at Sydney University in 1973. If anyone in that cohort was expected to go on to great things it was him. He had attended Sydney Grammar and was the 1972 winner of the GPS and CAS prestigious Lawrence Campbell Oratory competition. I believe he was best speaker I had heard in both debates and public meetings whilst I was at Sydney University. Whilst many of his contemporaries were concerning themselves with campus life and part-time jobs (I drove a taxi) Turnbull was already out in the wider world making serious contacts and developing a public persona based upon his overwhelming self-confidence and immense ability and intelligence. The editor of The Bulletin, Trevor Kennedy, with whom Turnbull later shared many fruitful and significant financial dealings, gave him a column called The Officious Bystander. A name probably suggested by Turnbull himself from his study of contract law and taken from the well-known statement of Lord Justice MacKinnon in Shirlaw v Southern Foundries (1926), Limited [1939] 2 KB 206 at 227. Turnbull’s time at the magazine and at Sydney University is well recorded in Greg Sheridan’s book  When We Were Young & Foolish – A memoir of my misguided youth with Tony Abbott, Bob Carr, Malcolm Turnbull, Kevin Rudd & other reprobates. I was one of the ‘other reprobates’ mentioned in the book.

Patrick’s book is not just about Turnbull but also broadly about significant personalities in the Liberal Party and the tumultuous events shaping the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments. The book spends a lot of time on Morrison himself who went from Turnbull’s beneficiary and supporter to his nemesis.

Patrick adopting the mantle of the ‘officious bystander’ points to a number of reasons why Turnbull failed. Turnbull completely misjudged and underestimated  Morrison’s ambition and guile. Morrison is fourteen years Turnbull’s junior. Morrison enrolled in 1986, Patrick states, at the “utilitarian University of New South Wales” in a degree studying applied economic geography. Unlike Turnbull, in the seventies at Sydney, one can’t imagine anyone at the Kensington campus in the eighties predicting Morrison would end up in the Lodge. Morrison had nothing like the glittering career Turnbull had prior to entering Parliament. However, Morrison had one great advantage, as a former NSW State Director of the Liberal Party, he knew the party, its factions and its personalities intimately.

 Morrison success “was an affront to Turnbull’s identity”.

Turnbull’s second mistake was not to make peace with the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. Dispensing with the services of Abbott, Kevin Andrews and Eric Abetz , leaving them to roam idly and widely on the backbench to plot for the return of the ancien regime was a gross strategic and tactical error. Turnbull’s visceral antipathy to the conservatives stemmed from his loss to the same forces in the Republic referendum in 1999. However, that mob had a lot more votes in the Liberal federal party room than a phalanx of ABC and Fairfax journalists.

Once having lost the office of Prime Minister, Turnbull did not gently go into the night. Perhaps because of the events post 2018 Patrick’s book should have had the more apt title, to continue the Dylan Thomas theme, Rage against the Dying of the Light. Thereafter, Turnbull was only too pleased to make negative public commentary against the major players in the change of leadership to Morrison, including Mathias Cormann, Christian Porter, Alan Tudge, Peter Dutton and Angus Taylor but the major target was always Morrison.

This excellent book is a great chronicle of that time in Australian political history. I am particularly indebted to be reminded of one of the greatest understatements in recent memory, dealing with what film producer Joanne Dyer said of Christian Porter. She retold the story that she knew Porter from university debating and in the 1980s they had slept together. Dyer described the encounter as “entirely inconsequential and statistically insignificant”.  A verbal tour de force, Dyer must have been a formidable debater.