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John Stapleton
Worked as an Australian journalist for much of his life. Fascinated by Medium.

Coup Capital of the World: Australia

The Demise of Malcolm Turnbull

Image The Independent

I am a vengeful god

The Lord is a jealous and avenging God; the Lord takes vengeance and is filled with wrath. The Lord takes vengeance on his foes and vents his wrath against his enemies. Nathum 1:2.
In the end, the oligarchs who seize power are judged not by the way they rule but the way they fall.
And there was nothing pretty about the brutal demise of Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s 39th Prime Minister and arguably the country’s worst.
This was a government which mismanaged everything.
Literally everything.
The man left behind a broken political party cruising to electoral wipeout.
He also leaves a country suffering rapid population growth and demographic transformation without any proper management or analysis of the social consequences, much less any coherent policy development on common sense issues like roads and schools.
A successful immigrant nation has been transformed into polyglot society divided by ethnicity, language, social status. class and conflicting interests. A country which, despite all the government’a relentless diversity propaganda, is deeply divided along class, religious and ethnic lines.
Turnbull leaves behind a country with some of the world’s worst and most expensive internet, highest electricity and housing prices.
The political and bureaucratic castes remain at war with the people.
National pride has fled out the window. There is no social cohesion.
That is the man’s real legacy.

The Final Hours

In the end, the Emperor had no clothes.
Holed up in his office, surrounded by enemies, the media pack no longer his friends, the dying hours of Turnbull’s leadership were as excruciating and as undignified as his reign.
He tried every dirty trick in the book to cling to power.
First, on Thursday, he suspended parliament, a motion narrowly passed along party lines after a scathing response from the Opposition. At the same time he questioned Peter Dutton’s eligibility to sit in Parliament because of some of his investments.
Even though he must have known more than half the party room were against him, Turnbull then demanded 43 signatures for the spill motion to proceed, a call without precedence.
This list was promptly leaked to the media and Turnbull used it to lure back dissenters, just to get his pick for successor in place.
Even as he was dying in front of the cameras, he would turn back to have one more say.
He couldn’t shut up.
The words he had used as weapons all his life now boomeranged back to flay his flesh.
Malcolm Turnbull may yet succeed in taking the ship down with him. The government is in on a one-seat majority.
A by-election in his wealthy Sydney seat of Wentworth could easily be lost to the Greens, a reinvigorated Labor Party or an Independent.
And down may come the government.

Honeyed Words: The Valedictory Deceits

“For Malcolm, for Lucy, for their family and for his personal staff, who are as loyal and as close as family, this is a very hard day indeed,” Opposition leader Bill Shorten said.
He also spoke of his enduring respect for his “formidable opponent”, recognising Mr Turnbull as an “advocate of great intellect and eloquence” and a politician driven by a “desire to serve” considering his late entry into Parliament.
“Australian politics will always need people like that, on all sides.”
The last thing the country needs is another Malcolm Turnbull.
They were the honeyed words. They were the height of insincerity. They mocked each other as much as the nation’s dark forces mocked the living.
Only a couple of days before this same man was declaring Turnbull “the weakest Prime Minister we’ve seen since Billy McMahon”.
His previous, more honest attack, covered the “turmoil” of the leadership spill, “dismal paralysis” on policy, the Prime Minister’s “notoriously poor judgement”, the charge that he had ignored “the real challenges of the Australian people”, and the “divisions at the heart of this government which cannot be papered over by simply changing the salesman”.
Federal Liberal Leader Nick Greiner predicted history would judge Malcolm Turnbull more kindly than some of his colleagues, saying the former prime minister had run the best cabinet government since John Howard.
He also agreed with Turnbull that there had been some elements of the media working against him over the past three years.
Challenger Peter Dutton declared: “I only nominated because I believe that I was a better person and a person of greater strength and integrity to lead the Liberal Party.”

The Final Press Conference as Prime Minister

Image Courtesy the ABC

Transcript Extracts Courtesy of The Guardian

On the ‘wreckers’

There was a determined insurgency from a number of people both in the party room and backed by voices, powerful voices, in the media. Really to bring — no, not bring down the government, certainly bring down my prime ministership. It was extraordinary. It was described as madness by many, and I think it’s difficult to describe it in any other way.

