Quarterly Essay 34 Stop at Nothing by Annabel Crabb

Author:Annabel Crabb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
ISBN: 9781921825330
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2009-05-31T16:00:00+00:00

LIFE AFTER HOWARD

When I first go to see Malcolm Turnbull about writing this essay, he is already settled in suite RG109 in Parliament’s House of Representatives wing – the office of the Opposition leader. It’s quite a pleasant suite; its corner office, earmarked for the Opposition leader’s chief of staff, commands a good view of the courtyard through which MPs and ministers often pass on their way to Question Time.

But it’s not an office that’s hosted much by way of happy times over the course of its recent history. Of RG109’s five previous occupants – Brendan Nelson, Kevin Rudd, Simon Crean, Mark Latham and Kim Beazley – only one has achieved the common goal of quitting it for the office thirty metres to the north.

The place looks different from when Brendan Nelson worked here. A big William Robinson painting hangs on the wall opposite the door, for example. It’s a good one, a huge canvas from Robinson’s endearing barnyard series, on which two dozen lovely chooks strut this way and that, eyes bright and quizzical and combs comically awry. It doesn’t belong to the Parliament House art collection. It belongs to the Turnbulls, and it must be a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of painting, at the very least. Lucy bought it originally for their farm, because the farm manager disapproved of chickens and Lucy felt that a farm without chickens was incomplete. Now that the painting has been relocated to Canberra, it provides comic relief to the principal occupant of suite RG109.

“Alex [Downer] and I used to amuse ourselves by working out which chooks reminded us of which colleagues,” remarks Turnbull, when I admire the painting. “Alex always wanted to be that one there” – indicating a splendid rooster.

Downer and Turnbull are much better friends than is widely recognised. As foreign affairs minister, Downer used regularly to stay at the Point Piper house, enjoying the hospitality of the Turnbulls’ home with its good cellar and gorgeous views.

“Well, I have known him since we both stood in preselections in 1981,” says Downer. “I stood for the preselection in Boothby, and he stood for Wentworth. We both lost, and we commiserated with each other on the grounds that it was perfectly obvious that the worst candidates had won. We agreed that we were the stand-out talent, and the tragedy for the nation was that it would now have to wait for that which could quite easily have been its at an earlier date.”

Talking to Downer is always fun. He is much more amusing than it might appear from his press conferences or television appearances – funny in a raucous and faintly inappropriate way. One senses that he is always teetering on the edge of a blithe solecism of one kind or another.

The drawback of being a journalist in conversation with Downer is that one must gird oneself at every turn for his jibes at journalists, every man jack of whom he firmly believes to be a devoted agent of the Australian Labor Party.

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