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Malcolm Turnbull prepares his final throw of the dice

Jack Waterford

Readers of Seutonius, or of Goscinny and Uderzo (creators of the Astérix comics), will remember the words "Alea iacta est", uttered by Julius Caesar as he crossed the bridge over the Rubicon from Gaul into Italy. The phrase means "the die is cast": Caesar has defied the explicit orders of the Roman Senate that he stay in Gaul. In any event, he should have surrendered control of his armies and left them in Gaul, if he had wanted to return home.

By crossing the river and defying the Senate, Caesar consciously passed a point of no return and became an outlaw and enemy of the state. He was gambling all, and on a long chance. Ahead lay the great civil wars with Pompey, after which, at least pending his assassination, he was master and effectively king of all the lands subject to Rome's rule.

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PM lashes out at SA Premier

Malcolm Turnbull has criticised Jay Weatherill over his energy plan, a day after the live public spat between the SA Premier and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg.

Malcolm Turnbull may have crossed his Rubicon this week. He is not as well armed as was Caesar but is, perhaps, as desperate.

He cannot carry on as he has been, whether since he was chosen by his colleagues as head of his party about 18 months ago or, by the skin of his teeth, the electorate nine months ago. He has been a dud prime minister, virtually devoid of public achievement. He has been a prisoner of his party's conservatives, simply unable to follow his own instincts or to be himself. The public once respected and admired him; they feel only contempt for the pallid and indecisive substitute for a leader. His colleagues are in despair: there is no obvious successor and, probably, no one who could do better, but the path Turnbull has been treading until now leads to a cliff, and they, and Turnbull, know it.

Turnbull needs to break his bonds and burst out a new man; a great, confident, self-assured national statesman. Not someone beholden to his party, his political enemies to his right, or to the nervous nellies who constantly try to hold him back. Becoming this involves risks – most probably an early election, quite possibly one he goes into with the commentators sure he will lose. Most likely he understands perfectly that, if he takes that gamble, he will probably lose. By now, he may well have calculated that (as Zapata said) it is better to die on your feet than to live a lifetime on your knees.

The Turnbull government as we have known it is going nowhere. Nor is Turnbull, as he has been so far. He lacks authority, and increasingly (largely because he will not be the Turnbull that half the electorate wanted and expected) he lacks legitimacy. Voters once thought, if by a narrow margin, that he offered more promise of economic growth and job creation than Bill Shorten. But while there is continuing respect for Turnbull as a businessman, there is increasingly less respect for his capacity to steer the economy, and even less for the competence of his Treasurer, Scott Morrison.

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Increasingly, however, voters seem to be indicating they have no real reason to fear Shorten or his economic team, nor a Shorten government's restrained social agenda. It is not merely the opinion polls that emphasise how little voters are impressed. And if most, but not all, of the Liberal Party's conservative wing are still relatively disciplined about openly criticising their leader, the general dismay in the party about its fortunes is manifest, and Turnbull knows it. That there is open discussion about whether Peter Dutton – a man who makes George Brandis seem charismatic – could be prime minister underlines the poor morale, foreboding and despair.

Just as importantly, Turnbull has been unable to make his luck and, at least until now, unable to dominate the news agenda, policy agenda or political agenda. Government just bumbles along, usually from one self-inflicted debacle to another. The activities, and antics, of Donald Trump dominate the headlines and, while they may excite a good deal of uncertainty, little that Turnbull has done, or can do, has reassured the public that only he can manage Australian-American relations. Domestically, any sense that Turnbull is in control of events is ruined by the fecklessness of the Senate, incompetence or cupidity with the administration of Centrelink, the nation's broadband system, defence policy in South Australia and the walking, talking circus that is Barnaby Joyce in action.

