Today is the final day of Malcolm Bligh Turnbull’s political career.
He’s resigned as the MP for Wentworth and is about to jet off on holiday, presumably to put as much space between himself and the Liberal Party as possible. Which, given the events of the last few weeks, seems like a very rational human response.
And thus ends what is probably the most disappointing and underachieving prime minister in modern Australian history.
He came to power in 2015 by successfully challenging Tony Abbott for the leadership, and all it took was agreeing to the existing policies on pretty much everything, especially on not introducing legislation for marriage equality or doing anything about climate change, which were two of the (many) conditions reportedly put on him by the National Party in order for them to accept him as leader of the Coalition.
And now, at the end, what can we attribute to the Turnbull epoch?
The NBN and the National Disability Insurance Scheme were both Labor projects which Turnbull begrudgingly maintained but ensured they were substandard to requirements.
The NBN.
Indigenous rights went backwards, topped by the utter refusal to consider the Uluru Statement from the Heart, not to mention deliberately misrepresenting the request for an indigenous advisory body to parliament as a “third house of parliament”.
Manus Island and Nauru’s camps were “closed”, in the sense that the people there were no longer detained, but still on the island with no rights and no ability to leave in what amounted to a dereliction of responsibility.
Snowy Hydro 2.0 might yet be a legacy of sorts, assuming that it’s built before the Snowy Mountains no longer have snowmelt to power it thanks in part to the climate change which the Turnbull government did literally nothing to mitigate – beyond a very curious grant to a Great Barrier Reef charity with links to the mining industry.
There were plenty of big bold ideas – GST changes, state taxes, the Emissions Intensity Scheme, the NEG, corporate tax cuts – which were all abandoned in what became a predictable dance of announcement followed by backdown.
What else did we have? Oh, the Centrelink Robodebt mess, a failure to address the rise of racist invective in parliament and his own party, and a disaster of a double dissolution election which sought to clean out the senate crossbench and just made things more difficult for the barely-returned government.
The senate crossbench, post-2016 election
Even the two most popular achievements of the Turnbull years were despite his best efforts.
Turnbull presided over the Royal Commission into the Financial Sector, which turned out to be both very popular and incredibly necessary. And that would have been a real feather in his cap, had it not been forced upon him after months of insisting that the banking sector could totally regular themselves and there no grounds for an investigation. Oops!
Turnbull was, however, the PM who welcomed in marriage equality – a genuinely massive change to the national character – but was mainly notable for enacting Tony Abbott’s policy of putting it to a non-binding public vote and Peter Dutton’s process of doing it as a postal survey.
That survey came complete with public national “debate” which largely consisted of conservatives angrily insisting that it would lead to vague but terrifying consequences which have entirely failed to materialise.
So not exactly a triumph of principle, in other words.
In this, marriage equality is similar to John Gorton being the PM in place when Australia was pivotal to the Moon landing: he had nothing to do with making it happen but just happened to have the PM’s job at the time.
And at best Turnbull will be remembered with the same fondness as Gorton: one of the PMs between Menzies and Whitlam, little remembered except as a leader aggressively undermined by his party and eventually quitting when a spill motion made clear the party were not behind him, leaving a riven and disunited party ready to be destroyed at the next election.
At worst, he won’t be remembered at all.
Self serving plug: Andrew P Street wrote The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat