Ross Fitzgerald’s proposition that the destabilisation of Malcolm Turnbull is starting (PM’s left-right dilemma”, Canberra Times Comment, 3 October, p16) is probably very close to the mark. Australian politics is a poisonous concoction of the prosaic and the febrile, a recipe for extreme ennui, and internal party politics is not exactly marked by common sense.
Turnbull cannot be what presumably he would wish, a Liberal wet, in a party room where the god-bothering and back-to-the-workhouse factions have the numbers. Not if he wants to remain party leader at least, which presumably he does, though one might ask why he wants to bother. Further, calls for him to “lead” fail to take account of the position in the legislature. There, the numbers require consensus negotiation, not captain’s calls (risible or otherwise) or trips to a phone box to change into the Superman suit. That’s actually a benefit, since political arrangements require adult leadership, not schoolyard solutions. Managing that process is true leadership.
But the problem goes much further than that. It embraces the separate but related significant difficulties in the Labor Party.
What Australia is now seeing is a sea change in politics that one day should result in a centre party that would accommodate Labor’s secular right and the Liberals’ secular left, plus those two parties’ centres. No one wants to talk about that, of course, since (in each case) their present settings in amber suit the suits very well.
Richard Laidlaw, Subiaco, WA
Despite the trend away from major political parties, there still remains a hard core of rusted on supporters incapable of recognizing even the most blatant malpractice of their chosen regime. One of the most obvious examples is Queensland’s Gold Coast which has long been blue team territory, even though the only time in recorded history that its been run with any semblance of efficiency is when it has been under administration. The incumbent mayor is unquestionably the most ‘interesting’ of his type in recorded history. I could easily rant for months about political corruption involving both major political parties and a bunch of the second tier ones but the common thread is the abysmal lack of openness, transparency and accountability. The fault is not so much venial elected representatives but rather with the most apathetic and disinterested sheeple on planet earth due to their elevation of footbrawl and thugby to the status of major religions and idiot box reality crap to their only other interest.