‘WHAT IS THIS thing, this Malcolm Turnbull?’ pondered one of the correspondents in Sydney University’s bratty student newspaper, Honi Soit. It was June of Turnbull’s first year at uni, 1973, and he’d stirred up a mini hornet’s nest by attacking the board of the university union—the body that represents students and staff—for refusing to rent the Rugby Club a hall for its annual ball. Unfortunately, in his letter to the editor, Turnbull had accused the union president, professor Phil Jones, of duplicity, rounding off with a Monty Python–esque spray:
If the union can’t provide basic services to its own clubs, to its own members, then the gang of sycophantic sybarites that are too cowardly to stand up for the students they represent, let alone play a game of rugby, should retire to that place where all carping pinch-back would-be Caesars belong—anonymous ignominy.1
The good professor went straight to his lawyers, giving Turnbull an early experience of being at the wrong end of a defamation threat—of the kind he would soon wield freely and expertly. A week later the apology appeared:
I, Malcolm Turnbull, hereby retract and apologise for any distress I have caused Prof Jones in my letter to Honi last week. The letter was couched in a strident tone to arouse rather than to wound. I have great faith in Prof Jones’ management of the union.2
After deriding his ‘false apologies and idiotic letters’, Honi’s columnist decided this thing called Turnbull was ‘just a person that wants to have its name in print because that sort of thing is good publicity for Union Board elections’.3 A wounded Turnbull hit back earnestly, saying that his original beef was well worth complaining about and his letter was certainly less idiotic than much else in Honi—which was true.
Student politics can be a proving ground or a minefield for aspiring political hacks, or a complete waste of time. On the conservative side of politics, John Howard, who had to work especially hard during his law degree to overcome his deafness, took zero interest in student politics when he was at Sydney University in the late 1950s and early 1960s—although he was nominally a member of the Liberal Party.4 Tony Abbott, by contrast, devoted a good part of his five years on campus to campaigning for the Sydney University Democratic Club, which was affiliated with Bob Santamaria’s Catholic anti-communist National Civic Council,5 and running for the presidency of the Students’ Representative Council.6 Joe Hockey’s clever ploy was to eschew both Liberal and Labor allegiances and build support among the not-very-political students at the uni’s residential colleges, mainly by putting on free beer when he wanted their votes. He won the presidency of the SRC in 1987.7
Malcolm Turnbull threw himself into it. He got top grades in all his first-year subjects, but he was no swot. He was drawn to where the action was and soon got involved with Honi Soit and the union. The question was, what did Turnbull stand for?
Sydney University was in turmoil in the early 1970s. Gough Whitlam was elected prime minister in December 1972, ending twenty-three years of conservative government. In the first days of government he declared higher education would be free. That same year, Sydney’s student body had also been reshaped: the University of Sydney Union had been formed by amalgamating the men’s and women’s unions and introducing more direct student representation. In 1973, a general strike of Sydney’s academic staff was called after the university senate made an unprecedented intervention to block the appointment of two female lecturers to teach a course in feminist philosophy. The senate backed down. The Economics Department was split between proponents of classical theory and the new breakaway subject of political economy.
Turnbull burst onto this tumultuous uni scene full of vigour. He was still living with his father, but Bruce’s situation was much improved: in 1970 he had bought a luxurious three-bedroom flat in Longworth Avenue, Point Piper, with spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge, and was happily remarried. His second wife, Judith Womersley, followed him into the real estate business. Malcolm was on the electoral roll at the same Longworth Avenue address in 1974 and would stay enrolled there for a decade, but he seems to have moved out within a year or two: university friends remember Turnbull living in a flat on Military Road, Watsons Bay, right near the famous Doyles seafood restaurant.
A key early influence on Malcolm at university was the writer Bob Ellis, Turnbull’s senior by twelve years, who had achieved fame with his hit 1970 play The Legend of King O’Malley. Ellis said they met by chance around 1973: ‘I had a girlfriend who I lost, and she turned up again with Malcolm about eighteen months after she left me, and to my chagrin I got to like him … We then used to go out rooting, and we would find ourselves alternatively in the same beds with different women and so on.’8
Ellis described Turnbull then as ‘ardent, ambitious, promiscuous and old beyond his years’.9 Ellis thought Turnbull mimicked his own third-person writing style.10 They were close for a while and began to co-write a musical on Jack Lang, to be called Lang Is Right! Lang was then in his nineties but was still doing tours of schools and universities, and spoke on the Sydney campus in 1973. If the Turnbull–Ellis script survives somewhere, neither man is letting go of a copy. Turnbull has said the play was ‘terrible’—one line rhymed ‘Patagonia’ with ‘new Australian utopia’. But he must have been serious about the project at the time, because it contributed to a falling out between the co-writers, when Ellis said he got a taste of the Turnbull temper, which would soon become notorious:
I was of course egocentric and always doing other things … eventually he came around to discuss the play and I didn’t want to see [him], so I told him to fuck off. He broke the door down and raged at us till dawn, which intervention caused us to move to the northern beaches.11
As the premier of cash-strapped NSW during the Depression, Lang brought on a constitutional crisis in 1931 by refusing to pay the very high interest on the state’s debts to British investors, so he could keep up dole payments for the poor, with unemployment topping 30 per cent. The Government Savings Bank of NSW, holding millions in state debt securities that were rendered worthless, suffered a public run and collapsed, to reopen later under Commonwealth control. The Scullin Labor government in Canberra, legally responsible for all states’ overseas borrowings, picked up the tab for NSW, sued the state in the High Court, and won. Defiant, Lang ordered public servants not to deposit revenues into federal-controlled bank accounts as required by law, but to receive payments and pay themselves only in cash. It was an extraordinary ploy; NSW governor Philip Game declared it illegal and removed Lang from office in 1932—the first dismissal by the Crown in Australia and a precedent for governor-general John Kerr in 1975. Labor was annihilated in the subsequent state election, but ‘The Big Fella’ remained leader of the state party for another decade.
Lang’s story fired Turnbull’s patriotic republicanism. England itself had been forced to renegotiate its war debts to the United States during the Depression. So had Germany. Many South American countries did the same with their debts to England. Why would not Australians, when pressed, do likewise? Lang already had a track record as the ‘battlers’ friend’ who, in his first stint as NSW premier before the Depression, had reinstated the 44-hour week and brought in worker’s compensation, child endowment and widow’s pensions—drawing partly on the hardship he’d experienced being brought up by his own mother, a war widow. Lang knew what poverty was like.
