Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s instinct for self-preservation has only succeeded in landing he and the COALition in a right electoral pickle. After months of posturing and grandstanding on almost any topic one cares to name – and delivering on none them – the PM’s hold on office is looking shaky. Whereas on his ascension to the top job Malcolm looked like delivering a knock out blow to Labor’s hopes he now looks incapable of fighting his way out of a wet paper bag.
Like a newly crowned king of the chicken house, Malcolm Turnbull swaggered in and crowed long and loud after ousting Tony Abbott. Since then his constant cockle doodle doing has increasingly fallen on deaf ears as the public lash his inaction through unfavourable opinion polls. Like Foghorn Leghorn the PM is seen as being nothing but a windbag.
To arrest his and the COALition’s alarming fall in popularity Turnbull chose to talk tough on industrial relations. His bluff in demanding the establishment of a commission to deal with corruption in the Trade Unions appears to have been called by the independents in the Senate who remain unmoved and uncooperative in the face of the PM’s threats to call a double dissolution if his ABCC Bill fails to pass.
With the trigger for a double dissolution likely to be soon at his fingertips, Turnbull cannot back out without further disastrous consequences to the perception of him as a lily-livered leader.
While not agreeing with the need for a Royal Commission into the banks, it appears opposition leader Bill Shorten has read the public mood correctly. Sick of the excesses of the corporate sector and banks, in particular, the public appear bang up for it after a raft of revelations about the extent of corporate tax dodging and profiteering.
This fact presents Turnbull with two problems. The first is that his wealth and his allegiance to the banking sector make him part of the problem in the eyes of many and, further, that his private school and business elitism makes him incapable of understanding the lot of everyday Australians.
The second is that by making industrial relations the key battleground he opens the door for every inequity and injustice within every sector of the workforce and the welfare system to be aired during the election campaign.
While the spotlight is on the greed of the corporate sector, the problems facing battling Australians will be magnified.
This is the strategy of Labor.
They couldn’t have asked for a better ally than the National Australia Bank whose sizeable contribution to a liberal fund raising event only served to further endorse the perception that the COALition are in the pocket of corporate Australia.
There is every prospect that an election in the current climate might go down to the wire and the PM may yet rue his assault on the micro parties and independents.