(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

There’s no greater interview subject than a former prime minister with an axe to grind, and Malcolm Turnbull proved that last night with a star turn on the talkfest organised by the Community Independents Project. 

The project, run by the former independent member for Indi Cathy McGowan, had invited the Statler and Waldorf of Australian politics — Turnbull and his Queensland mate Kevin Rudd — to opine on media and democracy. 

While we can pretty much predict what Rudd is going to say on the subject — he’s been calling for a royal commission into the Murdoch empire for years — it was Turnbull who really let fly on a few topics, including the character of the current PM. 

“My successor Scott Morrison does not give the impression that he feels he is as accountable as certainly I did, or as Kevin did, and you know perhaps Abbott and Gillard and, you know, Howard and Keating and so forth,” he said. 

“There is a sort of sense of invulnerability and a sense of being able to just treat the electorate as though they are all goldfish you know and have a memory of, you know, only a few minutes. It’s the normalisation of lies.”

Turnbull also gave the 2800 listeners a few insights into the state of Liberal Party politics. 

“We have got a situation where until really literally until last week, the moderate Liberals, the people who could reasonably be described as the small-l Liberals, were absolutely kept hostage by the right wing,” he said, adding that he could speak with great authority on this topic. 

“I’ve been deposed as leader of the Liberal Party trust by the right wing of the party, working with right-wing media … which is basically in coalition with the Liberal and National parties and government, and their MO [modus operandi] is one of a terrorist.

“But what they basically do is say: ‘Unless you give us what we want we will blow the joint up.’ And the moderates … have basically been held hostage by that and that is why you have this independent movement going on.”

He said the people in charge of the Liberal Party regard the base of the party as not the voters but the right-wing media outlets like Sky after dark, the tabloid newspapers and Alan Jones on 2GB. (Jones left 2GB in 2020, but we know what he means.) 

Rudd was also very concerned about truth: “It is a view now that objective truth doesn’t matter in much of the political discourse, and that there is no holding to account of a political leader, or of a political party, or of a local representative, in either expanding the truth which is verifiable or measuring the truthfulness of commitments made to the community.

“The second and related concern is the nature of the political process in institutional politics has produced, I think, a generation of political representatives who have little real world anchoring in the communities from which they come. Factional nurturing within the political party has taken absolute priority both in the left and the right.”

(Rudd, always factionally unaligned, hates both factions equally. By 2010 the feeling was pretty much mutual.)

Rudd then took us back to the halcyon days of 2008 when he was prime minister and people actually listened to him. 

“I would seek often as prime minister to speak with the [press] gallery, one on one, about what we’re working on … say Copenhagen on climate change, or what we’re doing about the Defence white paper 2009, and about the five- or seven-minute point, they would politely say to me: ‘Yeah, but Kevin that’s boring as batshit. What have you got for me for tomorrow?’ Because, and that is the qualitative difference, frankly, between the discourse between government and the fourth estate.” 

Fair shake of the sauce bottle, indeed.