First up: in the interests of social responsibility we need to apologise for the Malcolm Turnbull Q&A Drinking Game: if you did in fact play it last night then you would very definitely be feeling rough today.
There was Malsplaining (about solar voltaic panels and Snowy 2.0!)! Multiple “let me just say this”-es! “A kind of madness!” “Lucy and I”! Big talk on renewable energy at odds with what he did when PM! Much talk of his accomplishments! We’ve had less woozy mornings, to be honest.
He even took something as a comment, in a Tony Jones tribute which got a good laugh.
And that was kind of the vibe of the thing: a generally friendly audience for a generally pretty chill Malcolm Turnbull very determined to remind everyone of the casually charming guy they were so hopeful about in 2015 rather than the increasingly prickly and belligerent fellow that was their PM until three months ago.
And make no mistake, this was a reputation-polishing exercise – even if he plumped for a nice blue sports coat instead of the leather jacket of old.
This was a Malcolm sighing about how the Liberal Party was blowing itself up and reminding everyone – multiple times over the course of the hour – that no explanation had been offered for why he needed to be removed. Not by the plotters, not media magnates; not like back when he did it, certainly.
Singling out frontbenchers who brought the spill against him, including Steve Ciobo, Greg Hunt, Mathias Cormann, Peter Dutton. Mitch Fifield, and Michaela Cash – and, naturally, Tony Abbott – for the madness which “effectively blew up the government”, he was careful not to be seen to openly criticise his replacement. “I wish Scott all the best in the election,” he said, to laughter. “No, I really do.”
And on the face of it this was a human performance. He admitted that speaking about the coup hurt, and that his retreat to New York was largely about self-care after a devastating blow to his ego.
And that ego had clearly survived, because according to Malcolm, he’d done nothing wrong. At all.
Turnbull also took a somewhat rosy view of his own time as PM – blithely claiming that he had no issue with the ABC beyond a parental disappointment with its failure to be accurate and even handed (qualities which, as ever, seem to mean different things for citizens and people in political parties), and didn’t pause long enough to give anyone a chance to ask a follow up about the “efficiency dividends” inflicted on its funding.
Turnbull was also very, very happy to take credit for passing marriage equality without acknowledging the unnecessarily painful and divisive way it happened – pausing only to smirk about how Labor would have wished they’d done it instead, rather that that Australia’s LGBTIQI+ community and their friends and allies could have done without the hate speech and violence.
There were some flashes of anger – mentions of Barnaby Joyce’s suggest egomania got a chilly “You may very well say that but I couldn’t possibly comment.”
And he made some genuinely strong points: that parliament is not a welcoming place for women, that Australian elections are won in the centre and those that court the fringes are doomed to political irrelevance, and that the success of female small-L Liberals in traditionally safe Liberal seats such as his own is a sign that the party are not giving voters what they want.
#geri4pm2019
But most of all this was about reminding people of the Malcolm they put all that optimism behind; the white knight that was going to bring sanity and science and transparency back to government after the excesses of the Abbott epoch, and hoping that helped them forget the PM that failed to do those things and couldn’t even convince his colleagues to trust in his leadership.
And, most of all, he sought to remind everyone to keep on demanding to know why he was rolled. Because who could begrudge the man a little vengeance?