Upon Lang’s death in 1975, aged ninety-nine, Turnbull wrote that he was ‘a passionate man in the noblest sense of the word’. He went on to argue that the former premier’s reforms were not actually that radical despite his fiery reputation: ‘if Lang’s depression policies appear wild and misguided it is only because of the comparison with the “safe” and inhumanly cautious policies of the other governments of the day’.12 Yes, Lang was the hero at the eye of the storm who stood for the people against the banks, taking a great fall on a matter of high principle, the crash-or-crash-through approach, as Turnbull would later take on climate change. However, Turnbull did not share Lang’s fundamental political concerns. And Lang’s pre-Keynesian willingness to intervene dramatically in the market to (in modern parlance) stimulate the economy would sit at odds with Turnbull’s more hard-nosed response to the financial crisis as opposition leader in 2008–09. Labor’s treasurer during the crisis, Wayne Swan, loved comparing Turnbull to Sir Otto Niemeyer, the aristocratic British central banker who was sent out from the UK in 1930 to enforce austerity on Australia and tell Scullin to pull Lang into line.13 Lang was also a trenchant supporter of White Australia, and his theories on the international money-ring were downright anti-Semitic. Turnbull’s obituary noted Lang’s last book, Why I Fight, ‘purported to show how the wealthy German Jews of London, through their control of the Bank of England, dominated and manipulated the Australian banks’.14 Asked about Lang in 2009, Turnbull disavowed his early admiration for the man:
He was a very colourful personality and he was larger than life in every respect … [but] he was filled with vituperation and venom. I wouldn’t ever have wanted to have one zillionth of his bitterness. As my understanding of that period developed … [I came to the] view eventually that Lang was a bit of a coward.15
Odd, because Lang can be criticised for many things, but it’s hard to see how lack of courage is one of them.
Turnbull was struggling to find his place, politically. In 1973, at the same time that he was writing a play about Lang with Ellis, he joined the Liberal Party and would remain a member for a decade. He must have kept it pretty quiet, because it surprises people who knew him at this time; plenty of his contemporaries, including Ellis, thought he leaned the other way. Turnbull was grasping for the centre, somewhere left of Liberal and right of Labor.
One of Turnbull’s contemporaries at Sydney University was Laurie Ferguson, then active in the NSW Labor Council, on his way to becoming a federal Labor MP. The Labor Council was completely disinterested in student politics, preferring to focus on taking control of Young Labor, but it was willing to use support from the university’s sizeable Labor Club. As Ferguson remembers:
I recall Turnbull coming to the club, and he made this very passionate speech about how all of the progressive forces at the university—in other words, small-L liberals like himself, the communists, the Labor Party—should come together in what he called a popular front, a reference to World War II and left-wing anti-fascist forces. The club had no interest in that whatsoever because we weren’t really interested in university politics full stop … So then he advertised in the Daily Bull to establish this group. I can’t even remember the name of it, but it had a meeting on the bottom floor of the Wentworth building, on City Road, and I went along with a few mates, to have a bit of a stir in some ways. He opened the meeting and after 10–15 minutes a guy … simply got up and said ‘I move that this organisation be closed’. That was carried, and that was the end of the organisation!16
Malcolm Turnbull does not dispute the Ferguson story, but his memory—somewhat dimmed by the passage of time—is that he was rebounding from an unsuccessful attempt to win student support to edit Honi Soit: ‘As I recall it I was suggesting that the non-communist forces combine against the extreme left. This was prompted in part by my losing an election for the editorship of Honi Soit against two communists—Chips Mackinolty and David McKnight.’17 A more promising path opened up when Turnbull was introduced to the flamboyant Gordon Barton, the maverick businessman, owner of bookseller Angus & Robertson and publisher of Nation Review, then a pace-setting weekly current-affairs magazine employing Mungo MacCallum, Michael Leunig, Bob Ellis and others—slogan: lean and nosey, like a ferret.
Dubbed ‘Australia’s Great Gatsby’,18 Barton’s story is fascinating. Born in Indonesia in 1929, the boy had a very tough childhood: he was sent to Australia to board during World War II while his parents remained in Surabaya on Java, lost his older brother in the war, and was joined by his mum shortly before his dad was taken prisoner by the Japanese. Barton and his mother had nothing—the only income came from whatever she could make from house-cleaning. From an early age Barton did odd jobs like gardening and began to save, determined to lift his family out of poverty. A brilliant child, he received a rare, fully funded scholarship to study arts/law and, taking advantage of a loophole in the by-laws allowing him to double-count subjects, undertook the remarkable feat of also studying for an economics degree at night. He completed all three degrees while juggling work for a judge, his weekend gardening and a long-haul trucking business he’d set up with a mate.
The bohemian Barton was not only a natural entrepreneur. At Sydney University in the 1950s he hovered on the edge of The Push crowd—libertarians who embraced free love and free thinking. In 1966 he took out a full-page advertisement in The Sydney Morning Herald, timed to coincide with the visit of US president Lyndon B Johnson, denouncing the Vietnam War and the craven support of prime minister Harold ‘All the way with LBJ’ Holt. Barton had been a member of the Liberal Party on campus for years but campaigned against the Menzies government’s move to ban the Communist Party, ultimately ruled illegal by the High Court. Barton’s ad in the SMH was a bridge too far for the Liberals, who expelled him. But Barton got so much public support that he and some friends decided to form a new political party, Liberal Reform, and contest the federal election due to take place the next month. Barton wrote the new party’s policy platform, almost at one sitting. He was also a publisher, and took courageous stands by running the world’s first photos of the My Lai massacre in his Sunday Observer, forerunner of Nation Review, and by flying in Australian journalist and communist sympathiser Wilfred Burchett, denied a passport by the Liberal government, for speaking and writing engagements. Barton’s party was renamed the Australia Party, did well in the 1969 election and preferenced Labor in 1972, adding some four extra seats to its tally and helping Whitlam form government. The Australia Party would later form the nucleus of Don Chipp’s Australian Democrats.19
Turnbull, studying constitutional law in second year, was outraged that country electorates in the House of Representatives were so much smaller, by population, than city electorates—giving country votes a disproportionate say. The Whitlam government put up a referendum to entrench ‘one vote, one value’ in the Constitution in 1974, but it was defeated. Turnbull, twenty, wrote an article in the Union Recorder about a challenge planned by one of his law lecturers, Peter Paterson, who hoped the High Court would emulate the US Supreme Court, which found in 1964 that the US Constitution required congressional districts to be of equal size.20 Paterson and Turnbull met with Barton, hoping he might fund the case. As Turnbull recalls:
Barton was very supportive. The argument was based on the similarity between Article I, Section II of the US Constitution … to section 24 of our Constitution. In each case the constitutional language is the same. Gordon arranged for some grown up legal advice to support me and I filed suit in the High Court, there were some other cases on the same point and the issue was finally heard in [the case of] McKinlay v Commonwealth.21
The majority of the High Court rejected the challenge, finding the Constitution did not guarantee ‘one vote, one value’ in the House of Representatives. Turnbull continued to write about the issue.22 As well, Turnbull was mightily impressed by Barton, and did a long interview with him which ran in Honi Soit in mid 1974.23
Matching wits with Barton, young Turnbull’s admiration comes through from the first word of the Honi Q&A to the last. The piece introduced Barton as a self-made millionaire, ‘for those that [have] been asleep for the last ten years’, and had the air of a chat between like-minded chums, in furious agreement on the causes of the current economic crisis. Turnbull sounded more like the son of a small businessman than a student do-gooder:
Barton: ‘In Canberra there is no possibility of understanding what is going on in the economy. Because almost all the people there are not subject to the pushes and pulls of economic circumstance; they get paid their wages every week and all goes along according to a long term plan.’
