by Robert Manne
Later, he sends me the text of the Sir Robert Menzies Lecture he delivered shortly before the conservative rebellion that robbed him of his leadership. He explains this is the clearest exposition of his philosophy. In the lecture, Turnbull embraces the rhetoric Menzies deployed against Chifley during the historically decisive 1949 election campaign. “Are we for the Socialist State, with its subordination of the individual to universal officialdom of government … or are we for the ancient British faith that governments are the servants of the people?” He also quotes from Menzies’ famous 1942 “forgotten people” radio broadcast. “Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who will have become boneless wonders? Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles.” It is clear from the speech that Turnbull favours a muscular, individual enterprise form of liberalism. Like Margaret Thatcher, whom he quotes, he favours “strong” but not “big” government. Like most contemporary economic liberals, he is suspicious of the growth of the welfare state.
Turnbull roundly condemns Kevin Rudd’s post–global financial crisis reminder about the pivotal role of government action at this time of upheaval, and in defence of the social-democratic tradition. Rather implausibly, Turnbull blames “big government” – the home mortgage practices of the state-owned companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – and not “market fundamentalism” for the implosion of the US financial sector.
When I put it to him that politicians with an interest in ideas join the Liberal Party for the overarching value of freedom but those who join the Labor Party have a greater interest in the balancing virtue of equality, Turnbull disagrees. Like most Australians, he regards himself as a natural egalitarian. Turnbull has certainly kept a keen eye on the recent growth of inequality, especially in the United States, and accepts that growing inequality is an issue governments need to be concerned with. From the examples he gives, however, it soon becomes clear that the kind of equality he is most attracted to is not so much greater equality of outcome or even opportunity but what the historian John Hirst has called the typical form of Australian egalitarianism, the “equality of manners”. Turnbull tells me he was shocked by the unselfconscious acceptance of social hierarchy he encountered as a student at Oxford. His ideal community, rather, is the Australian surf club, where wealthy bankers rub shoulders with factory workers on equal terms.
In all these ways, then, Turnbull reveals himself to be not a secret Laborite or serendipitous Liberal but a true-believing member of the non–Labor Party tradition founded by the fusion of the George Reid free-traders and the Alfred Deakin protectionists in the first decade of the twentieth century. I have learned that some time after he lost the Liberal Party leadership, very senior Labor Party people thought of asking Turnbull to defect with the prospect of becoming Labor leader. The idea strikes me as rather bizarre. If Labor is not social democratic it is nothing. Malcolm Turnbull is not a social democrat. He is a classical liberal.
Yet if Turnbull clearly belongs within the Liberal Party, equally clearly it is to its small-l liberal wing. All members of the Liberal Party genuinely believe, with different degrees of purism, in what some would call economic freedom and others neo-liberalism. (Paradoxically, probably the least purist are those conservative members of the party, like Tony Abbott, Kevin Andrews and Eric Abetz – known inside Turnbull’s office, as I discovered, as “the DLP” – whose political ancestry can be traced back to B.A. Santamaria and the tradition of Roman Catholic social action.) Fewer contemporary members of the Liberal Party, however, believe in social freedom or civil libertarianism. Malcolm Turnbull, who does, is the most important representative of this now greatly weakened tradition within the party.
Examples abound. Before Abbott closed the discussion down, Turnbull was one of the most conspicuous advocates of a conscience vote on gay marriage, which he favours. To advance the cause, he conducted a careful survey of the members of his Wentworth electorate, where opinion was strongly in support. Similarly, Turnbull proved to be almost the only federal politician who powerfully protested a police raid – sanctioned by the New South Wales premier, Morris Iemma, and cheered on by the prime minister, Kevin Rudd – on the gallery where Bill Henson’s photograph of a nude, pubescent girl was displayed. Though Turnbull owns artwork by Henson, his protest concerned the rule of law. Henson’s photograph might have been “edgy” (perhaps too weak a word) but the chance of a prosecution was non-existent.
