Malcolm Thomas Brough was born in December 1961. He is the current member of parliament for the seat of Fisher, based on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Between 1996 and 2007, he was the member for Longman, based on Brisbane’s outer northern suburbs. Brough recently announced his retirement from parliament would take effect at the next election. His brother Rob is also reasonably well known around the country as the host of a retired version of the TV game show
Family Feud and he still reads the news on a regional Queensland television network.
Mal Brough was an army officer and ran some small businesses on the Sunshine Coast prior to his entry into parliament. He was also ‘noticed’ early by the powers that be in the Liberal Party. Despite being elected originally in 1996, he was appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business in 2000, Minister for Employment Services in 2001, Assistant Treasurer in 2004 and went on to be the Minister for Revenue. In January 2006 he was appointed Minister for Families, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, a position he held until he lost his seat (along with John Howard) in the November 2007 election.
As minister for indigenous affairs Brough was the minister behind the
Northern Territory Emergency Response in 2006, where the claim was made that reductions in social security payments and an increase in presence of ‘the authorities’ would somehow combat alleged high rates of child abuse and neglect in the outlying settlements of the Territory.
The Monthly, in an article from September 2013, paints a less than appealing side of Brough’s personality.
The Northern Territory intervention, the declaration of what amounted to martial law in Aboriginal communities awash with grog and plagued by child abuse, seemed the perfect vehicle for the captain-turned-politician. As indigenous affairs minister, he could bark out orders and expect them to be obeyed. Certainly, Howard thought Brough’s military background equipped him with the “right style” for the job. “His army training had given him a mix of authority and mateship,” he wrote admiringly in his memoir.
In making the case for the intervention, Brough projected the air of a commander addressing his troops on the eve of battle. The Australian public, he declared to parliament, were “willing to put their shoulder to the wheel when they feel that finally they can help to improve the lot of their fellow Australian citizens — the first Australians.” He concluded: “This is a great national endeavour and it is the right thing to do.”
Once he was out of parliament Brough became president of the Queensland Liberal Party for five months until the merger of alleged equals with the Queensland National Party was to occur. Brough resigned as president as well as a member of the party. According to
The Monthly: “I’ve just had a gutful, quite frankly,” he told Fairfax Radio.
Under the terms of the formation of the LNP in Queensland, existing MP’s were guaranteed pre-selection for the 2010 election, and moderate Liberal Alex Somlyay in Fairfax as well as former Liberal but at the time National Peter Slipper in Fisher chose to take advantage of the guarantee, despite Somlyay recovering from throat cancer and Slipper’s less that stellar local reputation. It is claimed that Tony Abbott offered Somlyay an overseas posting to ‘free up’ a seat for Brough but the offer was refused. While the matter was referred to the Australian Federal Police, nothing ever came from the complaint.
It is history that Slipper accepted the offer from the ALP Government to become Speaker of the House subsequent to the 2010 election — and subsequently resigned from the LNP. Brough announced his intention to ‘serve the people of Fisher’ in December 2010 for the 2013 election knowing that pre-selection guarantees were a one off deal for the 2010 Federal election. The LNP’s leadership would have preferred James McGrath, the architect of Campbell Newman’s Queensland election victory and a former advisor to Boris Johnston, Conservative Party Lord Mayor of London, to be the candidiate in 2013. By the stage of the preselection however, Brough had built up local support and was subsequently selected to be the LNP candidate. Slipper ran as an independent.
Brough and Slipper’s aide, James Ashby, met during 2012. The details of that and subsequent meetings, together with the subsequent unofficial release of Slipper’s official diary entries by Ashby to a News Australia journalist via Brough are still under investigation by the Australian Federal Police.
Independent Australia has written extensively on what they have termed
Ashbygate — should you wish to read further, their reading list is
here. Turnbull government ministers Christopher Pyne and Wyatt Roy are also under investigation over the same issue.
There is no way to know what the federal police are investigating, as quite rightly they will announce the area of their enquiry (in this case the misuse of official information — namely the diaries of the Speaker of the House) but not the specifics. It would be akin to the state police announcing that they will be knocking on the door at a specific address at 2.30pm in seven days’ time to look for evidence of an armed robbery. No doubt, if the evidence was in existence, it would not be where the police told the world they would be looking in seven days!
Having said that, investigators don’t just start looking into people’s lives because they drive a silver car, are holding a busload of people up on Monday morning when they can’t find their bus card or other meaningless justification. There has to be evidence of some potential misdeed reported to the authority with jurisdiction prior to an investigation being launched. Apart from the resourcing issue (investigations cost money for staff wages, telecommunications, office space and the rest of it), there has to be a reason to place people under a certain amount of (possibly unfair) speculation surrounding being the subject of ‘investigations from the authorities’.
It could also be suggested that politicians, as leaders of the community are held to a higher level of behaviour than others. Is it equitable? Probably not, but it is easy to argue that those who make the rules for others should clearly abide by the rules.
