Globetrotting Turnbull stretches his wings, but will the diehards clip them?

Extract from The Guardian

Katharine Murphy

There’s been joyful exuberance and solemn statesmanship, and squeezed in among meetings with world leaders, some carefully calibrated policy resets

Malcolm Turnbull arrives for a group photo during the Apec Summit in Manila on Wednesday. Photograph: Yuri Kochetkov/EPA

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@murpharoo

Thursday 19 November 2015 19.25 AEDT

We’ve ridden a clear cycle with the prime minister since leaving Australia a week ago.

We had two days of joyful exuberance, in Jakarta and in Berlin. Malcolm’s expansive adventures with new peers.

Then the horrors of Paris rolled in, and the urgency and complexity of Syria and the G20’s countering violent extremism agenda forced Turnbull to contract back into himself in order to get across the weight of work required to stay on top of the many things under way at once.

Then over the past couple of days in Manila, the prime minister has climbed out of his bunker and begun to engage once again.

The interesting thing is that Turnbull is not only engaging again, he’s carefully resetting his government’s agenda in a few content-rich ways.

Let’s work through a couple of examples.

Turnbull sought in the early days of his prime ministership to recalibrate the national conversation around terrorism.

I’ve noted before that he wanted to draw a line over the inflammatory language that was fuelling a national sense of contingency in Australia in ways that must have been extremely unhelpful to the practical task for security agencies of keeping diverse communities safe.

Let’s call this first Turnbull reset “terrorism is not a bloody culture war”. Just to keep it dignified, the “Tony” in this sentence can be implied, not stated.

In truth, the prime minister wasn’t obsessing over being the anti-Tony (leave that to Canberra journalists and our endless appetite for compare and contrast). He just wanted to clear the public space to talk about more Malcolmish things – the tax review, his innovation statement, this compulsion he’s now developed for this being the most exciting time to write a shopping list, or eat a Mars Bar, or launch your very own internet start-up.

But events have pushed him back into national security territory. He’s had to stow the exuberance (by and large, with a couple of mildly odd break outs).

Given he’s been funnelled into the “tin hat” space, Turnbull is not merely squatting in a defensive posture. Given he’s been given day release from the closed quarters of Canberra, where the various well-meaning colleagues line up regularly to check his free-thinking impulses, he’s pushed out in clear definitional terms.

The global pivot on the political solution for Syria has given Turnbull opportunity to make some statements about his inclinations on matters geopolitical which have the practical effect of drawing a hard line between his own shaded and qualified views and Tony Abbott’s apparent radically simplified fixation with dispatching Australian special forces to turn the tide in civilisational conflicts, either with an invitation, or without one.

Tony is Mr Force. Turnbull is Mr Nuance.

Of course we knew this at the helicopter level. But now we can bring our air conveyance down in order to inspect some fine print.

The prime minister has told us several things over the past 48 hours or so.

He’s signalled the Syrian conflict might not be able to be resolved by interventionist means at all. If it is to be resolved, it will require the great powers to demonstrate considerable pragmatism to ensure the world does not repeat the mistakes made after the resolution of the Iraq war, where “peace” (such as it was) was allowed to manifest in Baghdad as winner takes all. It will involve the disparate religious forces of Syria being welded together in a doubtless unattractive but functional working coalition that may, for a time, include the loathed dictator Assad, and radical Sunni elements we don’t much care for (although Turnbull clarified on Thursday that this did not mean Islamic State.)

In the basic sense of policy construction and its political articulation, we are now some distance from goodies and baddies and witches brews.

The reaction of “friends of Tony” in the Australian press to Turnbull’s articulation of an emerging but extremely fragile global consensus on Syria has been entirely predictable. “What an astonishing surrender,” gasped the News Corp blogger Andrew Bolt, as if this posturing outrage actually meant something. Surrender to whom? As well as the terror reset and the foreign policy reset, Turnbull snuck in a teensy forward-looking reference on climate change policy during his press conference in Manila on Thursday.

In his opening days as prime minister, Turnbull was rusted on fully to the Direct Action policy that he had once correctly characterised correctly as an ineffective and epically expensive boondoggle.

He remains carefully rusted on, but with the Paris climate talks ahead of him, and with the US president’s G20 invocation that Paris has to actually mean something ringing in his ears, he’s limbering up for movement.

Direct Action stays until the review in 2017, Turnbull said in Manila, repeating the formulation we’ve heard before. Then, nudging the door a little way open. If things were lagging where they should be, “we always have the option of buying international credits,” Turnbull noted casually, as if this was the most rational thing in the world.

It is an entirely rational course, but bringing international permits into the mix was once considered by this government as a thought crime worthy of a period of indefinite detention.

So you see what he did there, right? That little stretch of the hamstring.

On this trip, Turnbull and the journalists following him have been out of the domestic news cycle, not because we are trapped in the touring bubble of hoary old cliche, but because there have been too many serious and meaty developments to process and cover while hurtling around time zones.

There’s been no time to listen to the murmurings back home.

But if the posturing of Bolt is any barometer of the feelpionions of Australia’s rump of wounded conservatives, and one suspects it is, then Turnbull is flying back into interesting times.

Because Turnbull’s real existential challenge is not winning points in the hermetically sealed halls of the world and gaining the personal mobile numbers of a bunch of world leaders – it’s keeping his riven government together and moving them carefully towards the political centre in good time for the next federal election. To put the task simply, he’s got to appeal to rational self-interest in an era where self-interest tends to prevail without the tempering rationality. The early field evidence from the opinion polls suggests Australians want Turnbull to succeed, but there are people in his own show who would have rather lost with Abbott than won with Malcolm.

Turnbull and the Court of King Malcolm are acutely aware of this fact, it’s inescapable, but the instinct of the prime minister is always to expand rather than contract.

The story immediately after this trip is just how long is Malcolm’s piece of string? He’s had a small taste of freedom trotting about the globe, and he’s attempted to bank it for a rainy day.

But just how much repositioning can a mulish conservative bear?