There is an even more striking instance of Turnbull’s civil libertarianism. When Julia Gillard claimed that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks had broken Australian law by publishing 250,000 US State Department cables, of all parliamentarians it was Malcolm Turnbull, in a speech at the Law School of the University of Sydney, who most persuasively chastised her. As a young man, Turnbull had been involved in the Spycatcher case, where the British government sought to prevent the memoir of a former MI5 agent being published in Australia. As he pointed out, in this case the High Court had ruled that it had no warrant “to protect the intelligence secrets” of even a friendly foreign government. But Turnbull went further. Assange had merely done what journalists do. If he had committed a crime, why was that not also true of the editors of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age? Even more seriously, Assange had been at least indirectly threatened with assassination by no less a figure than former American vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, with her call to treat him like a member of al-Qaeda. Gillard had remained silent. Turnbull was appalled: “When an Australian citizen is threatened in this way, an Australian prime minister should respond.”
Malcolm Turnbull is, then, not merely the most prominent civil libertarian in the contemporary Liberal Party, the heir to what one might call the Alan Missen tradition. On a string of current social freedom or civil liberties issues he has been well to the left of Labor premiers and prime ministers.
There is, however, much more to the idea that Malcolm Turnbull is the heir to the Deakinite tradition of the Liberal Party than his civil libertarianism. Under the prime ministership of John Howard, attitudes to questions concerning ethnicity and race – the meaning of the dispossession of the Indigenous population, the idea of multiculturalism, assumptions about the loyalty to Australia of citizens of Muslim faith or ancestry – were transformed inside the Liberal Party and therefore, more generally, within the political culture. Howard famously refused to offer an apology to the Stolen Generations and, at least until the eleventh hour, repudiated the symbolic dimension of the movement for Indigenous reconciliation. He argued that multiculturalism threatened to turn Australia into a nation of tribes. His deputy, Peter Costello, thought multiculturalism was “mushy”. On many occasions Howard, Costello and other senior ministers implied that Muslims’ loyalty to Australia was an open question and that if Muslim citizens did not wish to obey our laws they should pack their bags and leave.
Almost all members of the Liberal Party have been influenced to some extent by the changing mood of the party, and the country, during the Howard years. Almost miraculously, Malcolm Turnbull seems entirely unaffected.
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Paul Keating was the prime minister deemed most responsible by Liberals for imposing the yoke of political correctness on the shoulders of the Australian people. In our conversation, it becomes clear that on questions connected to race and ethnicity – and indeed not only such questions – Malcolm Turnbull is a Keating admirer. In the history of Australia’s belated recognition of the injustice done to Indigenous people, a radical break came with the speech Keating delivered on 10 December 1992 at Redfern. I ask Turnbull whether he thinks Keating’s Redfern speech was a significant moment in our history. “I think he did very, very well with that. Absolutely.” What, then, does Turnbull make of John Howard’s refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations? “He painted himself into a semantic corner, in fact, where he ended up passing a motion which expressed great regret but wasn’t prepared to use the word sorry. You’d have to be a rabbinical scholar of the highest rank to be able to tell me what
was the difference, saying ‘I have very great regret’ and ‘I’m sorry’.” (Although not a rabbinical scholar even of the lowest rank, I politely disagreed.)
Turnbull accepts in principle the proposed referendum on Indigenous recognition in the constitution. But he is concerned that the mood of the country has altered since the Redfern speech and that, as a consequence, if the referendum fails, it would do great harm to the cause of reconciliation. “So it should not be put up.”
Though still a staunch republican, clearly Turnbull was badly burned by the failure of the 1999 republic referendum. He now believes that referendums for substantial change need more than bipartisan support. They succeed only where, as in the 1967 Indigenous referendum, there is effectively no opposition at all. Turnbull tells me he was far more angered by the republicans agitating for direct presidential election than by the constitutional monarchists. “I think some of them were quite dishonest … Peter Reith was completely cynical. I said to him at the time: ‘You are totally shameless.’ And he said, ‘Of course I’m shameless, I’m a politician.’” Turnbull believes the republic issue should return to the centre of the political stage following the death of the present queen. He repeats his standard line: in Australia there are now more Elizabethans than monarchists.
