Good advice Turnbull will not take
Malcolm Turnbull has every right to hate me, after the (accurate) criticism I have given.
But his refusal to go on my show damages him not because I am a media heavy who will take revenge. It damages him because of the truth it reveals: that Turnbull is intensely uncomfortable talking to a conservative and has nothing to tell him.
MALCOLM Turnbull — and even more the “dead men (non-gender specific) walking” sitting on the backbenches behind him — has one last chance.
To seize it he must personally, and I do mean personally, ring Andrew Bolt of this paper today to ask for a full hour of his Sky News program later this week, to both go one on one, head — no holds barred — to-head, and to lay out a comprehensive, cohesive, freedom-focused policy and political agenda.
For the last year since he knocked off Tony Abbott, Turnbull has been “hiding under his desk” so far as Bolt is concerned. He’s both outright refused and even more mindlessly failed to seek to go on his program...
He could start such a Bolt appearance with actually welcoming Trump’s victory — and perhaps even more, welcoming the defeat of the truly deplorable Hillary Clinton. This was not just a victory for what is purportedly his side of politics, but what should be — granted, in the broad — market-based policies that he purports to believe in.
Instead, as Bolt noted last week, Turnbull gave a hysterical speech as if the election result were tantamount to the outbreak of global conflict; almost literally urging Australians not to panic...
In such a Bolt appearance Turnbull should be very specific about a freedom agenda. For example, the government would demonstrate both its bona fides and its understanding by immediately moving to repeal the anti-free speech Section 18C in full, along with the then superfluous 18D.
For good measure he could detail precisely why he and his government not only had no confidence in Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs but that she had rendered herself unfit to continue in that position...
Turnbull should tell Bolt the government will reverse its ratification of the Paris climate agreement; that like India, China and Trump’s US, the government will give Australian consumers the cheap, plentiful and reliable power that only coal can provide.
ON the economic policy front, he would make it clear that it was the full company tax cut — for big as well as small companies — and accelerated to a much shorter, perhaps 4-5 year time frame, or nothing.
The government would abandon its ill-thought-through attack on superannuation; it would move immediately with the legislation to reinstate the anti-union thuggery building commission; and again, longer term, move to develop a broader market-based industrial relations system...
I could go on at considerable length — as indeed could a true leader of a Coalition government, such that even, un-Turnbull-like crisply spoken, the full hour would be insufficient to cover all the necessary policy and political territory.
But I won’t, for just maybe you might see my drift: this is all pure, unadulterated fantasy. There is no way on God’s — and carbon dioxide’s — Green Gaia that Turnbull would do any of this...
So I’ll leave it more general: Turnbull’s non appearance on Bolt will confirm he needs to go and go quickly. Apart from anything, could anyone seriously countenance another Turnbull election campaign wasteland?