Turnbull: ‘This is the lunacy of having a bush capital. But before the Depression [prime minister Stanley] Bruce was saying that the nation needed to be run by a group of sound-headed businessmen and enough of all these public servants. Do you feel financial policy would be better if there was more notice taken of people like yourself, that are in business?’
Barton: ‘Well, yes. But not only businessmen—trade unionists and farmers and so on. People who are working in the economy, and are, as it were, where it’s at.’
Turnbull: ‘Is the Treasury loath to consult people like yourself?’
Barton: ‘I think they think they do [consult]. I think they greatly exaggerate the extent to which they do.’24
It was a love-in, but with some far-sighted discussion. Turnbull asked Barton whether Labor could survive as a viable political force while it was tied to the union movement, still a live question today (and one which shows where Turnbull and Labor part ways). Barton said the Labor project was a victim of its own success, having created an affluent, middle-class society, and that after the incompetence of the Whitlam years the party would not be trusted with government for a very long time, if ever, creating room for a new political force with appeal to idealists and progressives.
Turnbull pressed Barton on his decision to step back from the Australia Party, and posed a question he could easily have asked of himself:
Turnbull: ‘You seem to be in the same dilemma as the English Liberals. Are you right of Labor or left of Conservative or what?’
Barton: ‘The English Liberals would say this left, right business is a bit ridiculous anyway. It’s the language of a hundred years ago.’25
You can almost see Turnbull nodding in agreement here. Certainly, Barton was brilliant, sexy and inspiring. There are enough life parallels to suggest that Turnbull took a leaf or two out of Barton’s book: Turnbull, like Barton, would get very rich. And then, like Barton, he would plough a fair bit of that money into his own political movement.
Turnbull started to contribute more frequently to Honi Soit. No statement was too bold or too sweeping. For example, in a solid bit of analysis on US Republican president Gerald Ford’s re-election prospects in the aftermath of Watergate, he opened with: ‘As a nation the Americans are particularly hysterical, and their politics are no exception.’26 And in a piece on Whitlam that was full of undergraduate musings on leaders from Hitler to de Gaulle, there was a presumptuous warning that the PM was surrounding himself with yes-men, taking too many overseas trips, and losing the support of the party. Turnbull appeared to have contacts inside the ministry, and he cautioned that Whitlam ‘should stay home and have a few beers with his caucus critics, and a few less ego massages from the smart young men on his staff’.27
As he tried his hand at journalism, Turnbull continued to shine in debates, as he had done at school. At the weekly university union nights held at the new Wentworth building, over free dinner and too much red wine, debates ran as a mock state parliament, with the leader of the ayes dubbed the premier and the nays’ boss the leader of the opposition. Topics were not always serious. In 1974 Turnbull won the Henry Lawson Poetry Prize—which had been won by his mother, Coral, in 1948—for a piece of verse he composed and delivered in a debate on the topic ‘That a woman is just a woman but a good cigar is a smoke’.28
Another arts/law student, Bob Gaussen, first encountered Turnbull at one of these weekly union nights, and recalls that Turnbull could take either side on any topic at two minutes’ notice and deliver a crushing defeat to his opponents.29 In both 1974 and 1975, Turnbull would captain the university’s winning team in the intervarsity debating competition, and represent Sydney in the combined Australian University team. Gaussen was a year ahead of Turnbull, enmeshed in student politics, and the two became quite good friends—he helped Turnbull out with his old textbooks and lecture notes, as did others. Gaussen was on the board of the union, which turned over almost $1 million and had dozens of employees running cafes on campus, the brand-new Manning Bar and child-care facilities, as well as publishing the Union Recorder, putting on films and concerts and so on. Towards the end of 1974, Gaussen was headed for a second term unopposed, this time as president, meaning he could name his own board ticket. Just before nominations were about to close, Gaussen had to dump one of his candidates and found himself short of a running mate. He called a few people, including Turnbull who, standing by the Gestetner machine pumping out the election notices, convinced Gaussen to take him on.
The big issue that year was a 70 per cent price hike in union-run cafes and bars. Turnbull’s short statement to voters made some worthy promises about setting up a supermarket co-op for students, installing wheelchair ramps and accessible toilets, pruning bureaucracy and creating more casual jobs, and concluded with a flourish: ‘For too long the union has been run by mealy-mouthed, long-serving directors with little regard for the members. Elect a director that’s not afraid to fight for what he believes.’30
It was enough. Turnbull was voted up as a director of the union—his first electoral contest—on Gaussen’s coat-tails. Early the next morning, as a joke, he snuck into the union boardroom and pinned a sign on the door, which was right across from the president’s office: ‘Malcolm Turnbull. Leader of the Opposition. Knock to Enter.’31
By the end of his second year, Turnbull was at the heart of university life even if he’d been beaten in more elections than he’d won—and was looking beyond the campus. Turnbull had put a few none-too-subtle questions to Barton during his Honi interview:
Turnbull: ‘Do you think that the Nation Review is dominated by an incestuous, cliquey ingroup?’
Barton: ‘It is a bit inbred, both the people that write it and those that read it.’32
Whether or not it was intended, it was not a bad way to get the attention of Nation Review editor Richard Walsh. When, over the summer of 1974–75, Turnbull went on a trip to the United States and England, he made the most of it, filing his first colourful pieces for Nation Review. One was a vain attempt to interview disgraced US president Richard Nixon, who had finally resigned in August, at the ‘Western White House’—his home in the Republican stronghold of San Clemente, south of LA. Turnbull did speak with former White House aide Franklin Gannon, and wondered why such an intelligent young man would work for Nixon.
More sympathetic was an interview with the confounding governor of Alabama, Democrat George Wallace, a white-hot segregationist in the 1960s who delivered the most famous racist political speech in American history,33 and who once stood in a doorway of the state’s university to block the entry of a black student—defying president Johnson’s civil rights laws and the US Supreme Court, but winning crucial support from the Ku Klux Klan. Crippled in a 1972 assassination attempt, Wallace ultimately won the abiding loyalty of Alabama voters—including 70 per cent of African Americans—as a champion of the poor. By 1974, Wallace ruled the state with ‘an iron fist that would have been the envy of Jack Lang in his heyday’, Turnbull wrote. Encountering the young Australian journalist, Wallace’s greeting was warm: ‘Well, we like Aussies in the south.’ ‘They do too,’ wrote Turnbull, clearly charmed. ‘For many southerners the White Australia policy has made Australia appear as a last bastion of white supremacy.’34
Perhaps Turnbull was testing the boundaries: his next stop on what was shaping up as a world tour of prominent reactionaries was London, for an interview with Enoch Powell. The maverick politician had split with his Conservatives in the 1974 general election—he’d accused prime minister Ted Heath of betraying English sovereignty by joining the European common market—and thrown his support behind Labour’s Harold Wilson, who formed a minority government. Powell was an elemental force: a brilliant, Cambridge-educated classics scholar and poet who became the youngest professor in the Commonwealth when appointed by the University of Sydney in 1937, aged twenty-five (where he taught Gough Whitlam)—he had hoped to beat his hero, Friedrich Nietzsche, who became the world’s youngest professor at twenty-four. Powell quit abruptly to return to England to fight when World War II broke out in 1939, and enjoyed a meteoric rise from private all the way to brigadier (just short of a general) by war’s end. Entering politics as a Conservative member for Wolverhampton, north of Birmingham where he grew up, Powell achieved lasting infamy in 1968 with an inflammatory speech opposing the anti-discriminatory Race Relations Act, in which he warned that if immigration from Commonwealth countries was allowed unchecked, Britain would be racked by the same ‘colour question’ dividing the United States.
Turning up at the House of Commons with his TAA flight bag stuffed with notebooks, a camera and tape recorder, and an apple core (binned at security), the twenty-year-old Turnbull pondered the enormous Union Jack flying above the British parliament, oblivious to the fall of empire and rise of debt, ‘its bright colours picked out against the sombre sky, a symbol of confidence in a city where all whom men call wise are filled with gloom’.35 But when he was finally ushered in to see Powell, the interview did not go well. Turnbull put it to Powell that his unwillingness to moderate his unorthodox opinions on race—on almost everything—had rendered him a Cassandra figure, ‘a voice in the wilderness cut off from the reins of power’. Powell checked him: ‘The important thing to remember about Cassandra is that she was right.’36 Then Turnbull hit a brick wall, receiving an answer guaranteed to stump any progressive:
When asked what motivated him in politics he [Powell] replied: ‘Ah, you’ve never met a real Tory, have you? I am a politician because I like being a politician; I am like the man who plays the violin because he enjoys doing so. However not all men who play the violin would like to do so in the Albert Hall, if they were not good enough at it. But politics is essentially public, so I practise the art I love and which I am good at in the public arena.’37
It is hard not to sympathise with the reporter. Where to from there?
It must have been a comedown when Turnbull returned to Australia in February 1975 for his second meeting of the union board, to consider new formats for union dinners, the provision of ramps and toilets for paraplegics, and funding the purchase of union chess clocks. A bigger battle was brewing: the new editor of the Union Recorder was also a director of the union board, and had struck a secret agreement with a printing firm, Media Press, owned by then-little-known Lebanese businessman Edward (Eddie) Obeid. Turnbull moved a motion that the editor be removed, but he resigned before the motion could be considered. He remained a director of the board, however, so president Bob Gaussen marshalled the evidence needed to remove him. The nub of the allegations was that he had allowed a private commission agent to handle the printing of the Union Recorder, and had received favourable treatment from the printers ‘with regard to his own private financial dealings’—all previously unknown to the board.38
Fast-forward to the big night, the convening of a special meeting at which Obeid was present. Before the crucial motions were to be debated, however, a diversion: somebody must have been keyed up, because the meeting solemnly resolved that ‘Malcolm Turnbull be whacked over the knuckles with a wet noodle!’ Then everyone got down to the serious business at hand. Two charges were upheld, but the meeting found that while the editor had acted incompetently in not providing details to the board, and had a conflict of interest, he was not guilty of a deliberate misrepresentation. Gaussen remembers Turnbull as a staunch ally during the stoush; he was already living up to his middle name! Obeid was thanked for his attendance—some forty years later he would wind up at the centre of the worst NSW corruption scandal since the Rum Corps.
The Union Recorder needed a new editor, but Turnbull was not interested. He was busy juggling his study with his writing for Nation Review, which was paying him 30 cents a word. Meanwhile, partly off the back of the big interview in Honi, Gordon Barton was keen for Turnbull to play a role in the Australia Party. Barton’s followers were wary. Campaign coordinator Fergus McPherson recalls telling Barton that Turnbull was ‘a bit young’:
to which Gordon replied, ‘Sure Grandpa’. This was a justifiable dig at an apparatchik protecting his dunghill! Since I had been actively involved in the Liberal Reform campaign since I was [Turnbull’s] age in 1966, Gordon was entitled to dish out that sarcasm. Perhaps the Australia Party would have been more successful if I had vacated the field for Malcolm!39
Turnbull does not recall ever joining the party, and other prominent members like David Hill and Shann Turnbull cannot remember him being involved in campaigns, but in 1975, apparently, Turnbull ran for president of the University’s Student Representative Council as a member of the Australia Party club, coming fourth in a field of four, beaten to the prize by fellow law student David Patch40—some thirty years later, his Labor opponent in the federal seat of Wentworth. Patch remembers a debate at the union building between the candidates—himself, Turnbull, a Democratic Labor Party (DLP) guy and a long-haired Trotskyite:
[Turnbull] was on the other side of this great big wide board table … and he taunted me and heckled me ruthlessly during my speaking time, which annoyed me considerably but I managed to restrain myself … When he spoke it was my turn, so I returned the favour, and you could see Malcolm getting visibly more and more angry. Then he lunged at me across the table … he had to dive across the table to get to me, and he knocked me backwards with his left hand and was sprawled over the table and I fell backwards off the chair. The other people in the room grabbed him before he could finish me off.
We raced down to the SRC afterwards, me and another mate from the Labor Club, and printed off a special edition of Labor News, the official bulletin of the Sydney University ALP Association, with the headline, ‘BASHER TURNBULL!’ We … handed them out the next morning at the gates of the university. Malcolm, as per normal, threatened to sue me. I said, ‘Go ahead Malcolm, I’ve got no money!’41
It was one of many occasions—over twenty, Patch thinks—in the space of a few years in which the two men went head-to-head in an electoral contest. There were representative positions open to students at the SRC, senate, arts/law, plus the editorial post at Honi Soit and so on. Each time Turnbull went up against Patch, Patch won—right up until they fought for the big one, a seat in federal parliament.
Turnbull filed more regularly for Nation Review as constitutional crisis overwhelmed Canberra: the Senate blocked supply to the Whitlam government in the wake of the Khemlani overseas loans affair, an ill-conceived attempt to borrow US$4 billion from Middle Eastern backers without the appropriate authorisation from Treasury. The young Turnbull was vehemently against the Liberals’ strategy, writing: ‘Malcolm Fraser and his supporters may well be economic conservatives but in their desperate rush to seize power they have proved themselves to be nothing more than political fascists.’42
Just weeks before it happened, Turnbull was confidently predicting that the Labor-aligned governor-general, John Kerr, would ‘not dismiss Gough’ despite the urgings of Messrs Fairfax and Murdoch. But Turnbull’s main focus was the Constitution:
No matter which of our tall national leaders ends up with a white Mercedes, the current fracas in Canberra has demonstrated what a woefully undemocratic document the Australian Constitution is. Of all the ill-conceived anachronisms sprung from that tortured piece of late-Victorian prose, the Australian Senate takes first place. Alone among the creatures of our Constitution, it has been a total failure from its first sitting.43
He made the familiar arguments: why the Senate was not and had never been a states house; why it should not have the power to block supply; how 70 per cent of the voters received one-third of the votes in the Senate; and how constitutional loopholes meant that rural votes counted for more than city votes in the Lower House. No wonder the Country Party was so vocal in gunning for Whitlam, he wrote—if he abolished their gerrymander, they would lose a third of their seats: ‘For 73 years the rural interest has perverted the electoral system; it is not surprising its leaders are now in the vanguard of the attempt to cut short the elected government’s term of office.’44
When Kerr did dismiss Whitlam and Turnbull was proved wrong, his writings grew more outraged:
I doubt that Kerr considered that by dismissing Whitlam he has condemned himself to an eternity in the history books portrayed as a villain. He will be seen as a more despicable version of Philip Game, who dismissed the elected government of NSW premier Jack Lang in 1932. With equal justice, or injustice, Whitlam has been elevated to the status of a political martyr. No matter what may happen to him in the coming elections, he is assured of the foremost place in the hagiography of Australian Labor.45
Turnbull argued Kerr had alternatives—instructing the Senate to pass supply, and calling an election—and picked over the detail of the governor-general’s royal instructions which obliged Kerr to act on the advice of his ministers. ‘Can this unelected ribbon-cutter be permitted to act on the advice of people other than the elected government?’ Turnbull asked.46 He concluded that while Kerr had not broken any specific command in the royal instructions by sacking Whitlam, ‘he has certainly flown in the face of the royal instructions’ general tendency which at no place envisages the possibility of a governor-general disobeying his ministry’.47 A republican was born—one who desperately wanted to codify the so-called reserve powers of the governor-general that Kerr had used to sack Whitlam.