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At no moment in our conversation does Turnbull seem more animated than in our discussion of multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is more than the recognition of Australia’s great ethnic diversity or the success of the post-war migration program. It involves a celebration of the ways in which Australia has been enriched by the fact that citizens of non–British or Irish ancestry do not have to shed older ethnic identities and assimilate to become fully Australian. During the Howard years, the celebratory aspects of multiculturalism were repudiated. Under Rudd and Gillard they have not revived. But there can hardly be a member of the federal parliament who is a greater enthusiast for multiculturalism in its celebratory dimension than Malcolm Turnbull. Even as a university student, in the dying days of the assimilation era, he was dismayed to find that many of his fellow students of Greek heritage did not know any Greek because they had been discouraged from learning the language of their parents. And presently, as the member for Wentworth in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, he is delighted that non-Jews celebrate the festival of Hanukkah and non-Chinese the coming of the Chinese New Year. What kind of madness is it to think that Australia is diminished or threatened as a result? Turnbull has an interest in the history of the once-great multicultural centres of Islamic civilisation: Constantinople, Smyrna, Alexandria. “Are the great cities of the Middle East or the Levant stronger or poorer for becoming monocultural?” For Turnbull that question answers itself. He entirely disagrees with historian Geoffrey Blainey’s claim, still embraced by John Howard, that multiculturalism poses a threat to national integrity by turning Australia into “a nation of tribes”. This is a fantasy, a “straw man”. Nor does Turnbull believe that multiculturalism has “gone too far in accommodating Muslim minorities”, as John Howard told the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank, in 2010. His only misgiving about multiculturalism is when its proponents suggest to people like him that they should think of themselves not as Australians but as “Anglo-Celts”. I ask him whether he believes there is a danger of Australia becoming a nation of tribes, or what he calls a “hyphenated” or “caravan” culture. Very emphatically, he assures me he does not. We have the balance right.
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This leads to a puzzle about Turnbull. Malcolm Fraser, a patriarch of the Liberal Party, has watched with increasing disillusionment under John Howard and Howard’s true heir, Tony Abbott, the gradual and inexorable shift of the party to the right on the questions of Indigenous reconciliation, multiculturalism, Muslim immigration and asylum-seeker policy. Because of this shift in social values, Fraser has abandoned his membership of the Liberal Party. He now characterises the politics of its present leader as “dangerous”. He regards Malcolm Turnbull as the most prominent true liberal in the party and his defeat at the hands of the party’s conservatives as a bitter blow. In turn, Fraser’s distaste for the direction in which Howard and Abbott have led the Liberal Party is fully reciprocated by its ideologically inclined members. The economic liberals describe the period of the Fraser government in almost biblical language as “seven wasted years”. The social conservatives regard his contemporary criticisms of Howard and Abbott on questions of human rights, ethnicity, religion and race as treachery and an old man’s pathetic desire to find favour and forgiveness from the Left.
What does Turnbull think of Fraser? Although Turnbull is an economic liberal, he summarily dismisses the “seven wasted years” description as unfair. Fraser was elected four years before Thatcher and five before Reagan. “I think a lot of the criticism of Fraser is very anachronistic. You’re criticising him for not doing in the ’70s what it became fashionable to do a decade later.” Turnbull is even less sympathetic to the dismissal of Fraser among the party’s social conservatives. He thinks Fraser was fundamental to the success of multiculturalism and praises his work in the area of Indigenous reform. He tells me he regards it as a great mistake of the contemporary Liberal Party not to celebrate Fraser. When I later let Turnbull know that I intend to argue that he is the true heir and successor to the tradition within the Liberal Party that began with Alfred Deakin and ended with Malcolm Fraser, he makes it clear that he would be very flattered to be compared with Deakin, and indeed with Fraser.
