It is not unusual for political leaders to mould their parties in their own image. In the Australian context we need only mention Robert Menzies, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and John Howard.
These politicians moulded the course of their respective parties, redirecting policies and priorities. As a result they changed the way Australians thought and lived and changed the country’s direction, for better or worse as the case may be.
Tony Abbott, the recently ousted prime minister, wanted the Liberals to become a hard-ass party of the pure free market model. It all ended in a coup against him by a clear majority of his own party room. Their overthrow of “The Mad Monk” was a triumph of old-fashioned Tory pragmatism over political dogmatism.
His successor, Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, is now recalibrating the position of the Liberal Party; his mission is to shift it from the party of anti-modernity, anti-science and anti-intellectualism to a party of the conservative centre.
A majority of federal Liberal MPs and every public opinion poll have signalled their approval of Turnbull’s approach but the change in direction is receiving hostile fire from three quarters – the hard right of the Liberal Party, sections of backward Nationals and Rupert Murdoch’s ink-slingers.
Murdoch, as always, has his keen eye on massaging newspaper circulations and TV ratings. He is working behind the scenes to persuade the Liberal maddies to form a Tea Party faction of the Liberal Party to harass Turnbull.
It worked for him in the UK when he encouraged crazed Thatcherites and gave them free publicity in his Fleet Street empire (he then dumped them in favour of New Labour’s Tony Blair). In recent years he has volunteered Fox News and the New York Post to the Tea Party in return for an endless stream of “exclusives” and rent-a-quotes.
Every move by Turnbull is combed over by the Grand Inquisitors at News Limited to decide whether he is erring from the party (i.e. News) line. They search for traces of stateism, republicanism, interventionism, support for public broadcasting – anything that amounts to deviationism.

Malcolm in a muddle

Turnbull’s leadership coup was carried out at a heavy price. Because he needed sections of the Abbott/Howard right wing as well as Joe Hockey’s “wets”, he is now caught in a balancing act, trying to appease both sides while building the centre.
As voters have already started to notice, this means conflicting and erratic signals are emanating from Turnbull’s office. The Press Gallery still can’t make up its mind about him or his strategy.
Turnbull press conferences have become agonising high-wire balancing acts: a nod to the right wing of the party followed by a nod to the left.
He began his prime ministership with the scripted narrative that he was a boy from a poor background who worked hard and made it to the top. It is a fairy tale of such egregious self-serving imagination that few people swallowed it.
The truth is otherwise. Turnbull has enjoyed preferment and patronage all his life – from his parents (his mother a successful academic and his father a wealthy hotel broker), from the likes of Kerry Packer, Neville Wran and his father-in-law Tom Hughes QC.
His story is impressive. He has achieved remarkable success in business, the law, journalism and now politics.
When he brought forward his leadership coup and outsmarted Abbott and his principal rival Scott Morrison, he was operating like a corporate raider. He was reading from the takeover manual written by Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs when Turnbull was head of Australian operations and learning the merchant banking trade.
It is worth recalling American journalist Matt Taibbi’s colourful description of the notorious blood suckers at “Goldie Mac”: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells of money.”
His objectives are privatisation of the Post Office’s valuable parcels division – watch for Goldman Sachs gouging colossal fees as banking advisers to the sale – and remaining public assets such as the Royal Mint and choice blocks of Crown Land. He is wedded to the voodoo theories of “trickle down”, i.e. make the wealthy class wealthier so that when they spend their extra money everyone else becomes better off too. It is a total nonsense, and history proves it.
Turnbull is immersed in the cultural values of his patrons such as Blankfein but for me he is no more than an oligarch with a patrician face. However, Opposition leader Bill Shorten won’t be fighting the next federal election on this basis because he is afraid of being branded (by News Ltd, of course) as indulging in “class war” politics.

Israel on the warpath

Since the re-election of the extremist regime in Israel in May, Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has abandoned any pretence of wooing friends in the West.
He has openly insulted US President Barack Obama, French President François Hollande, Pope Francis, the EU and the UN. Domestically, he has renewed state violence against the Palestinians by stepping up street patrols, arrests and increased settler colonisation of the West Bank. An 18-month-old toddler Ali Saad Dawabsha was burned to death when settlers set fire to his parents’ West Bank home and then daubed the burnt ruins with Zionist slogans.
Now Netanyahu is targeting Al Aqsa Mosque in the heart of Jerusalem, the golden-domed religious symbol of Palestinian culture and resistance.
Taking advantage of the West’s fixation with defeating ISIS in Iraq and Syria, Netanyahu appears to believe this is an ideal time to drive more Palestinians out of their homeland by extending Zionist oppression in all the Arab territories occupied since the Six-Day War in 1967.
As a direct result, opinion polls conducted on the West Bank show that Palestinian anger is reaching breaking point. Support for a new war against the Tel Aviv regime is growing as Palestinians lose confidence in the so-called peace process and their own politicians.
A total of 42% supported “armed action” as the most effective way of establishing their own homeland. Three months ago only a third favoured armed struggle.
If Netanyahu does goad the Palestinians into another intifada (uprising), Tel Aviv will call up hundreds of army reservists in Australia. I wonder whether the Turnbull Government will cancel their passports and Australian citizenship for travelling overseas to fight in a foreign war? I think we should be told.

Quote of the week

“For people on 40,000 and 50,000 and 60,000 dollars a year, penalty rates are the difference as to whether they can afford to send their kids to a private school.”
– Federal Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, aka “Showbag Bill”