When a former prime minister calls an impromptu media conference while visiting Parliament House, using the occasion to trash talk one of the few policy decisions both major parties agree on, you know his retirement isn’t going as well as he might have hoped.
After enjoying last week’s moment in the limelight verbally jousting with US President Donald Trump, Malcolm Turnbull has once again found his way in front of a microphone to offer some scathing assessments of ‘s nuclear submarine deal under the AUKUS pact.
Asked whether or not Trump will honour the deal, Turnbull replied that he was confident that he would.
But it wasn’t praise for Trump’s respect for signed and sealed agreements that was behind Turnbull’s reasoning.
‘At the back at his mind, he’ll be thinking: “Who are these dumb guys that agreed to this deal?”,’ Turnbull said.
In other words, Turnbull is confident Trump will honour the deal because it’s good for America but bad for .
‘AUKUS is a terrible deal. It is so unfair to , and the reason it is unfair is that we are paying US $3billion to the Americans to support their submarine industrial base, but we have no guarantee that we will ever get any submarines,’ Turnbull said.
Whether the former PM is right or not is almost beside the point… and I happen to think that he is.
The subs deal also costs a fortune, somewhere in the order of $350billion, and that’s assuming it comes in on budget.
In truth, deals like AUKUS are as much about stimulating local manufacturing with government money as anything else.
It’s also a chance to lock in the US alliance at a time when policy makers in Canberra have concerns about the rise of China’s military presence and outward posturing.
Turnbull is alive to that, but he also sees basic downsides in the drafting of the agreement made. Not that I suspect those finer points are what really motivates his desire to comment on what concerns him.
So what is really motivating Turnbull’s scathing assessments of his successors’ decision making?
It’s hard not to think that it’s driven by spite, at least to some extent anyway.
Turnbull has never gotten over the fact that his party unceremoniously removed him from the top job.
Peter Dutton challenged Turnbull for the Liberal leadership back in 2018, so he gets special attention.
Scott Morrison came through the middle to win the prime ministership, and Turnbull now suspects Morrison orchestrated the whole thing to his advantage in the first place.
As a consequence, despite the pair being close for years and despite Turnbull backing Morrison over Dutton, Turnbull soon became one of Morrison’s greatest critics.
This includes when Morrison inked the subs deal which scuttled Turnbull’s previous submarines purchase agreement with the French.
When Labor got on board and supported the AUKUS deal to avoid a clash with the Coalition on national security, they put themselves in Turnbull’s sights too.
There hasn’t been a more intelligent PM in the last half century than Turnbull. But his time in power was a bitter disappointment to many of his biggest supporters. And deep down I suspect he feels the same way.
When negative sentiments dictate why former PM’s choose to make public comments they do themselves a greater disservice than anyone else.
Even when their gripes might be reasonably founded they seem incapable of expressing such sentiments in a way that makes the issue at hand the focus, rather than the bile being sprayed around about them.
The savage nature of politics makes it difficult for former politicians to break out of the impact it has on them in the aftermath of their careers.
Some might argue that Turnbull was always likely to end up this way. Former Liberal Party powerbroker Nick Minchin long expressed such concerns when warning against electing Turnbull into the Liberal leadership.
Nonetheless the party room did it twice, before both times exiting him stage right a short while later.
The benchmark for post prime ministerial dignity other ex-PMs should learn from goes to Julia Gillard, who has managed to elevate what was a rather unsuccessful prime ministership in the eyes of many simply by acting with grace during her political retirement.
And few political leaders were more mistreated during their careers than Gillard was. Yet she still finds a way to leave the bitterness behind.
Gillard isn’t a mute. She comments from time to time, but she doesn’t let her history with others dictate when, and she isn’t consumed by a desire to get her name back in lights.
If only all former PMs showed such dignity. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong on what they comment about.