Tony Abbott is – was – more to my taste ideologically. He’s a monarchist, a social conservative, the man who repealed Australia’s disastrous carbon tax. But he was not an effective executive or parliamentarian or shifter of public opinion – and, partly as a result, he let me down badly on one of my two core issues: freedom of speech.
Malcolm Turnbull is far less to my taste ideologically. He’s a republican, in favor of gay marriage, who’s hot for all the climate-change hooey and supported that ghastly carbon tax. He’s also a little thin-skinned – to the point where he walked out of one of my speeches. Not over anything I said, alas. He never got that far. He took umbrage at something Nick Minchin, Australian Senate leader and Finance Minister, said during his introduction of me: Nick and Malcolm were on opposite sides during the monarchy referendum, and so Turnbull flounced out in what, for a republican, was a very queeny huff.
That said, I find him one of the most serious and thoughtful politicians on the other of my core issues: demography. We sat next to each other at a conference a few years back. It was alphabetical – so S for Steyn, T for Turnbull; on my other side, I had R for Kevin Rudd, the previously ousted Prime Minister. We had little plates of snacky-type stuff and, every time I turned to talk to Turnbull, Rudd’s hand crept over and snaffled my nibbles. Anyway, Turnbull, like me, is a serious demographic junkie, and he spent much of the afternoon passing me various napkin doodles of inverted pyramids showing projected population declines for different fertility rates. Compared to most politicians around the west, he was almost uniquely well-informed on the subject.
So I wish him well, and I assume he has learned the lesson of his last, failed stint as leader, which led to Tony Abbott deposing him. Now he has deposed Abbott, a decent bloke but one who seemed never quite to grasp that a leader has to lead. In the end, the issue was his competence rather than his conservatism.