But the puzzle remains. Howard despises Fraser. Fraser despises Howard. They represent the alternative social trajectories of the Liberal Party. Yet Turnbull seems genuinely to admire them both. He regards Fraser as a great “social progressive” and believes the Howard government was, on balance, “very, very good”. To me this is like a commentator on the Iraq invasion praising the contributions of both John Pilger and Christopher Hitchens.
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There is an illuminating moment during our discussion of Julia Gillard. When I raise her admission that she was not really interested in foreign affairs, Turnbull counters that she must have been dissembling. “It couldn’t possibly be true … The woman’s a confection … To say that you’d rather be sitting around in a children’s kindergarten than worrying about foreign affairs when you’re Prime Minister of Australia … The idea is to look after the national interest.” His remark makes one thing transparent. Unlike Gillard and Abbott, the shadow minister for communications is interested in international relations and Australia’s place in the wider world. And not merely interested: concerning such questions he is a man who is indifferent to contemporary Australian mainstream orthodoxy and determined to think about the new strategic landscape for himself.
Turnbull has, in a previous speech, mocked those who go to Washington “doe-eyed”. He confirms to me he was referring on that occasion to Gillard, who in 2011 flattered Congress with the thought that Americans “can do anything”. “If you go to Washington and gush and goo over Americans, they say, ‘Well of course, we’re the imperial power … Yes, absolutely, we’re fabulous’ … But there is no point in imagining that you’re going to earn any respect by just simply being there, sycophantic.”
Like all potential Australian prime ministers, Turnbull is a friend of the United States and a supporter of the alliance. Yet his view of contemporary America is far from gushing. Turnbull thinks American politics is becoming “profoundly dysfunctional”. Despite the “staggering” budget deficit and public debt, “what’s depressing about the debate in America is that so much of it is actually just innumerate”. Turnbull is particularly scathing about the recent trajectory of the Republican Party and the influence of the Tea Party, which he describes as “extreme”, “reactionary” and “radical”. He says the consensual Republican idea that the budgetary situation can be improved by cutting the taxes of the wealthy is “just bizarre”. He thinks that American voluntary voting encourages Republican extremism and the search for “hot-button iss
ues” to bring out the voters, like abortion or guns or gay marriage or Obama as a secret Muslim. He is concerned about the fragmentation of opinion and collapse of the rational centre. A few decades ago, American citizens across the political spectrum listened nightly to sober and balanced mainstream news anchors like Walter Cronkite. Today, in the era of cable, liberals take their opinions from MSNBC and conservatives from Fox News. Turnball has spoken to politically experienced Americans who think “the lack of bipartisanship” in Washington has been “quite shocking”. He is profoundly concerned about the “self-evident” corrupting influence of “the power of money”. America now looks to him “like a country that is barely governed”. To put it mildly, these views are not those of a conventional member of Canberra’s political elite.
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Turnbull spoke very eloquently in parliament on the tenth anniversary of September 11, quoting at length from a speech delivered by Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence in the Great Synagogue, Sydney.
We confront the ambivalence of our psyche expressing on the one hand our profound grief that the world is damaged and that we are bereft. But we express on the other, defiance and ongoing struggle; a striving to renew and rebuild. The physical may crumble but the spirit endures.
But he is altogether clear-eyed about the American intelligence, foreign policy and military failures that have flowed as a result. Too often since September 11, the actions of America and its allies have played into the hands of the enemy by alienating young Muslims living in Islamic lands or in Western countries. “People who demonise Muslims are very much playing into the hands of al-Qaeda.” He recalls a conversation with John Howard, where he pointed out that one of the terrorists responsible for the London outrage was, like Howard, a cricket lover, but with a Pommy accent.