It’s time for another book, folks

Today, we commence the first international reading! Am very excited

For y’all australians that didn’t know, it is my habit to occasionally drink whiskey and read books by politicians so you don’t have to, thusly:

https://twitter.com/killermartinis/status/1231998830104715264?s=21 https://twitter.com/killermartinis/status/1231998830104715264

And here is a thread containing threads of the books previous! I have done many!

https://twitter.com/killermartinis/status/1222930469500674049?s=21 https://twitter.com/killermartinis/status/1222930469500674049

Anyway for non-Australians this dude is Malcolm turnbull, whom most Americans will remember best as the world leader Donald trump first yelled at and most Australians will remember as “wow I didn’t realize you actually could get worse than abbott but here we are”

Malcolm turnbull is if like Boris Johnson owned a hairbrush and an ability to keep his fucking mouth shut sometimes but maybe a little more racist

So! Let us begin! First, we have Mal’s childhood anecdotes. Coral was his mother.

Like I said, Boris with better hair

(I should explain: australians categorically refuse to respect given names. Like I think it hurts them in their tummies. Ergo, tony becomes tones, Malcolm becomes Mal. Which is handy because letter count, in this instance)

After a few pages of his famous pedigree (he’s related to Angela Lansbury) we come to this:

How? HOW COULD YOU BE EMBARRASSED BY THIS, THIS IS AMAZING

Okay so one reason I truly love Australia is the national ethos of not taking anything too seriously

Like until 2017, when mal was PM, anyone could go walk on top of Parliament House which had been designed with that express purpose in mind. So any average dickwad could be more elevated than the politicians working below.

Malcolm turnbull really knew in his bones that all Australians get a fair go because *checks notes* poor people were allowed to go in the ocean

“Fellas, is it gay to eat a banana,” Australian 1960s edition

A quiet but total burn

This is the most Australian anecdote

Every single person who is now refusing to cede any political ground to younger people has some variation of this story from their younger days and loves to tell it and thinks it’s funny

management: murderous since forever

I feel like “always been repelled by intolerance and discrimination of any kind” is a bold claim for a conservative who oversaw Nauru much less the rest of Australia

Bit of an aside: not a week ago an Australian said she couldn’t wrap her head around how small American children can spell difficult places like Mississippi

I fucking present to you:

Wow, young turnbull was way more ethical than the older version

Imagine a Liberal PM in the last decade insisting that businesses pay tax

I feel like “logical consequences” and “hypocrisy” aren’t the same thing. Like the first bit is hypocrisy, why are you mad about the last bit?

I frequently am glad that I’m young enough to live in memeworld because tbh most of these books do spend whole paragraphs explaining the Streisand effect and I will never have to explain that to my audiences. People just know what it is.

The idea of a firm called Whitlam turnbull kinda blows my mind tbh

Every politician who has ever been in banking and writes an autobiography is required by law to include a whole chapter on the arcane details of some deal they did to impress other memoirist politician bankers, I am increasingly convinced

Like there’s a bet going or something

I actually understand most of the jargon around things like liquidity or options and it still bores me fucking silly to read ten pages about the negotiations for options between three rich dudes all trying to fuck each other over

I mean. What? Why? I AM SO BORED

Seriously. For PAGES.

The Russian sense of humor is really hilariously bleak

Dude has by this point become an international deal maker, won international cases as a lawyer against the crown, and after he’d bought his multimillion-dollar property he learned that people need income

(It should be noted for American audiences that the world “plantation” isn’t quite as loaded elsewhere as it is here)

Okay. But turnbull calling someone “eeyore on downers” is pretty great

He...wasn’t wrong. He failed to see the cats coming but he wasn’t wrong

Feminism

Pure grade-a feminism

Lol turnbull might be a billionaire except he couldn’t afford to sue Rupert Murdoch in the mid nineties over some early internet deal

That’s hilarious tbh

Ladies I regret to inform you that we have hit the inevitable “men reimagine their businesses as antiheroes” part of the program

Just as all these books require deal re-enactments, each of these men at some point must say a variation on the following:

Dude. DUDE. If you ever piss off a person from the lower end who’s learned to modulate their accent in order to fit in amongst the wealthy so much they let you have it accent and all

RUN. THIS IS NOT CUTE. THIS SHOULD SCARE YOU. WE DO NOT MERELY SLIP LIKE THIS.

A fully deep cut for my fellow political tragics: can you imagine how utterly horrifically boring meetings between Malcolm turnbull and Jon corzine must have been

Okay, so. I have always struggled to explain to folk outside the states what America is like, and struggled to explain to people in the states what the rest of the world is like

Here’s one of Australia’s top capitalists doing it brilliantly if unintentionally

Like this dude has at this point in his memoir spent decades on grinding deals and international cases and he shows up to Goldman and is like wait what the fuck, do we not human anymore

Uh...actually good work here Mal

This too because an Australian would think it was a trick question and the Americans were dead serious

So first, my bona fides:

https://twitter.com/killermartinis/status/768574761043529729?s=21 https://twitter.com/killermartinis/status/768574761043529729

Secondly, we have just reached chapter eight and I know it’s 5am for #auspol but wherever you are in the world maybe get a drink because we have officially moved between the biographical history and into politics

Chapter 8 is called “an Australian republic”

Okay folks: here comes the racism

Now, for international audiences I should perhaps explain Australia and myself before we get into this.

Every country is differently racist. It’s only the cultural hegemony of the US that really obscures this for US audiences.