A subsequent Nation Review piece by Turnbull explored more thoroughgoing constitutional reform: to introduce multimember electorates chosen by proportional representation, as in Germany, to allow smaller parties to gain a foothold. Governments would have to be coalitions, forcing everyone towards the middle:
A government of moderate Laborites and liberal Liberals may form a coalition of the centre with opponents to their right and left. It would probably spare us from both the Ivor Greenwoods and the Jim Cairnses of this world, in favour of the Jim Carltons and Gough Whitlams … Splits in the major parties would be more likely as splitting would not necessarily mean the wilderness for the splitters. Opponents of such a reform are legion. The most fundamental complaint … is that it allows minor parties to win representation. This is only the large parties fearing the end of their monopoly. Real democrats would welcome such variety.48
Original. Informed. Unrealistic, if not completely unsaleable. How different was Turnbull’s reaction to the dismissal to that of Tony Abbott, already the instinctive, conviction politician: at Sydney University Abbott organised rowdy flag-waving rallies in support of John Kerr.49
As the Whitlam government collapsed, Turnbull’s old family friend Neville Wran was making inroads as the new state opposition leader, offering a way forward for the ALP. At the beginning of 1976, heading into his fourth year at uni, Turnbull wangled a seat in the NSW parliamentary press gallery. NSW was grinding towards the end of a decade of Liberal Party government: Robert Askin had handed the reins over to Tom Lewis in 1975. Turnbull’s reporting was certainly sympathetic to Wran Labor and decidedly unsympathetic to the faltering Liberals. In one of his bigger Nation Review pieces, at the end of 1975, he had attacked the Lewis government’s anti-porn laws, written around the spurious new legal concept of ‘indecency’, and showed his libertarian streak with the closing line: ‘Once again, the Liberal party have shown themselves to be liberal in name only.’50
A leadership coup kicked the year off: Eric Willis rolled Tom Lewis to become the premier, and an election was called for May. Turnbull thought the change vital if the Liberals were to have any chance of winning the election, writing: ‘Lewis’ popularity was at an all-time low and he had only his own stupidity to blame.’ He compared Lewis with deposed Liberal leaders John Gorton and Billy Snedden, observing that ‘the population expects Liberal leaders to be grey-suited Tories of the bluest stamp. Askins, Menzies and [Victorian premier Henry] Boltes win elections. Gortons, Sneddens and Lewises are likely to lose them.’51
Willis was in the conservative mould, but Turnbull would soon be likening him to a ‘shifty grocer’52 and talking up Wran. Wran was no Whitlamite policy adventurer, wrote Turnbull, but a ‘bread and butter politician’53 hammering at the fact that NSW had the country’s dearest public transport, petrol, milk and bread. But as the state election neared, Turnbull added that Wran stood for more than hip-pocket issues, that he wanted to appeal to the intelligent, middle-class swinging voter with liberal reforms like decriminalising both homosexuality and marijuana use. Though covering his first election campaign, within weeks Turnbull had become bored:
When we look beyond the leaders and their respective chances of victory, we see nothing but a long, grey horizon of mundanity [sic]. Trains, buses, the price of milk and fines for polluters, jails, taxes, class sizes, the price of land and the cost of conveying it; these are the issues of a state election. They affect all of us one way or another … But they are dull. They excite no passion.54
Wran won, just, and Turnbull was effusive: he had the ‘common touch’, was a people’s champion, and had ‘worked tirelessly to build up new policies and above all a new, quiet, sincere and thoroughly bourgeois image’.55 In a cosy touch, Turnbull complimented Wran’s ‘energetic and talented’ press secretary, Brian Dale, for cultivating good relations with the press. Soon enough, Turnbull’s state political coverage veered into speculation about the ‘only believable’ next Liberal leadership challenger, the ‘shy but highly intelligent’ and photogenic Peter Coleman, former editor of The Bulletin, whom Turnbull would oppose in a Liberal preselection contest five years later.56 A later piece noted Coleman was ‘an intellectual, an idealist and, for a politician, relatively humble … enough to make him stick out like a sore and unloved thumb in the Liberal Party’.57 As it happened, Turnbull was right, but he made the call a year early. The Libs turned inwards, and soon Turnbull was writing that ‘one could be excused for thinking that her majesty’s opposition in NSW has gone to sleep’.58
Turnbull’s writing certainly wasn’t shy. In July 1976, harking back to an earlier story on Malcolm Fraser’s new tax-sharing arrangements, one of Turnbull’s lead pars gloated:
It is often embarrassing to be right, but I blush not over my correct analysis back in April of the dreaded new federalism … It is nothing more than a cunning attempt to offload millions of dollars worth of government expenditure back onto the States without giving them any means—other than imposing an income tax—of raising the extra revenue needed. Neville Wran claims he was sold a pup. Not so. He has been given a large, extremely hungry and undoubtedly treacherous hound.59
As in Honi Soit, however, Turnbull’s writing was somehow out of place in Nation Review. Unlike Bob Ellis, John Hepworth, Mungo MacCallum and Patrick Cook, Turnbull had not yet crafted a distinctive voice—or if he had, it had a tendency to veer into legalese, what one commentator called ‘old boy’ prose.60 Part of the problem was that Nation Review itself was flagging, a victim of its own success as Fairfax launched into the same space with the iconoclastic National Times. Looking back now, then editor Richard Walsh feels Turnbull’s stories showed how the magazine was losing its way.61
Still, writing for Nation Review had put Turnbull squarely on the radar of the media bigwigs. During 1976, the 21-year-old student took on two new gigs: covering state politics for radio station 2SM, then owned by the Catholic Church but dominating the charts with its ‘more music’ formula, and reporting for Channel Nine. With gumption galore, he had simply cold-called news director Mike Ramsden and offered to cover state politics for him. Ramsden agreed to pay him $40 per story—his initial break with the Packer empire. Describing Nation Review’s left-liberal bent, Turnbull later wrote that he was ‘serving, simultaneously, Marx, God, and Mammon’.62
It was around this time that Turnbull had a chance encounter with the owner of Channel Nine, Kerry Packer. Larrikin adman John Singleton made the introduction, over a dinner, Turnbull later recalled. Eager for more work, as ever, Turnbull had done some freelance copywriting for Singleton—they are said to have co-written the screeching jingle for Metcash forerunner David Holdings: ‘Where do yer get it?’63 Singleton was an occasional Nation Review columnist who had just launched the far-right, no-tax Workers’ Party. Attracted to Singleton’s libertarian, business-led platform, Turnbull wrote a couple of sympathetic pieces on him for Nation Review.64 One night Singleton and Packer were off to dinner, and Singleton invited Turnbull to tag along. Nothing came of it straight away, but Packer would have a driving influence on Turnbull’s life.65
Given he was also trying to keep up with fourth-year university studies, Turnbull was by now seriously overcommitted. Something had to give, and the interminable law lectures were it. Famously, Turnbull paid a fellow student, John O’Sullivan, $30 a week for carbon copies of his lecture notes.66 O’Sullivan, a long-time Liberal Party backer who now runs the Australian arm of bank Credit Suisse, says it was a win–win:
I would happily have taken a copy of my notes for him for free to enable him to do his job as state political roundsman for Channel Nine. To Malcolm’s eternal credit, he insisted on paying me—I well remember him telling him me, ‘You’re enabling me to earn some good money with this job—the very least I can do is pay you something.’ I didn’t have any money at the time and I thought it was very decent of him.67
A few students grumbled, not to mention the miffed lecturers, when Turnbull’s beeper went off and he’d storm out of lectures. Who cared? His grades held up.
Turnbull was hungry—sometimes too hungry. From the beginning he had an ability to piss people off, and he stepped on a few toes as he learned his way around. Something like this happened once too often for Channel Ten’s Paul Mullins who, ticked off by some snide Turnbull remark, decked him. As then premier Morris Iemma told the NSW parliament in a speech to mark the retirement of ‘Mullows’ after more than thirty years:
There was a new freelancer in the gallery with a few tickets on himself. This ambitious young turk, in very typical fashion, said something to which Mullows took exception. Next minute the offender was on his back on the ground. This was not the first or the last time that Malcolm Turnbull has come off second-best!68
Turnbull himself remembers the incident, if not precisely what set Mullins off: ‘I said something to him which suggested he had done a very soft story on a politician that deserved something harder and his reaction was immediate and kinetic.’69
Turnbull cut a cool figure on television. Archival footage from Channel Nine shows the scowling cub reporter in an open-necked shirt and safari suit, with a thick mop of hair and sideburns, putting important if longwinded questions to young attorney-general Frank Walker about legalising victimless crimes, and seated at a Neville Wran presser attacking Fraser’s surprise revaluation of the currency in the days before the dollar’s float.
Over Christmas 1976, Turnbull again took off to London for holidays. While there he spoke at a Cambridge Union debate. Bob Ellis would later claim Turnbull ‘quoted without attribution my attacks on the English’ in his speech.70 Sitting in the audience was the legendary editor of the UK’s Sunday Times, Harold Evans, who later sent Turnbull a handwritten note: ‘Dear Turnbull—magnificent speech. See me in the Gray’s Inn Road tomorrow.’ Turnbull later said it was like getting ‘a message from God’:71 ‘Harry Evans was a hero to every young journalist of my generation. At the Sunday Times he had championed investigative journalism, exposed the horrors of thalidomide. He personified the ideals of independent journalism.’72
Next day at The Times’ office, Evans offered him a job on the spot, but Turnbull said he needed to go home to finish his law degree. A difficult decision: this was one of the best gigs journalism could offer, anywhere in the world. Evans then was at the peak of his powers, and the weekly newspaper’s crack ‘Insight’ team of investigative journalists had unrivalled influence. Evans had hired quite a few Australians, who went on to great things. Evans told Turnbull: ‘Don’t do that. Think of what awaits you. Law will certainly make you more money than journalism—but where does it end? Chief Justice? Or much worse, you could end up a politician.’73
Turnbull took it on board. From London he made an impromptu dash to the United States when Rupert Murdoch announced he would buy New York Magazine and the Village Voice newspaper, landing himself on the cover of Time. Turnbull rustled up a freelance film crew and, desperate for an interview, called Murdoch at his New York Post offices: ‘He was not giving interviews to anybody. So I just started dialling one extension after another. And finally I fluked it—I got through to the extension on Rupert Murdoch’s desk. I said something like “Jeez, Rupert Murdoch. You’ve got to help me out. I’m completely screwed!”’74
The Channel Nine footage shows a bemused, surprisingly groovy Murdoch, then forty-five, in a heavy brown turtleneck, braving a windy Manhattan street to field a few questions from his upstart compatriot. Turnbull was mainly interested in whether Murdoch would impose his conservative politics on his two new mastheads, particularly given the uproar over his blatant campaign against Whitlam in 1975, which led to a staff walkout at The Australian. It was especially pertinent for the radical Village Voice, an underground paper that staff feared could be turned into a daily or a supplement to the Post.
Turnbull: ‘The Village Voice is a very liberal, occasionally left-wing magazine. Are you going to change the political flavour of that?’
Murdoch: ‘No, I just want to encourage a bit more of it. I think it’s an important irritant in this town. It’s been a voice for progress and liberalism in many ways and the main thing is, it’s sort of free, a bit wild, and that’s its character. We wouldn’t dare touch that.’
Turnbull: ‘Couldn’t the day come when you take a particular political stance in New York and impress that on your papers here?’
Murdoch: ‘No. Well, that would certainly be the case with the New York Post, but the Voice is a different thing altogether.’
Turnbull: ‘There won’t be any repetition then of the situation in The Australian in 1975?’
Murdoch: ‘Or ’72? Or which?’ Turnbull: ‘Or both!’
Murdoch: ‘Not with the Voice, no. I hope that those sort of things will never be repeated anywhere. It’s very rare when one feels that one really has to go to the barricades.’75
Murdoch would man the barricades more and more often, of course, as he learned to wield his power on both sides of the Atlantic.
Turnbull also had some fun with the trendy, upmarket New York Magazine, pointing out how its pampered staff had their own special dining room with a $32 000-a-year French chef. ‘No wonder they went on strike when they heard Murdoch was going to take them over,’ Turnbull opined. Asked if the chef would be kept on, Murdoch smiled and said: ‘I would think not.’76
In a cracking coincidence, Turnbull had earlier literally bumped into Robert Hughes, the expat art critic for Time magazine, and grabbed him for a quick vox pop. Unbeknownst to either, within five years Turnbull would marry Hughes’s niece, Lucy. There was a nice exchange between the two Australians, overcoated against the northern winter. Hughes—long-haired and fearless—was good talent, giving Murdoch a colourful spray: ‘I haven’t seen Rupert in fifteen years, not since he fired me as his political cartoonist. I’ve no idea what the bastard’s up to … I just hope that he doesn’t vulgarise [the two papers] in the way he’s quite capable of doing.’77 Which gave Turnbull a nice question to put in closing to the sheepish mogul:
Turnbull: ‘Why did you sack him fifteen years ago?’