For instance, police, public officials and so on are expected to avoid conflicts of interest and uphold the laws they have a responsibility to enforce. Justices of the Peace — who are volunteers in the legal system — are not permitted to accept any reward for their services (in Queensland at least) and are expected to report any conviction made against them to the relevant government office. Should such a report be made, the expectation would be the Justice of the Peace will be asked to resign their office.
Malcolm Turnbull obviously knew when he appointed Brough, Pyne and Roy to his front bench that there was a possibility the investigations that were underway would produce evidence of some misdeed. As we have already discussed, the police don’t investigate people for the fun of it.
So why did Turnbull appoint them? Surely he has enough political smarts to realise that appointing three ministers who potentially will have to resign in disgrace wouldn’t be a good look — as well as being (several) ‘free kicks’ to the opposition parties. But then again, Turnbull doesn’t seem to consider how his choices and actions will be received at all. Perhaps it is a ‘born to rule’ mentality; perhaps it is that he believes the triple twists (with pike) that he has performed over the past few months since becoming prime minister; or perhaps he believes that we all want him to be prime minister so badly, we’ll accept anything.
To be fair, conversations about refugees, climate change, tax cuts, budget repair and so on are all things that Turnbull inherited from Abbott, and it does take time to turn around the workings of any large organisation including the federal government. Upon gaining the prime ministership, Turnbull claimed there would be a great deal of difference between him and his predecessor(s). Last November, Mark Kenny from
Fairfax observed
Turnbull is in a hurry and his core message is the same to all of them [the impressive array of summits he attended soon after gaining office]. Australia, he wants them to know, is back — back in the international community, back participating in multilateral forums, back in the digital economy, back in the climate change discussion, back in the 21st century.
His oft-made observation that the household internet names — Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and Netflix — would still be in short pants if they were people, is designed to communicate his relaxed relationship with economic disruption, with change as opportunity rather than threat.
Such observations fit perfectly into Turnbull's nuanced Australia presentation — one that eschews dogma, and instead synthesises solutions as needed, applying the best arguments and policies for a given problem. Results are all that matters, he says.
By 9 February 2016, even
Andrew Bolt was questioning the ability of Turnbull to get anything done. Michael Gordon,
The Age’s political editor discussed Turnbull’s
metamorphosis from charming persuader to brazen scaremonger, from agent of optimism to voice of doom, and from true believer to barrister with a brief. Gordon, unlike Bolt, actually made an attempt at analysis of the problems Turnbull faces:
The dangers are everywhere: recalcitrants on the backbench who will revolt if Turnbull proposes anything they do not like; a Treasurer still struggling to justify his can-do reputation; and the prospect of Australia's longest election campaign since the 10-week odyssey of 1984.
But the biggest danger is that the approach invites cynicism on two fronts. The first is that Turnbull's scaremongering is at odds with his previously stated convictions on negative gearing. Just like his embrace of a plebiscite on marriage equality, or "direct action" on climate change. This is why he needs to announce his tax plans sooner rather than later and focus on his blueprint for the future.
Turnbull was communications minister in the Abbott government. So let’s have a look at NBNCo
something he had carriage of — the NBN. You might remember the ALP were going to connect over 90% of Australian properties to a fibre cable, much faster that the currently available ADSL and ensure that those who missed out on the direct fibre connection were to receive access to similar speeds through the use of satellites. The LNP claimed that the network proposed by the ALP was gold plated, the roll out too long and not worth the money it was going to cost. Turnbull’s plan (after Abbott made him communications minister and publically gave him the task of destroying the NBN) was going to be completed
much sooner, much cheaper and more affordably. So how’s that going? According to an internal NBNCo
report:
the giant infrastructure project has fallen two-thirds short of its benchmark construction timetable. Connection costs to each house or business are also blowing out. The model had been marketed to voters as superior to Labor's NBN because it was ‘Fast. Affordable. Sooner’.
The ‘final design’ process for connections — needed before construction can start — is running far behind schedule, according to the February 19 report.
The Coalition's NBN roll-out is beset by delays and rising costs. While 1,402,909 premises should have been approved at the date of the report, the figure was sitting at 662,665 — 740,000 fewer than planned. The snapshot says NBN Co has achieved 29,005 fibre-to-the-node ‘construction completions’, while noting its internally budgeted target for this period was more than three times that at 94,273.
So sooner — nope; cheaper — probably not; affordable — not only is it looking like not being any more affordable to build, but the running costs are higher as each of the ‘nodes’ on street corners to convert the digital signal from the fibre to the analogue signal used in the household copper connections needs a power connection and electricity to operate.
The NBN failure is entirely Turnbull’s fault as he was the minister who had carriage of the project for an extended period of time. It was on his watch; he was responsible and the argument that he inherited the mess when he took over as prime minister is clearly a fiction.
Sometime in the next six months, Turnbull is going to be appearing on your TV and on your internet screen suggesting that he leads a government than can creditably manage this country for the next three years. Just remember:
- how he has managed the NBN rollout since 2013 (it was his job under Abbott),
- his ethics in the appointment of Mal Brough to his ministry, as well as
- how the ultra-conservatives are still driving the real agenda
and the only reason he’s there is that his party determined the previous bloke was worse.
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