It may be true that in politics it is better to be lucky than good, and certainly it would appear Malcolm Turnbull is benefitting from such luck that fits well with his positive narrative. For the ALP, the positive Turnbull means it has lost an advantage it had over the negative Tony Abbott, but it would be wise not to counter by filling the void Abbott has left.
This week came the news that an agreement on the Trans Pacific Partnership had been reached. This was the end of negotiations that had been ongoing between various nations since February 2008 – Australia started negotiating in November that year.
In that time Australia has had four changes of Prime Minister – Rudd to Gillard to Rudd to Abbott to Turnbull.
And yet it is Turnbull who despite being PM for around 1 per cent of the period of the negotiations gets to announce the deal being done.
This is often the case with such agreements. Governments (by which is really meant, public servants) will negotiate such deals for years and unless you happen to be a Prime Minister for longer than two terms, you will be unlikely to be present at both the start and the end.
But the one there at the end always seeks to claim credit.
Turnbull even made it clear to 3AW’s Neil Mitchell that he was involved in the negotiations, telling his listeners that “Barack Obama and I spoke about this last week, yes, he called me last week and we had a long discussion about it.”
The announcement of the trade deal fits well with the over-arching narrative that Turnbull is attempting to tell of his nearly 4 weeks as Prime Minister – that he is all about the new, the innovative and the agile.
Trade deals are great for such narratives as they provide ample opportunity for grandiose statements about opportunities and very little need to bother with following up on such claims years later.
When the TPP was announced this week, the Prime Minister and Trade Minister suggested it would usher “in a new era of economic growth and opportunity across the fast-growing Asia-Pacific.”
The reality is, as economist Paul Krugman said when recently here in Australia, the TPP is not so much about free trade as it is about “intellectual property rights and dispute settlement procedures.” But such things are pretty unsexy and don’t allow government ministers to talk of massive benefits that will flow to our economy.
Will we look back to the TPP as a turning point in our nation’s economy? Will it foster a new era? Almost certainly not.
When the recent China-Australian free-trade agreement was signed, the Trade Minister Andrew Robb boasted how it would produce “many hundreds of thousands of jobs.” And yet as Fairfax journalist, Peter Martin, noted the government’s own estimates suggest that by 2035, the ChAFTA as well as the free-trade agreements signed with South Korea and Japan will produce just 5,434 extra jobs.
Even worse is that while this week we have seen newspapers filled with columns about what the TPP will mean for Australia, we have yet to see the actual text of the agreement.
That doesn’t mean that the government is lying about the agreed aspects within the TPP, but we certainly are not getting the full story. It is a bit like reporting on the federal Budget and by relying only on the Treasurer’s speech.
But such matters are mere details for the new Prime Minister.
For he is lucky in that he finds himself in the position where deals promulgated by previous governments fit his narrative in a way they never did his predecessor. Tony Abbott may have liked to talk about flicking the switch to positive, but aside from the odd journalist seeking to curry favour with the then Prime Minister’s Office no one really believed it.
Where Abbott worked best in the negative, Turnbull is always more believable in the positive.
It is why his time in opposition charged with trying to “demolish” the ALP’s NBN never sat well. Turnbull has the aura of a man who wants to leave his mark – literally as well as figuratively – on Australia.
And after the shemozzle of the ALP hating itself and the two years of Abbott negating everything, it would seem voters are now in the mood for Turnbull’s positivity.
Such a mood has dangers for the opposition. The ALP traditionally likes to pitch itself as the more optimistic party – the party that builds things rather than preaches of the need for cuts and smaller government.
The ALP had been using the positive tactic well against Abbott. Sensibly it has not shirked from the approach since Turnbull took office.
This week Bill Shorten responded to Turnbull’s desire to broaden the scope of infrastructure to include more than just Abbott’s “roads of the 21st century” by announcing plans for a $10bn fund for Infrastructure Australia and a range of public transport projects.
It’s a smart move, for were Shorten to shift to a negative mode against any or all of Turnbull’s plans, voters would quickly see him as a wannabe-Abbott. And in the short time since he was deposed, voters have made quite clear that another Abbott is someone few want to see.