Murdoch: ‘I don’t know. I always had very warm feelings to [sic] him. I have some vague memory of an argument over who was to pay for a couple of cases of champagne, I think!’78
It was while abroad that Turnbull got a telegram from managing editor Trevor Kennedy offering him a full-time job at Kerry Packer’s Bulletin magazine. All Turnbull’s work had paid off: it was a big break into the Packer empire, now in the hands of a third generation. Tasmanian Robert Clyde ‘RC’ Packer had founded a media dynasty based on the pioneering Smith’s Weekly, launched in 1919. His son Sir Frank built it up, launching homemaker bible The Australian Women’s Weekly in 1933, and later buying The Daily Telegraph, the tabloid he loved, and the first TV station to broadcast in Australia, Channel Nine. Sir Frank died in 1975, and it would be a few years before Kerry took control of the family business by buying out his older, supposedly smarter brother Clyde. But Kerry was quick to embrace the TV network and made it ‘the one’ with a win-at-all-costs mentality that counted quality as well as ratings. Kerry had the guts and flair to drive revolutions like World Series Cricket and Cleo magazine.
The Bulletin in the 1970s and 1980s—particularly after it incorporated Newsweek—often pumped out more than 200 pages a week, and was chock-full of big-name ads. A century earlier, under legendary founder Jules Francois Archibald, it had been a fiery crucible of Australian identity, nurturing poets like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, but it fell into a decades-long slump after World War I. It was snapped up for a song by Sir Frank Packer in 1960, in a job lot with Women’s Mirror, which he bought to close down. Sir Frank toyed with the idea of closing The Bulletin too, but instead gave it a whole new lease on life under the editorship of Donald Horne, who hoped it would give ‘an informed picture of the life we lead in this country and its extraordinary diversity’. Sir Frank called it his ‘left-wing aberration’.79
Kennedy, founding editor of The National Times, had been headhunted to edit The Bulletin in 1972. He hardened up its news stories and steered it away from the Horne mix of centrism and humanism—according to Nation Review, which commended Kennedy for his pluralism and refusal to tie the magazine to one side of politics.80 In his memoir When We Were Young and Foolish, journalist Greg Sheridan, who started at The Bulletin, recalls Kennedy as a serious anti-communist, yet also an editor who wanted his writers to have strong views, and supported a diversity of opinion.81 Sheridan compared the magazine under Kennedy to a fast-paced Spectator, or the front of the New Yorker. An incredible array of talent worked at Kennedy’s Bulletin: future political leaders like Turnbull and (later on) Tony Abbott; senior writers like Robert Drewe, David Marr, David McNicoll and Alan Reid, and future editor-in-chief of The Australian, David Armstrong. There too was Bob Carr, a thirty-year-old education officer at the NSW Labor Council, whom Turnbull met while researching a story about the Australian Workers Union, later profiled for The Bulletin and recommended to Kennedy. They became good friends. The Bulletin’s offices were plush, with leather-topped desks and leather-bound swivel chairs. Long lunches were the norm. Circulation doubled and doubled again, until it was selling well over 120 000 copies a week at its height. Kennedy moved up the corporate ladder at ACP, handing the editorship over to Trevor Sykes, hired from the Financial Review. Kennedy joined the board of ACP, and ailing Sir Frank gave him the unofficial responsibility of mentoring his son Kerry, then thirty-five and shaping up to take over.82 Hard as nails, Kennedy would soon become managing director of ACP. For Turnbull, he was a good person to have on side.
Sheridan had met Turnbull at Sydney University, and remembered him as an ‘almost impossibly glamorous figure around campus’, with all his media commitments. At ACP, Sheridan found Turnbull brilliant but intimidating. Turnbull’s serious tone fit perfectly at The Bulletin. His early work included solid features on woodchipping and corporate law reform. He also wrote a piece on the future of the monarchy, timed to coincide with the Queen’s second Australian tour in 1977. Headed ‘Long to Reign over Us?’, it opened with:
So long as we can stomach the fact that we have a woman who heads the most bankrupt state in Europe on our coins and banknotes (the one dollar note), and so long as we can still appreciate the irony of hard-headed conservatives taking honours from a woman in whose name an enormous socialist bureaucracy regulates the lives and livings of a nation, then we will probably remain a monarchy. It’s possible that the crunch will come when a future British Labor government decides to drop ‘Defender of the Faith’ from the Queen’s title and style her instead ‘Her Socialist and Desegregated Majesty, by the Grace of the Left Steering Committee, Queen of The Devolved Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (in liquidation).’83
Turnbull was trying on a new conservatism: the mildly republican piece actually softened some of his earlier opinions in Nation Review on the dismissal. It was ‘undoubted that Kerr had every legal right to act as he did’.84 Turnbull fingered Whitlam for making the monarchy more palatable to Australians—and a republic less likely—by styling Elizabeth II the Queen of Australia. Interestingly enough, as Turnbull wrote, republicanism was first made a national issue through the pages of The Bulletin itself, and he reprised its old satire marking Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, including the caustic observation that
the mere fact that something is longer than anything else is not so wholly remarkable as to call for universal joy; unusual length is a circumstance which Victoria’s reign shares equally with the Amazon and the principal boa-constrictor and the 1886 drought … also it is characteristic of the SA railway to Oodnadatta, and of the equator, and the long threepenny beer.85
Under Kennedy, The Bulletin kept up its century-long republican drumbeat, and the pages of the magazine showed a world shifting inexorably to the right: Thatcher was on the rise; free marketeer Milton Friedman got the Nobel Prize for economics; Malcolm Fraser chose to dine with libertarian Ayn Rand at the White House, as a guest of Gerald Ford. Kennedy picked the zeitgeist, running big features such as one on the death of socialism by the ‘godfather of neoconservatism’, Irving Kristol, of the then-new American Enterprise Institute, and a cover story on over-taxation in Australia picturing a suited businessman, cap in outstretched hand, slumped against a wall, headlined ‘What our big govt costs you: wife, two kids and three bureaucrats to support’.86 For Turnbull it was a big cultural change from the larrikin Nation Review.
Within a couple of months, Turnbull had sold Kennedy a brilliant idea: the final-year law student would write an audacious new column, at first called simply ‘The Law’, but soon called ‘The Officious Bystander’. Without a trace of irony, the magazine announced, ‘The law is far too often a mystery to those without legal qualifications’—such as its new columnist!—and promised: ‘Beginning next week, Malcolm Turnbull will start unwrapping the shrouds which surround it.’87 It was a first; the legal profession braced itself and Turnbull was soon making waves, ticking off judges and top silks with all the authority he could muster—and a smile, once his first very grave dinkus was replaced with a happier portrait.