On Peter Dutton and Dutton Abbott

Disunity is death in Australian politics, as everyone says, and it’s perfectly obvious. But the people who chose, Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott and others, who chose to deliberately attack the government from within, they did so because they wanted to bring the government down. They wanted to bring my prime ministership down. And they — while, you know, the consequence is that I’m no longer PM.

On the Leadership Ballot

Insofar as there has been chaos this week, it has been created by the wreckers. I have done everything I can to maintain the stability of government and the stability of the party. But, of course, if people are determined to wreck, then they will continue to do so.
I have always been focused on what I can deliver for the Australian people. That’s why this week has been so dispiriting, because it just appears to be, you know, vengeance, personal ambition. You know, factional feuding, however you describe it. It hasn’t had anything to do with 25 million Australians,

On Party Disunity

Image The Guardian
Australians will be just … dumbstruck and so appalled by the conduct of the last week. You know, to imagine that a government would be rocked by this sort of disloyalty and deliberate, you know, insurgency.
Many Australians will be shaking their head in disbelief at what’s been done.

From his own Side of Politics

Addressing herself to the Prime Minister she once championed, star columnist at The Australian Janet Albrechtsen wrote:
You cannot work out that greatness comes from both humility and confidence, each needed at different points in the performance cycle. You said once you didn’t know what humility meant. You told a friend you wanted to be Prime Minister by the age of 40. When he asked “for which party?”, you said it didn’t matter.
Your Rudd-level narcissism means you are headed the same way, into political oblivion, bridges burned, a political party in disarray and a country let down.

The Future: A Straw Man Cometh

The Fall of King’s Landing. Deviant Art.
On Friday, 26 August 2018, Australia saw its 6th change of Prime Minister in 11 year.
“What did you think of yesterday?” the old newspaper reporter asked at his local cafe.
“We have a new Prime Minister?”
“Yes.”
“What’s his name?”
“Scott Morrison.”
“Never head of him. What happened to the other one? Starts with ‘D’.”
“Dutton.”
He shrugged.
A young tradie, tattoos curling across his fingers and up his neck, pipes up: “I thought Kevin Rudd was still Prime Minister. You can’t pay attention to all this shit. Does your head in.”
All the same policies were still in place. Crushing public debt. Insane levels of immigration.
Falling educational standards. Australia now ranks below Kazakhstan in mathematics and science, and general literacy os falling. The failure to address these issues will have long term consequences for the country.
Sky high petrol, electricity and housing prices. Choked cities. A political class deeply out of touch with the electorate. Atrocious foreign policy, captive to America’s wars and tens of billions of dollars of American military contracts.
As Turnbull gathered his family around him at the official residence in Canberra, The Lodge, the subject of a recent multi-million dollar renovation, the scenes amongst his subjects were equally calamitous.
Just without the taxpayer funded luxury.
The new Prime Minister was quick to continue the show pony aggrandising of his predecessor, making helping drought-stricken farmers his number one priority. An easy sell.
Miccia Corta
This was the same government whose policies had devastated rural communities across the country, condoned banking practices which had driven family after family off the land, imposed insane levels of legislation and paperwork on farmers and jacked up input costs, including fuel and electricity, to barely sustainable levels.
And which had overseen the selling off of significant swathes of prime farm and grazing land to foreign interests, most particularly to the Chinese.
Using the plight of farmers to further your own political purposes was just business as usual for this mob. Cheap cheap cheap. Cheep Cheep Cheep.
Plunder the Rich. Give to the Poor.
That was the government of Australia.
Vale Malcolm Turnbull. Vale Australia.
This is the final in the series on the Demise of Malcolm Turnbull.
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THE QUAGMIRE COLLAPSES: THE DEMISE OF MALCOLM TURNBULL
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FROM OUT OF THE MAELSTROM: A VERY AUSTRALIAN TWO HORSE RACE
THE MANY LOWS OF MALCOLM TURNBULL’S PRIME MINISTERSHIP
WAR CRIMES: THE TERRIBLE LEGACY OF MALCOLM TURNBULL
BETRAYING THE FUTURE: THE WORST INTERNET IN THE WORLD
AUSTRALIA’S ASSAULT ON FREEDOM OF SPEECH
WE COME NOT TO PRAISE BUT TO BURY
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Parliament of Australia’s official website post the coup