Turnbull’s first interview with Leigh Sales on The 7:30 Report last night was very interesting. Not because he said anything new about politics or policy, but there was one particularly revealing quote that I think is worth publishing in full, because it describes a very different perspective than we are used to seeing from the Liberal Party.
LEIGH SALES: Life has dealt you some great cards that few people get, right? You’ve got a great brain, everyone would agree, good parents, good health, lovely family, good education, enormous wealth. What do you say to Australians who might think, “Well how can Malcolm understand what it is to struggle for anything ’cause Malcolm’s had everything that he’s ever wanted?”
MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, the truth is I have been extraordinarily lucky. I have had to struggle in my life. I didn’t – I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth, by any means. But, you know, the reality is that even if you’re born with brains, you know, with a higher-than-average intelligence, that is as – in a sense, as undeserved as somebody who inherits a billion dollars. The fact is we’ve all got to recognise that much of our good fortune is actually good fortune. Of course you work hard. Look, I’ll give you an example. I remember when I was a partner of Goldman Sachs in New York, very successful investment bank, everyone was earning very big money, the chairman, the chief executive of the firm gave a sort of pep talk to the partners and he said, you know, “We’re doing well. We’re making lots of money ’cause we work hard and we deserve it.” And I said to him afterwards, just quietly, I said, “You know, there are taxi drivers in this city that work much longer hours than anyone does here and they don’t earn very much at all.” So, the truth is, we don’t really deserve our good fortune. And that’s why, if you are – if you do well, you’ve got to give something back. That’s why I encourage people to be generous. I encourage – that’s why I encourage and practise philanthropy. And in terms of understanding the situation of others – all of us are different, right? So the truth is nobody can have experienced exactly the same experience of any other Australian. The important thing is to have the emotional – emotional intelligence and the empathy and the imagination that enables you to walk in somebody else’s shoes, to be able to sit down with them on a train or on a – in the street, hear their story and have the imagination to understand how they feel. Emotional intelligence is probably the most important asset for – certainly for anyone in my line of work.
It’s an interesting philosophy from a man who, as Sales pointed out, has achieved success not many Australians have access to. What he’s describing, without actually using the word, is a concept feminists talk about all the time: privilege.
Turnbull is a wealthy, white, middle class, well-educated, able bodied, intelligent, attractive, heterosexual man, born in Australia. He’s sitting on top of the intersection of just about every possible privilege you can think of, and he’s recognising that for what it is – opportunities he was born with, that are either totally out of reach, or at least extremely difficult to access, to anyone not born to them. He’s articulating the idea that all too often, people born with those privileges actively resist – he didn’t earn them or deserve them, he was given them. The corollary being that people who have not achieved success are not inherently lazy or undeserving, they just didn’t have to opportunities available to them that men like Turnbull had. Additionally, he has taken the next step of understanding that those of us who have been given opportunities denied to others have a responsibility to share the benefits and widen the access to those opportunities.
It’s a very interesting change of perspective, after two years of the baffled anger of entitlement displayed by people like Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott.
Fundamentalism in politics is as dangerous as it is in religion or social constructs. The idea that all Tories are bastards and everything they do is self-serving and deliberately detrimental to working people is as unreasonable as the notion that Labor and/or the Greens are the party of altruism and care for the disadvantaged. Polarisation of ethics or moral value is never true and always puts us at risk of ignoring the best possible options. The broad philosophies of either side of politics may be different, but the truth is that most of us sit somewhere in the middle and can see merit on both sides.
Turnbull appears to be attempting to position his part in that middle space, he is doing it from the liberal view point of free market and small government, but he is a centrist, not a hard right wing warrior. Which was why some of the social media responses to that particular quote from the 7:30 Report were so interesting, Turnbull is a rich white man from the Liberal party, so articulating the concept of privilege was met with disbelief and ridicule. I’m not convinced that the same idea from a rich white man of the Labor party would have garnered the same response.
Politics is always divisive, but the dumbed down adversarial politics we’ve had over the last decade has left us with a hangover of sullen resentment that’s difficult to overcome. And it could prevent us seeing benefits offered by either side of politics that deserve support.
If Turnbull is able to create policy, even from a free market viewpoint, which is underpinned by the recognition of the inherent inequality of opportunity that privilege brings, he may actually be able to achieve some of the goals we all want for Australia.
So far, all he has done is talk, we’re still waiting to see if there is substance behind the style. Without that, he’s nothing more than a social commentator in a nice suit. But introducing the concept of the inherent inequality in opportunities given to us a birth to the public debate is another good first step.