Former Australian minister for communications Malcolm Turnbull is to become Australia’s sixth prime minister in eight years after defeating Tony Abbott in a ballot of Liberal Party lawmakers yesterday.
Turnbull won by 54 votes to 44, hours after condemning Abbott’s economic management and challenging him for the leadership of the governing party. Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop is to remain deputy leader after winning a separate ballot against Australian Minister for Defence Kevin Andrews.
Turnbull, 60, has a window to halt a slide in the government’s popularity caused by political missteps and Abbott’s combative leadership style. Faced with the likely departure of senior ministers loyal to Abbott, Turnbull needs to move quickly to restore unity if he is to turn around the party’s fortunes ahead of a general election due next year.
Abbott’s coalition government has trailed the main opposition Australian Labor Party in opinion polls for months. Unflagged spending cuts in his first budget in May last year angered voters, while his decision to bestow a knighthood on Queen Elizabeth II’s husband, Prince Philip, in January was ridiculed and exacerbated a perception that he is out of touch with public opinion.
He narrowly saw off a leadership challenge in February, and pledged to turn around the party’s poll ratings with a focus on jobs, families and national security. It was not enough.
A poll published in the Australian newspaper on Sept. 7 put support for the government at 46 percent against the opposition’s 54 percent. The survey showed 41 percent of voters prefer Labor leader Bill Shorten as prime minister, against Abbott at 37 percent.
Turnbull faces a myriad of challenges. He needs to revitalize the government’s stagnant political agenda, come up with an economic plan to combat stalling growth and heal the wounds created by the divisive leadership vote.
Business leaders have been critical of the government’s lack of resolve to overhaul an outdated tax system and labor market — reforms seen as essential to an economy experiencing its weakest run of growth since a 1991 recession.
Australia needs outstanding economic leadership and strong business confidence if it is to remain a “high-wage, generous social welfare-net, first-world society,” Turnbull said yesterday after stepping down as communications minister and announcing the challenge.
Turnbull has an impressive resume: before winning a Sydney-based parliamentary seat in 2004 he was a Rhodes Scholar, a political journalist, a successful lawyer and a Goldman Sachs Group executive. He was Liberal leader for 15 months while the party was in opposition before being ousted by Abbott by one vote in December 2009.
His social agenda is seen as more centrist than that of Abbott, a former trainee Jesuit priest who opposes same-sex marriage and scrapped the previous Labor government’s carbon-price mechanism.
Turnbull has called for lawmakers to have a free vote on gay marriage and in 2009 supported an emissions trading system before he was ditched as party leader.
Announcing his leadership bid earlier yesterday, Turnbull pledged to restore a more consultative Cabinet process, after Abbott was lambasted for a string of “captain’s calls” — including Prince Philip’s knighthood.
“We need a different style of leadership,” he said. “A style of leadership that respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take, and makes a case for it. We need advocacy, not slogans.”
Zareh Ghazarian, a Melbourne-based professor at Monash University’s School of Political and Social Inquiry, agreed that Abbott’s autocratic leadership had contributed to his downfall.
“There have been a series of leadership gaffes,” Ghazarian said. “These things have to an extent alienated a chunk of his own party. It’s been one embarrassment after another for the government.”
The leadership turmoil is reminiscent of the Labor government, which saw first-term prime minister Kevin Rudd ousted by his deputy, Julia Gillard, in a party room coup — only to claw his way back to the top job weeks before the September 2013 election.
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