Turnbull. Part2 Seething for power

You have to wonder where there ABC is with all this given the attention the last PM got?

*This part covers the period from 1980 (the end of Turnbull’s schooling) until 2000 (when he re-joined the Liberal Party).

1981 – Turnbull returns to Sydney from Oxford, and has his eye on the Prime Ministership. He has said the particular party he would join to achieve this “doesn’t matter”. Surrounded by safe Liberalseats in his area of Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Turnbull had decided to join the Liberal Party, and now, after a short time at the bar, he would run for pre-selection:

“I contested the Liberal Party’s pre-selection for the very safe seat of Wentworth…Had I won the pre-selection ballot, I would have certainly been returned as a member of the House of Representatives.” 1

Given his known ideological leanings, many of his friends had expressed surprise that he ran for Liberal pre-selection, but he didn’t have much choice if he wanted to be Prime Minister. Finding a safe Labor seat as a well-to-do barrister and eastern suburbs carpetbagger would’ve been too difficult.35

During his run for the seat, the National Times newspaper features a story about a 1977 incident in which Turnbull is alleged to have strangled former girlfriend Fiona Watson’s cat “Nessie” to death. The article said:

“…if Turnbull is preselected he could face some hostile questions from the Animal Protection League.”

Turnbull sues the newspaper in the ACT Supreme Court, and letters emerge that Turnbull had apparently written after Fiona had ended their relationship but before the death of Nessie. The letters were obviously intended for Fiona but, disturbingly, were nominally addressed to Nessie. One of the letters said:

“Dear Nessie,

Tell your miss that I love her very much, tell her that when I came to see her on Sunday and she wasn’t there I cuddled you up and it broke my heart that it wasn’t her.
Tell her I know a lot of her current boyfriends will tell her not to see me, they will stroke her hair back and tell her to forget me.
But Nessie, we know she never will and you tell her, my little cat, how much we were in love.

All my love
Malcolm”

A scan of the above letter has circulated online. See it here.

When another journalist from another newspaper raised the same matter in an article, Turnbull sued again, and received a payment. Indeed, Turnbull has repeatedly denied strangling the cat saying “no cat died at my hands” and that he thinks the cat “got run over by a car“. This had led to a theory that he killed the cat by running it over with his car.

He subsequently loses that pre-selection contest to former NSW Opposition Leader Peter Coleman, but continues to seek political office.

In 1982, the ‘progressive’ former Liberal Prime Minister Billy McMahon retired from his federal seat of Lowe. He endorsed Turnbull to replace him, but Turnbull decided not to contest the marginal seat. Then, in 1983, Turnbull ran for Liberal preselection in the very safe Liberal state seat of Mosman, but again lost, this time to Phillip Smiles.

Turnbull doesn’t run again, and allows his Liberal membership to lapse in 1983.37 Clearly he has no desire for party membership other than as a conduit to personal power.36

24th October, 1984 – Trevor Kennedy, chief executive of Australian Consolidated Press, says:

“Malcolm probably wouldn’t even be satisfied with being prime minister of Australia. He’d probably rather be prime minister of the world.” 37

8th December, 1984 – A Business Review Weekly magazine article recognises the seeming paradox of Turnbull, that he has close associations with the Labor Party but his attempts at a political career are all with the Liberals.

“…despite his cultivation of Labor politicians and Labor lawyers, Turnbull had become a member of the Liberal Party, with aspirations to a political career.”

Of course, when you understand that Turnbull lives in a very safe Liberal seat, and needs a safe seat to become Prime Minister, you can understand why he probably has no other realistic option but to join the Liberals. Finding a safe Labor seat to contest as a carpet-bagger is probably not going to work for someone like him.

17th December, 1984 – The Supreme Court of NSW dismisses a defamation lawsuit Turnbull was running for his client, Consolidated Press Holdings, saying that it was an “abuse of process”. Justice Hunt said that Turnbull:

“…managed effectively to poison the fountain of justice…”

July, 1985 – Writing in the Bulletin, Turnbull defends High Court “Justice” and former Whitlam Labor Attorney-General Lionel Murphy following his criminal conviction for perverting the course of justice. Murphy is, of course, an old friend of Turnbull’s mother and an ideological ally.

The Labor Party strongly support Turnbull’s article, with Peter Bowers writing in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“Turnbull’s article in this week’s Bulletin magazine, asserting that Murphy’s conviction was a miscarriage of justice has been hailed by the Labor Party at large as the last word on the subject.” 38

January, 1986 – Turnbull becomes involved in the Spycatcher case, where he teams up with the far-left (including communists) in a lawsuit against Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative British government. I’ve put the details of Turnbull’s involvement in this case in a separate article, for the sake of tidiness.

Note: Turnbull had left the bar a few years earlier,35 and therefore had no obligation to take this case.

4th November, 1986 – Writing in The Bulletin, Turnbull praises left-wing Labor stalwart Lionel Murphy. Turnbull said history would look kindly on Lionel Murphy’s achievements – more kindly than upon his critics who would be forgotten “because of their insignificance“.

Murphy’s primary critics included B.A. Santamaria, mentor to Tony Abbott.

9th December, 1986 – British journalist Michael Davie writes about Turnbull’s left-wing tendencies in The Age newspaper, saying:

“There was evidently a moment when he entertained ambitions about orthodox politics, when he stood for pre-selection first in Wentworth. and then in Mosman. He tells people now that he has moved to the left. This is just as well, since Labor is in office in both Canberra and New South Wales.”

Davie also reports that:

“…Mr Turnbull says he is neither Anglophile nor Anglophobe. He is, I would say, a Turnbullophile.”

16th March, 1987 – Turnbull tells Australian Associated Press that he had feared a judge involved in the Spycatcher case “was a conservative judge“.

March, 1987 – Turnbull launches an investment bank with two Labor Party figures. They are former NSW Labor Premier Neville Wran (whom Turnbull would later say was his “best friend”), and Nicholas Whitlam, son of the radical leftist and former LaborPrime Minister, Gough Whitlam. His nickname among the bank’s employees was “The Ayatollah”.39

1st October, 1987 – Turnbull attends a benefactors’ luncheon for Bob Carr, who was then a state Labor MP for the NSW seat of Maroubra and a minister in the Unsworth Labor Government. It is revealed that, while working at The Bulletin together, Turnbull and Carr were co-authoring a spy novel set around the 1980 Olympic Games. They are longtime “close friends” according to Turnbull.

26th January, 1988 – Australia celebrates the 200th anniversary of colonisation. Malcolm Turnbull looks over the celebrations, and is angry that the British Royals are prominent attendees. In his book The Reluctant Republic, he later writes:

“That Bicentennial year was a year of shame. Every major event was presided over by a member of the British royal family.” 2

Considering we were celebrating the bicentennial of Britishcolonisation, Turnbull’s dismay seems rather irrational.

30th August, 1988 – In an interview on SBS’s ‘Speaking for Myself’ program, Turnbull says: