The battle for Turnbull’s soul

You can call parliament a lot of things, many of them unpublishable. One of the publishable ones is “theatre”.

Parliament is not so much a forum for political leaders to argue their cases, or act in the interests of the nation, so much as it is a space in which they can perform those arguments and actions to an equally performative audience of their colleagues, who, playing their role in the show, laugh at jokes they don’t find funny and yell “Shame!” at decisions they don’t find all that shameful.

It’s no accident that “show” is the Canberra slang for political party, or sometimes for Australian politics in general.

There are days when this is more obvious. At the simplest level, parliament was recalled early today. But what actually happened was that the governor-general, as protocol demands, showed up in the parliament to deliver a speech, written by the government, laying out the PM’s agenda for the next few weeks and the government’s reasons for pursuing it.

A sample:

My government also regards these [industrial relations] measures as crucial to its economic plan for promoting jobs and growth, and managing the transition of our economy from one reliant on the mining construction boom to a more diversified economy.

It’s a fairly bizarre event, when you stop to think about it, normalised as so many things are by repetition: one person, vaguely pretending to be another person, speaking almost as though he or she were that other person and shared that person’s desires for the period ahead.

In other words: theatre.

Today was always going to belong to Malcolm Turnbull, reminding everyone of his dramatic decision to recall parliament and to hold an early budget, which in turn reminds an increasingly sceptical electorate that he can make decisions. The sheer rareness of the pomp meant that it was effective.

Turnbull really needed the theatre to be effective, too. Having won a victory with his initial decision, he has been losing the PR battle since. He needed to look like he genuinely cared about getting these industrial relations bills, the justifications for his double dissolution election, passed. Instead, crossbenchers have accused him of not negotiating sincerely with them. The sense that he wants and needs to have an election has come to dominate.

This is a large part of why the truckies legislation has become such a prominent part of the political battle in the past week. It gives faces and stories to a battle over unions that was beginning to seem like a political abstraction.

Labor knows how important this theatre is to Turnbull, and they threw everything at it today.

Labor’s deputy leader in the senate, Stephen Conroy, bucketed the governor-general, saying a strong GG would never have agreed to the PM’s request to bring back parliament.

What we’ve had today is the ghost of 1975 revisited upon us; the long, dead arm of Sir John Kerr crawling out of his grave to participate in a travesty of democracy in this country.

It was a huge overreach, and will annoy some voters with its sense of bad manners. But it was a strong theatrical choice, dragging the attention of the media and the electorate back to where Labor wants it: that this is not a bold choice by the PM but a tricky one, one that marks him out as just another politician. The GG was just collateral damage.

This battle, over the right to define the soul of Malcolm Turnbull, is what underlies all of the ceremony this week. Is Turnbull a visionary, equipped with a keen political instinct, or just a conman with no real beliefs, using legislation he doesn’t care about to deliver a political outcome he cares about deeply? When Labor frontbencher Tony Burke says that the PM is fighting for Abbott government bills, it may sound like a different message to that being argued by Conroy, but it’s just a variation on the same theme.

The battle to define Turnbull is happening on multiple fronts. In question time the opposition attacked the government over its reluctance to hold a Royal Commission into banks. Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce, who is already proving his worth in his new spot, argued that Labor MPs didn’t understand business because they’d never been in business. A clear and effective attack that uses Turnbull’s experience as a positive. Labor’s Jim Chalmers then asked a question with the precise opposite intent, reminding everyone of Turnbull’s history as a banker.

The beauty and sadness of theatre lies in its transience. Today’s performances will vanish quickly. Newspapers, chip wrappers and all that. But the battle to define Turnbull is a bigger one, and its outcome will play a role in determining the shape of politics for years to come.

Today’s links

• Poll round-up: Fairfax-Ipsos here. Their personality characteristics breakdown here. Newspoll here [paywall]. Phillip Hudson here [paywall]. Michael Gordon here. Peter Hartcher here. Phil Coorey here [paywall]. The polls in one place here.
• Bronwyn Bishop is gone.
• A storm in a teacup over a handshake. Very amusing video though.
• Brazil’s president is being impeached.
• Telstra, in a pretty stunning backflip on a backflip (though a welcome one), has decided it will actively support same-sex marriage.
• If you haven’t seen Justin Trudeau, the Canadian PM, explain quantum computing yet, do.
• The student who was allegedly kicked off a plane for speaking Arabic. Yep.
• A couple of pieces with Michaelia Cash at their centre: Michelle Grattan’s piece here, and the Herald’s piece from today here. 
• Johnny Depp makes another film, this one for Canberra.