Independent Australia Contributing editor-at-large Tess Lawrence hopes that the ascension of Malcolm Turnbull to the prime ministership will usher in a better and less brutal form of politics.
ON TUESDAY IN PARLIAMENT, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull came to praise Caesar and not to bury him.
On Monday, though, in front of Canberra’s Parliament House, Malcolm Turnbull, sans the portfolio of communications minister that moments earlier he voluntarily relinquished, came to bury Caesar and certainly not to praise him.
He ruthlessly politically disemboweled his longstanding nemesis, the now former Prime Minister of Nowhere Tony Abbott.
Abbott was well hung, drawn and quartered. Buried alive. The budgies in his smugglers surely shrivelled.
But even as the first knife turned in Abbott’s back, embedded in Turnbull’s words were those sly siblings — spin and strategy.
It was imperative to portray the coup against Abbott’s leadership as more than both an expedient expression of personal ambition, and the desperate move of a Party and Coalition Government dying in the polls.
An increasingly autocratic prime minister was indisputably intent on further imprisoning the Australian people in an hostile environment that was making aliens of us in our own country, suffocating the human and legal rights of the individual, suppressing freedom of speech and freedom of the press, especially the media’s role as inquisitor.