Meanwhile, Australians seemed doomed to repeat the horrible days of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. Government would begin the week by announcing a new policy, one apparently with some substance, before evidence soon emerges of it not having been thought through or run past even the obvious interests. With Gillard, it sometimes involved good policy brought forward in desperate attempts to seize the agenda, then horribly repackaged as a public relations confection and rushed into the public arena. With Abbott, it was often little more than a thought bubble, devised as a distraction from his latest ad hoc fumble or ideological flourish. Embarrassingly, the wheels would be falling off even by the end of day one, as soon as it became clear that the proposal, whatever it was, had not been through the cabinet or caucus process, that its cost calculations were devoid of bureaucratic pedigree, that even elementary and predictable objections and problems had not been considered, and that the prime minister, and colleagues gathered for the publicity launch, had not even rehearsed their lines. By week's end, the proposal would be dead and buried, the government desperate for some new grand announcement.

Some with slightly longer memories might recall an earlier folly, involving John Howard and Turnbull, over national water policies and the Murray-Darling rivers. This was a policy, devised largely out of Turnbull's office, deliberately concealed from the Treasury. Turnbull defiantly said this was because Treasury did not understand water policy.

Paul Keating used to say, though he was not the author of the phrase, that good policy made for good politics. It's often forgotten over a decade in which so much of politics, and policy, has been reduced to slogans, and simplistic but symbolic gestures, on both sides of politics. Periodically, politicians on both sides declare that we need a mature "national conversation" on some problem of public policy. Almost invariably, the cheap shots, partisan gambits and wedges are there immediately, with the other side quickly realising there is no percentage in playing the game, in arguing the priorities on the other's terms, or being set up for some fairly obvious ambush. Never trust a politician with her, or his, eye to the heavens.

Policy debate, generally, is now out in public, outside Parliament, or within the parties, in secret meetings so that no sign of dissent is obvious. Only rarely in modern Australian politics is policy refined by debate in Parliament or parliamentary committees; only rarely, other than rhetorically, do politicians on one side seriously address the other's arguments and presentations.

Some Liberal Party members would rather lose government, or Turnbull, than have a climate-change policy.

Turnbull is giving signs that he wants to change the game. He has been working for months on the idea that Australians yearn for energy security, and for affordable power bills. There are many pieces in the jigsaw, involving various forms of electricity generation, from coal and gas-fired power, hydro-electric power, and the panoply of renewables, including wind and solar power. In recent days, technological advance and publicity for the problems of South Australia have also brought the potential of batteries to the fore.

At the moment, one sees the foreground rather than the grand picture. Turnbull, and his Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg, are trying to be agile, innovative and flexible in how they place the jigsaw pieces on the table. The end position is a claim – rather difficult to advance at the moment – that the government has a comprehensive strategy for managing Australia's energy needs, and for dealing with complex issues of supply and demand over the decades ahead.

It is a vital – indeed the principal – part of the argument that Labor has no such policy, and that what it does have is a mishmash of fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the garden stuff, hopelessly ideological and misconnected to climate-change strategies, and likely to lead to a situation where Australians will soon be caught by blackouts, brownouts or outages. One should only consider South Australia (if not NSW, which has had its own outages).

By contrast, Turnbull, the businessman prime minister, has sized up the problems, thought matters through, and is prepared to make the bold decisions that will promote future Australian growth and jobs.

Having the big picture in mind allows room for nation-building announcements on the fly, such as this week's announcement of a feasibility study into the possibility of having an examination into whether we should have an inquiry about the practicability, viability and reasonableness of increasing the capacity of the Snowy Mountains hydro-electrical scheme.

The fanfare could have caused some people to think the government was committing a magically discovered $2 billion into a 50 per cent increase in national electrical capacity. All that has been committed is about $500,000 for a study.

The idea, or thought bubble, had been so well-advanced that NSW and Victoria, legal if not moral co-owners of the hydro-electric scheme, were informed of it only the day before it was announced. It is unclear that it has gone through cabinet or departmental coordination processes.

