Malcolm Turnbull, the great pretender.

I feel really sad with where Australia is at the present moment. I believe that most Australians are seeking a society in which their government is driven by good policy, good leadership and ultimately good government. Sadly our current PM and his cabinet are failing dismally on all three fronts. If Australia could be likened to a ship, we have a PM as Captain floating around in waters, without a rudder. There's no rudder because there is no leadership to steer this ship. The ship has the best motors in the world, the best fuel resources and the best personnel but a faulty leader. All this is crystallized by Malcolm Turnbull’s inability to govern his own party, let alone the whole nation. Instead of being a man of conviction he is seen more and more for what he is … a ‘flag in the wind’.

If Malcolm were a true leader he could have stood with the 62% of Australians who voiced their concerns about marriage inequality in the recent postal survey. He could have actually stood up to the extreme right within the Liberal/National Party’s and called for a conscience vote on the floor of parliament without the need to unnecessarily spend $122M. 133 of 150 electorates voted for legal recognition of same sex marriage and it is now abundantly clear amendments to the Marriage Act should have passed the parliament long ago.

To add insult to injury , practically confirming my thesis of him, he rolls out the ‘grey ghost’ from the past, Phillip Ruddock, the very man responsible for the discriminatory 2004 Marriage Act changes, to consult with the community and recommend legislative amendments. Perhaps Ruddock is the ‘Mr Fixit’? Most of these minority 17 electorate’s who voted No, are areas full of thousands of ‘religious people’ whom Ruddock approved under his discretionary ministerial powers (provided they made substantial donations to the Liberal Party).

Our current PM Malcolm could never be confused with the other Liberal Malcolm PM, former leader Malcolm Fraser. In fact, our Malcolm is not even the shoelaces of Malcolm Fraser. About a half dozen years before passing away, Fraser had the tenacity and courage to distance himself from the (modern) Liberal Party because of what he saw as the cancerous influence of the Conservative Right. Like him or hate him (as my own father did when he was PM), Fraser was a man of conviction and principle and this was evident in his embrace of Multicultural Australia and the opening of the humanitarian efforts to save and settle thousands Vietnamese boat people on our shores. Any Australian who enjoys a good bowl of Pho' has Malcolm Fraser to thank for it.

In his retirement after a long life in politics, Fraser became involved in international relief and humanitarian aid issues and, spoke out domestically, as a forthright liberal voice for human rights. Shortly after Tony Abbott won the 2009 Liberal Party leadership spill, Fraser ended his Liberal Party membership, stating the party was "no longer a liberal party but a conservative party". Now Cory Bernadi and his party are trying to capture that dying demographic slogging it out with Pauline Hanson's One Nation.

What the attitude of the current prime minister shows, is that he is not in tune with the majority of Australians. He will throw whomever and whatever under a bus in order to hold on to power, to the point of cancelling the sitting of parliament. Have a look at what he did to the Uluru Declaration of the nations first Peoples. He has very poor judgment and this was ever so evident in the now famous 2009 'Utegate' affair in which Turnbull accused PM Rudd of corrupt conduct and lying to Parliament. This of course emanated from (now false) allegations fed to him by disgruntled Public Servant Godwin Grech. On 23 June, of that year Turnbull admitted that there was no substance to his allegations against PM Rudd,, and was forced to apologise.

Turnbull is the epitome of a book tile by that other Australian showman 'Prince Lorenzo Montesini ' called "Cardboard Cantata" because that's exactly what he is, a waffling waste of time with absolutely no substance, cardboard.

Malcolm is for Malcolm.