If Malcolm Turnbull was still Prime Minister, there’s a good chance he’d be heading to the polls right now, despite the Victorian election. He could have called an election for December 8, conscious that at best he only had a small gap in the polls to make up — or perhaps the government might have finally drawn even in Newspoll by now. But most of all, he would have had a strong wind of economic and fiscal news behind him
The Reserve Bank will confirm both the strength of the economy and monetary policy stability at its meeting tomorrow, which will see interest rates on hold (and most likely until well into 2019 and perhaps 2020). Friday will see the bank’s 4th Statement on Monetary Policy released with higher growth forecasts and better than expected figures for unemployment and inflation.
Turnbull would have known that next week’s October jobs report would confirm that Australia’s jobs boom continues, albeit slower than in 2017. It’s true that the Wage Price Index for the September quarter, also out next week, won’t be good news. But even there, the boost from the 3.5% national wage decision by the Fair Work Commission (which the government opposed) will help, with some of the lesser journalistic lights parroting the well-worn “turned the corner” line. And to top it all off the, September national accounts on December 5, right before the election, will confirm growth remains at or above 3%.
Last week would have also confirmed that now is the time to sprint to the polls. We learned that September’s trade surplus hit a surprise $3 billion off solid (and rising) prices for iron ore, coal and LNG, boosted by the favourable impact of the falling dollar. Economists reckon the trade surplus for the September quarter could add 0.2 percentage points to GDP. The Reserve Bank’s Commodity Price Index — a proxy for our terms of trade — showed the resources boom had returned with the index hitting a near six year high in October and up 22.3% in the past year. This was backed up by figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics on export and import indices that showed export prices for the September quarter jumped 3.7% while import values climbed 1.9%.
That points to an improvement in our terms of trade of around 1.8% on a preliminary basis for the September quarter.
That all translates into a flood of revenue into government coffers or, to use Paul Keating’s phrase, the Liberals have once again been hit in the arse by a rainbow from the extractive industries, with revenues running billions of dollars ahead of estimates. That’s why the government is constantly going to the ATM to announce new handouts — like last week’s lazy half a billion over ten years to expand the War Memorial.
Imagine that cash being directed to marginal seats. It would have made the perfect platform for a government seeking re-election.
Instead, Turnbull will this week be the centre of attention for another reason — a special edition of Q&A on Thursday night where he can defend his record and, almost certainly, deliver an almighty serve to the traitors, wreckers and fools in the Liberal partyroom who have almost certainly deprived themselves of a third term in government.
For all his many faults, Turnbull managed — especially once he’d gotten rid of the appalling Barnaby Joyce — to get his government back to near-level pegging with Labor despite everything. He had a good chance of securing what would have been a sweet victory indeed, possibly one that would have ended Australia’s revolving door Prime Ministership and given us some stability.
But his colleagues had different, and far more stupid, ideas.
This theory requires the imagination of an alternative universe in which the Liberal Party is united behind Turnbull, the extreme right pull their head in and there is some connection between the concerns of the party and those of voters. As this was unimaginable even had Turnbull stayed on, I’ll back the old “disunity is death” theory over the elite-driven “good” economic news which will indeed be news to those trying to pay the bills.
The recent habit of the meeja in wearing rose tinted glasses while looking back at Malcolm has got to stop…mostly because it is a load of bollocks. It’s not just the above guff…but read anything from Murphy over at the grundian or listen to Leigh Sales, Fran Kelly or Crabb and you’d have thought Turnbull was the messiah.
He wasn’t you know! He was possibly worse than Abbott and Morrison in as much as he should have known better and not only that, but we all suspect that he did know better. His Government and he, were simply awful.
The lesson on the economy is that it seems to do its own thing quite independent of whomever is in power, for good or for bad. So the next time a coalition minister tells you that the economy will always be better under them than Labor, you might just take that as the bullshit it is.
I mean, are any of these guys ever going to try and tell us what Turnbull and co did to create this good economic news? Besides be restrained by the ALP from pissing it all away on big business tax cuts disproportionately favourable to offshore investors who don’t get franking credits on dividends like Australian investors?
No, it seems “Turnbull was in office for these good economic indicators and extra revenue so yay Turnbull! Let’s have 3 more years of lying about negative gearing, taking no action to reverse inequality and taking no action on climate change, protecting the big banks and shonky financial planners, or dealing with the wages and prices that affect ordinary people’s lives!”.
You forgot “telling Melburnians that they were being terrorised by African Gangs”
It’s surprising how many journalists paid to examine and explain what the Governrabble was doing persisted to the end in telling us how Turnbull really wanted to do good stuff, he was just being constrained all the time to do the nasty things the hard right wanted and always, always abandon his own best instincts. We should forgive him because he wasn’t Dutton or Joyce, just their helpless puppet. And people like you and me who just comment unpaid out of the goodness of our hearts (and for the dry pleasure of saying “I told you so”) were saying, “No, he’s doing what he really believes in.” Crikey, my invoice will be in the mail.
Slight problem there Keane. Turnbull pulled back to “almost level pegging” in polls taken before the collapse of the NEG and before the media narrative of Labor leadership instability after Super Saturday collapsed in a screaming heap.
The Ipsos poll taken AFTER the fall of the NEG gave the lie to the idea that Turnbull would get back to even.
I don’t think Morrison is doing particularly better or worse than Turnbull would have been doing now. People have made up their minds about this government regardless of who leads it, and also made up their mind about this opposition leader (at least he has a chance in government to dispel the media-created bad impression people have of him, and it IS media-created, there’s not a Shorten-friendly journo in Canberra). The NEG was the last chance Turnbull had to hold onto the votes of people still desperately hoping for the promise of a socially progressive economically orthodox government, fig leaf though it was.
This article just reads like an attempt to pretend that all the guff written about a Turnbull recovery and a Shorten leadership turmoil literally weeks before Turnbull lost his job and Shorten didn’t was NOT all a gross error of political misjudgment and a prime example of the problem with press gallery groupthink.
“He had a good chance of securing what would have been a sweet victory indeed, possibly one that would have ended Australia’s revolving door Prime Ministership and given us some stability.”
Seriously, everything that happened under Turnbull (let alone under Abbott), and you are actively cheering the idea of Turnbull being re-elected for “stability”. Unbelievable.
Come down below the line and defend this tripe.
“He could have called an election for December 8, conscious that at best he only had a small gap in the polls to make up — or perhaps the government might have finally drawn even in Newspoll by now.”
Wasn’t the 2PP newspoll 45-55 in Labor’s favour immediately before Turnbull was knifed?