Turnbull put on his sage businessman's face and pronounced his thought bubble an excellent business proposition, one in which the Commonwealth would invest to the max if NSW and Victoria declined to take part. It should not surprise if NSW and Victoria did not. Their "shares" in the authority were 2001 gifts from the Commonwealth, although the Commonwealth retained for itself the value of the share that the ACT should have been entitled on the basis of consumption. NSW and Victoria have never contributed a cent to the cost of the Snowy scheme (not even for the water flowing into irrigation as a casual bonus); all they have paid is a cost-plus share of the price of generation. Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and the two territories were screwed by a rotten Howard-era deal. The public was nearly additionally screwed by an attempt by the owners, just over a decade ago, to privatise their holdings. That was, mercifully, frustrated by loud popular opposition in 2006. The national committee of audit, in 2014, recommended that the Commonwealth renew efforts to privatise the authority, but the political tide may now be out on privatisation, as recent elections in West Australia and Queensland (though not NSW) seem to confirm. Certainly, it forms no part of Turnbull's grand and visionary nation-building scheme, evoking white man's pride in perhaps the most noticeable and popular socialistic achievement of postwar reconstruction.

We saw other evidences of the grand vision during the week. It is clear that the government's bells-and-whistles secretariat is developing a vast string of announcibles. We saw Turnbull proclaim a crisis of domestic supply and demand, then his statesmanlike solution to the crisis, mid-week, when he told gas producers to deliver a secure domestic supply of gas, or else.

We saw him reserve his options on South Australian battery schemes and avoid anything in the way of commitment to any (very unlikely) re-investment, public or private, in coal-fired power plants. He and Frydenberg neatly avoided mentioning a price for carbon emissions, the big mistake Frydenberg made late last year when he accidentally trod on the fingers of some of the sleeping members of the party's deplorables wing. Inexorably, however, Turnbull is heading in that practical direction, if, perhaps this time, with some capacity to strand opponents in his own party. Some of these would rather lose government, or Turnbull, than have a climate-change policy. But if they lose this Prime Minister over it, they might immediately lose government to a by-election caused by Turnbull's resignation.

Turnbull is not taunting enemies in his own party. Indeed, the ferocity with which he is playing partisan politics on energy, particularly against South Australia and Victoria, as well as the adept way he has raised the spectre of blackouts, rationed gas supplies and national grids in gridlock because of windless or cloudy days, suggests a new lease of life. Thespian life, anyway. Not since Andrew Peacock has one seen such pouting and such angry faces.

The cynic might note that the secretary of his department is Martin Parkinson, formerly of the Treasury but also, under Labor, head of the Climate Change Department, which, under Penny Wong, lost the plot on the politics and policy of confronting the cheapest moral challenge of our time. Parkinson certainly commands the bureaucratic intellectual resources to put shape and substance into energy policy, assuming Turnbull is fair dinkum.

But fair dinkum or not, there is so far little evidence of serious and coordinated policy development or strategy. What we are seeing so far is tactics without evident strategy, flimflam not substance. Perhaps, however, there is dry powder in reserve.

What, in theory, Turnbull needs is for Labor, at state or federal level, to make a mistake on energy, or power prices so high he can proclaim some form of political emergency, worthy of a call on the people. Perhaps with yet another double-dissolution election, if he has the taste for yet another disastrous bet on his political judgment. (And perhaps with a punt on the political pliability of Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove, a bet I would never be prepared to make.)

Anyone making such calculations would expect disaster for Turnbull and the government. But the slim hope might be the best he has. It could well be the vehicle for a proud, if very politically unsuccessful, statesman, to exit with a degree of dignity and perhaps honour. If assassinated by his own party, then perhaps with the grudging recognition and honour he received after his adventure as opposition leader. If by an election, then after some opportunity to be, finally, Malcolm Turnbull. On his feet, not his knees, for a last throw of the dice.

Jack Waterford is a former Canberra Times editor.