Turnbull’s column was announced along with a sympathetic cover story on High Court judge Lionel Murphy, whom he had known since childhood as a frequent dinner party guest of Coral’s, along with Wran. Whitlam had sown the seeds of his own downfall by removing his attorney-general from the Senate in 1975—then NSW premier Tom Lewis would break convention and decline to appoint a replacement senator from the Labor Party. Murphy’s High Court appointment caused a furore, and while Turnbull touched on his lack of professional experience, and the looming conspiracy case against him, he also defended the judge who wore his ‘political heart on his sleeve’ but was at least up-front about it, unlike others on the bench. Turnbull commended Murphy for ‘dragging our law into the 20th century’, being willing to throw precedent out the window in reinterpreting the Australian Constitution—for example, in a straightforward ruling that the UK could no longer legislate for Australia—and delivering mercifully brief and clear judgments in the style of the US Supreme Court, rather than the sometimes literally incomprehensible fifty-page declarations of other High Court judges.88 Turnbull threw in: ‘American judges discarded the hot and anachronistic panoply of wig and gown over 200 years ago. It is a measure of our conservatism that we are only now beginning to consider doing away with the horsehair and the ermine. Murphy would be happy to see them go.’89
This prompted a correction from one letter-writer from Southport, Queensland, who said Turnbull was perpetuating a myth: ‘He is right about the wig, of course, but not about the gown. American judges of superior courts certainly cling to the gowns. The tendency in Australia to link the words “wig and gown” should not be allowed to obscure accuracy.’90 Between the legal profession and the media, Turnbull was now the meat in the sandwich, for it would not be his last slip-up. Letters poured in. ‘Malcolm Turnbull is no ornament to the profession of law or journalism’, began one.91 Another excoriated Turnbull for using legal-sounding gobbledegook and achieving ‘no less than four inaccuracies in a single paragraph, which isn’t bad, even for Turnbull’.92 Clearly having fun, Turnbull shot back at his critics:
I was accosted in a hotel the other night by an old friend who told me that a number of judges were furious at their treatment in this column. I have never respected the notion that judges should be treated as though they were a combination of Buddha and a vestal virgin. Their names have been noted and their performances will come under even closer scrutiny.93
More letters followed. Another Turnbull column opened plaintively: ‘There’s nothing the matter with being vicious. In fact there is not nearly enough venom and malice in this pussy-footing society of ours.’94 Turnbull rounded out his first year at the ‘Bully’ by calling for the chief justice of the High Court, Sir Garfield Barwick, to step down over comments he’d made in a constitutional case concerning parliamentary representation of the Northern Territory:
In recent years … Barwick has stepped into the political arena in a fashion that not even Murphy would dare emulate. Barwick gave his much-criticised advice to the Governor-General, and now he has been inviting litigants to the High Court so that decisions he disagreed with may be re-heard. Let us not be naïve. Barwick has nailed his colours to the mast. It is time he sailed off into an honoured retirement.95
Certainly no deference to a Liberal Party hero there. To rub it in, just weeks before issuing this sage advice to the country’s most senior lawyer, Turnbull had noted in a cheery postscript that he was ‘vanishing for three weeks to suffer the joys of law exams’96—his last—and that Geoffrey Robertson, Michael Kirby and Julian Disney would write columns in his place.
Kerry Packer famously instructed one of his Bulletin editors to ‘Just make ’em talk about it, son’, and on that criteria alone, Turnbull’s legal column was a success. Veteran journalist Trevor Sykes, who took over as Bulletin editor from Kennedy in 1980, says Turnbull’s most brilliant column was on the Lindy Chamberlain case—a masterful, one-page walk through the chronology of everything the prosecution said she had done in a mere eight minutes, from murdering Azaria to sounding the alarm. ‘I thought it was most persuasive, and nothing in-between has ever changed my mind about that,’ he says. ‘It was well against the prevailing sentiment at the time.’ Sykes, who claims to be the only man who has employed both Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott (also a Bulletin journalist), says Turnbull had enormous energy: ‘You only needed a couple of minutes in his presence and it was bloody obvious he had a brain and a half.’ Simultaneously holding down three jobs somehow was not a problem—Turnbull could adapt to anything. ‘You always knew you didn’t have the whole of Malcolm’s time,’ says Sykes, ‘but he could put more in in an hour than most fellows could put in in a day, so you didn’t worry too much about that.’97
Turnbull did a lot more for The Bulletin than write a feisty legal column. He got around, travelling to the Gold Coast, Alice Springs and Adelaide to do features on property development, Aboriginal law reform and the Don Dunstan phenomenon. He championed Michael Kirby’s work as head of the Law Reform Commission, particularly to allow class actions. He did a lot of digging into drug syndicates and heroin importation and, in a major investigation for the magazine that ran over three weeks, he interviewed ex–Narcotics Bureau whistleblowers who admitted law-breaking and dirty tricks, including spying on a member of the House of Representatives. A colleague, Suellen O’Grady, recalled Turnbull was always in early, bashing away at his typewriter, hitting the keys so hard the desk would shudder. O’Grady worked with him on the hard drug investigation, and ‘we did joke later about the wisdom of sending the girl from Loreto Convent Kirribilli and the boy from Sydney Grammar to infiltrate the world of heroin and dope dealers’.98
On one occasion, Turnbull did a long feature article on student politics, which brought him into contact with a generation of future politicians: Peter Costello, Nick Xenophon and Tony Abbott, who were all trying to take on the Maoists and other left-wingers who controlled the Australian Union of Students. Turnbull famously wrote that
the leading light of the right wingers in New South Wales is twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles … [which have] given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn’t really deserve. Abbott is opposed to any legalisation of homosexuality and generally presents an old fashioned DLP image.99
Michael Yabsley, one of the foremost campaigners for voluntary student unionism, recalled that Turnbull made quite an impression:
There was always a bit of a view that he was doing the writing, while the rest of us were doing the doing … We thought: ‘What’s this guy doing as a reporter? He should be on the floor of AUS council as a delegate.’ We thought he was red-hot talent, but could go either way politically.100
In one genuine scoop, Turnbull and colleague Alan Reid also revealed that prime minister Malcolm Fraser had made an extraordinary request of his finance minister, Eric Robinson, to change evidence he’d given to a royal commission. On the day at least, the story was compared to Watergate.101
Turnbull took a particular running interest in the strange case against Gough Whitlam, Lionel Murphy, Rex Connors and Jim Cairns that stemmed from the Khemlani loans fiasco. Lawyer Daniel Sankey alleged that when the four ministers got governor-general John Kerr to sign an executive council minute authorising the borrowing of up to $4 billion ‘for temporary purposes’—and therefore not requiring approval of the states via the Loans Council—they were conspiring to break the law because the loans sought were in fact for twenty years. Turnbull hinted at dark forces trying to shut the case down:
Throughout the marathon prosecution against Whitlam and others, Danny Sankey has been approached by people with proposals to call the prosecution off. One such intermediary was a well-known nightclub proprietor and underworld figure. He suggested that Sankey call it off in return for a guarantee of no actions for malicious prosecution by the defendants. Sankey declined the offer.102
The case seemed strong on the face of it, but Fraser attorney-general Bob Ellicott baulked, withholding publication of documents tabled in parliament which, if used in evidence, would have supported Sankey’s argument. Neither side of politics was keen to see ministers put up for criminal prosecution just for advising the governor-general. The whole thing was swept under the carpet.
Despite his success at The Bulletin, Turnbull, now twenty-three, had finished his degree and was starting to lift his sights, focusing on the law and moving from journalist to adviser inside the Packer camp. Turnbull had milked his legal affairs beat, making contacts with politicians, judges and top silks, as well as making a name for himself.
He was about to prove the adage that ‘journalism can lead you anywhere, provided you leave it early enough’.