Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Support for Liberals leader Malcolm Turnbull rises

The most recent Newspoll survey conducted for The Australian showed that satisfaction with the opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull has risen by a whopping 4 percentage points to 30 percent! Mr Turnbull's rating as preferred prime minister was up two percentage points at 19 percent, a long way off Kevin Rudd's 66 percent. Of course the accuracy of the Newspoll was impugned by Labor accusations that Mr Turnbull once wanted to join the Labor party, these accusations were made in the lead up to the Newspoll survey.
Mr Turnbull, of course, refuted these claims, saying that it was actually the Labor party who approached him. Qualification wise, Mr Turnbull has got it all. He graduated from Sydney University with a Law/Arts degree and subsequently won the Rhodes Scholarship, which took him to Oxford to complete his Bachelor of Civil Law, the most prestigious and academically demanding postgraduate law degree in the world.  Upon entering the workforce, he served as General Counsel to Australian Consolidated Press Holdings and subsequently became the Chair and Managing Director of Goldman Sachs Australia. With these sorts of qualifications, I imagine that many institutions would be headhunting Mr Turnbull (including the Australian Labor Party).
Nevertheless, there will be people who argue that academic and work qualifications are irrelevant to one's performance as the leader of a nation. History, however, begs to differ. The first Prime Minister of Australia, Edmund Barton, was a lawyer by profession and also a Justice of the High Court of Australia. Amongst other things, Barton was a devout supporter of federalism and played a part in the eventual drafting of the Commonwealth Constitution.  Alfred Deakin, Robert Menzies, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and John Howard are some examples of previous Prime Ministers who were also lawyers by profession. This is not to say that one must be a lawyer by profession to be a good Prime Minister, but history suggests that lawyers have the right skillset to become successful Prime Ministers. Even the front bench of the two major parties are mainly occupied by lawyers.
The most notable exception is Kevin Rudd. Modern day lawyers often place a big emphasis on the use of 'plain english'. This is clearly a notion that Kevin Rudd is not familiar with, who sent German translators into ein schpinn during a press conference with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, that the Major Economies Forum (MEF) was unlikely to deliver much by way of "detailed programmatic specificity" on climate change. I imagine he could simply have said nothing definitive would emerge from the MEF on climate change.

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