Have you wondered what high office might taste like? The power, the profile, the perks? Thanks to Barnaby Joyce, we can get a strong sense of its flavour.
Last Sunday, the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister had dinner together, the two most powerful elected officials in the land, to discuss the parliamentary fortnight ahead.
![Illustration: John Shakespeare](/web/20170327004005im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/v/6/0/n/y/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gv60bp.png/1490501292040.jpg)
"We have frank discussions, there's warmth in the relationship," says Joyce. "Malcolm can level with me. He can say, 'This is my shit sandwich'."
"And I can say, 'I don't agree with that, but if I was doing it, this is what I would do. And he does the same for me."
According to this insight, it seems that these jobs demand a fairly steady diet of crap ciabatta. But it must be a consolation that the men at the top can share personal tips on how best to enjoy them.
Turnbull has munched his way through a number of them since taking the prime ministership. Most have been prepared for him by Tony Abbott.
In order to seize the leadership, he had to agree to preserve Abbott's policies on climate change and same sex marriage. They were distasteful to Turnbull but he swallowed them.
This week he seemed to eat another one made according to a Tony Abbott recipe. It was Turnbull's decision to change the Racial Discrimination Act, and section 18C in particular.
It was unfinished business that Abbott bequeathed him. According to the Labor Party and some of the conservative Liberals, it's something Turnbull embraced only because Abbott and the right-wing agitators forced him to. But is this true?
We know Barnaby Joyce didn't want to touch this particular dish. The Nationals leader doesn't love the existing act – it tries to keep people "wrapped in cotton wool", as he put it this week. "I don't want to have to go to court because I've had a go at you."
Barnaby just thought it was the wrong matter to pursue at the wrong time, a distraction for the government and a gift for Labor. As he put it in an interview with Fairfax Media this week: "It is definitely not the issue people are talking about in the beer garden on Friday night or at the counters of banks, or to be quite frank, in the big office blocks when they finish work on Friday night.
"They are not rolling down from floor 15 to have a beer and talk about 18C, or coming in from the farms and talking about it. And when they finish at the metalworking shops they're not saying, 'Wayne, come and have a beer and let's talk about 18C'."
People were worried about electricity price and supply, worried, above all, over whether they'd have a job, he said.
Even after the cabinet decision to pursue the change, the deputy PM couldn't contain his frustration. Crashing through the principle of cabinet solidarity, Joyce told us that Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act "lives in the extremities of the bell curve", meaning at the very fringe of the population distribution.
"Where do you meet those people? At party meetings," he said, and "they come into your office to rant and rave about it, all four of them. So you meet them in your office, you meet them at party meetings, and then you think the whole world thinks like that and they don't."
But Turnbull has a different view. This is quite an interesting divergence between the PM and his deputy. Tony Abbott once described Joyce as "the best retail politician in Australia", and he might be right about that.
Turnbull, however, set retail politics aside because just now he's operating at the wholesale level. He's trying to demonstrate that he's not a moderate who has to keep appeasing the right wing of his party, but that he can lead the moderates and the conservatives.
He's trying to show he can be a better leader for the conservatives than Abbott was or could be. Abbott as prime minister, after all, wanted to change the Racial Discrimination Act but bungled the process and lost his nerve.
In recent months Abbott has said he regretted that failure. Turnbull is trying to show that he can deliver on a conservative agenda where Abbott could not. He's seeking to make Abbott a total irrelevancy, while winning the support and loyalty of his party's conservatives in the process.
In the event, Turnbull took the initiative to bring the matter back to his cabinet and find a solution. Even under the Abbott prime ministership, Turnbull had not argued for retaining the existing wording of 18C – that makes it unlawful to offend, insult or humiliate people on racial grounds. He was always prepared to rework the wording to make the test more objective, to prevent vilification and not just hurt feelings.
But the proposed change Attorney-General George Brandis brought to the Abbott cabinet went too far – it would have abolished 18C altogether.
By seeking to change the act now, Turnbull will appeal to some of the party's base – Barnaby's "all four of them". But it will not win the government a single vote at the centre of the electorate. Quite the contrary, it's opposed by every major ethnic lobby in the country and will harm the government's standing in the multi-ethnic marginal seats it needs to hold and win.
But, with two years or more to the next election, Turnbull is not worrying about the retail vote. Trying to rule for both broad churches within the Liberal Party, he's pursuing an ecumenical approach to be leader for all sections of his party.
He has another opportunity to do this. Although he's been slow to seize it, the Fair Work Commission decision to cut some Sunday penalty rates is an issue that can unite his party's moderate and conservative streams.
Since John Howard lost power partly over a workplace reform plan, the Liberals have been too traumatised to return to the fight – any fight – over industrial relations. After a decade, this is starting to really rankle with many Liberal MPs and senators and their supporters.
Turnbull aims to be the leader that brings the Liberals back into their traditional character, back onto their favourite battleground, fighting the union movement.
He is pairing the Sunday penalty rates decision with a parallel program to prosecute unions for taking payments from corporations in conflict with their obligations to their members. Again, this is not likely to win a lot of votes at the centre of the electorate. But it gives all of his party a powerful unifying cause.
At this exact moment, the ACTU has helpfully supplied a radical new leader, Sally "it's OK to break the law" McManus. She's the union leader right out of the conservatives' central casting.
As time goes on, Turnbull's agenda is more his own and less Abbott's. The proposed company tax cuts that will be decided by the Parliament next week, the childcare package that passed the Parliament this week, the attempted rescue of the national electricity market, are all Turnbull agenda items.
Turnbull's aim is to be recognised as the unifying leader of the Liberals' two traditions, not a committed member of one faction grudgingly appeasing the demands of the other.
That is his formula for keeping his job and for depriving Abbott of any lingering relevance. And ultimately allowing him to feed mere morsels to the man most committed to his destruction.
Peter Hartcher is political editor.
'A note from the editor' – www.smh.com.au/editornote
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