My understanding of poverty or sexism or racism or really anything in an international context is, y’know, international. Inherently not having grown up in a place, bringing my own cultural perspective into anything

With that said: the U.K. at least understands class and that class exists and fucks people, on racial lines as well.

The US sort of inherently has to grapple with slavery. Not well, but we can’t pretend.

Australia does not deal with its colonial past well if at all.

Tbh the US doesn’t really either, which is shitty but lots of people start and end with slavery and don’t deal with the stolen land

In Australia they finally said “sorry we invaded and massacred y’all” but that’s basically the end of it for most white folk in charge

Anyway there’s a LOT of history and social struggle and before I just publish Turnbull painting his picture of himself I thought I should say that my analysis will sometimes be clear-eyed as I’ve no Australian myths from childhood and sometimes too broad or off point because same

And with that, let me bring you the first paragraph of chapter eight

Australian exceptionalism.

The notion of a fair go.

Calling boasters and boosters to obscure the fact that the Liberals went with lifters and leaders, which is the same concept but different denigration.

The idea that Australia isn’t jingoistic or flag-waving.

Because, and here is where my analysis might falter, what the fuck else is “stop the boats” if not some jingoistic flag-waving circle jerk?

The very notion that you’d put migrants and refugees into camps, without rights, for however long you’d like to keep them?

And that’s *before* we get into the self-congratulation that white Australians indulged in when, not long ago, the government formally apologized for the stolen generations

Which was considered brave and bold

(The stolen generation was the policy that Aboriginal women’s children would be better off separated from their families and placed for adoption to white Australians or in orphanages. Which is the same shit we did, and do, in the States.)

(Also, if you didn’t know, “stop the boats” is the official policy of Australia, which literally means their version of ICE stops any boats coming to the country in order to stop “certain elements”. This is explained as biosecurity to an island nation. It’s racist.)

(Although the fact they stopped Johnny depp’s boat and pretty much forced him to film a hostage video or they’d kill his dogs is pretty fucking great.)

No, I mean it’s *really great*

(Also a few tweets ago autocorrect went for “lifters and leaders” which is certainly not the same as “lifters and leaners”)

Anyway let us carry on while the former PM waxes poetic about a country that really never existed outside the collective fever dreams of its leadership

As a prequel to this quote may I remind you that a Muslim lady ( @yassmin_a) had to move out of the country because of the violence she would face in Australia for having public thoughts that people@found “un-Australian”

So, uh.

Or that time not long ago that @monaeltahawy asked, rhetorically, on a show that’s about literally @QandA how many men we’d have to kill before they stopped raping ladies and it became a national issue and they pulled the episode because how dare a Muslim foreigner threaten men

Or any of the headlines since covid hit about Asian immigrants being beaten in Parramatta, which is a major suburb of Sydney

The quintessential nature of Australia can be really found in the argument around what’s called Australia Day, which is the day the white people found the place.

Tbh at least in the US we celebrate Independence Day as when someone overthrew a government.

Australia Day is literally “wow. White people showed up.”

(Yes, I know about Columbus Day but that’s mostly mattress sales and used cars at a discount. The actual comparative holiday is July 4)

This is where you find a movement from Indigenous folk to instead call it Invasion Day, which has been met with violence and nationalism

Exactly the kind of flag-waving bullshit Turnbull is so in love with his country for never showing.

Basically the argument there is “but white folks have barbecues and hang out on beaches and have fireworks” and everyone else is like “we know, stop being pricks” and then Karen stomps off in a huff and writes some heated letter to the editor of the Australian

(The Australian is what Rupert Murdoch did before Fox News)

I will leave it to #auspol to explain why this is fucking hilarious but the quick version is that Malcolm turnbull has always been a low-rent Paul Ryan. He is a man who, having amassed wealth, thinks that “falling behind” is a personal decision.

This is some serious magical thinking though. “I choose to see this place as not what it is, but rather what I wish it was. Now, having stipulated that let’s do some analysis”

*pinches nose*

Like obviously this is the NEXT FUCKING PARAGRAPH. OBVIOUSLY.

Also my bad I had previously thought it was a different British dude that showed up to plant the British flag. This is why I say I know I’ll get things wrong, having grown up with different national myths

Anyway here’s his takeaway at the British sending a prince to commemorate 200 years of British rule:

White Australians getting drunk and forming a movement to demand national recognizance is peak. Just peak.

I mean my god

Imagine in 1990 having to grapple with colonialism

Because you wanted to not be subjects of the queen

Because you had a history that was uniquely yours

WHO COULD IMAGINE IT

Also, tbh motherfuckers pick up some muskets and put some fucking tea in a harbor, it’s not like there ain’t a history for how to overthrow British rule as a group of colonies

I cannot overstate how openly drunk any given Australian is at any given time and this goes doubly for their politicians

And I say that as someone who is conspicuously drinking bourbon to fisk this book, which is the last in a series called “Linda gets drunk and reads books”

Who could have known when tony Abbott shows up shit goes sour

Okay folks, dinner break! Also, we’re still doing content cause someone asked how do you make pasta so that’s gonna be dinner

Turnbull commences after I explain how flour and eggs work

Okay

We made pasta and I’ve set up an impromptu house party made up of my housemates WHICH IS WHY I DEMANDED A TABLE ON THE DECK

And I’m back into this book

First thing back: oh wait running a government is difficult

Says the former PM? In his memoir?

Secondly lol at the “we want the same thing basically but with autonomy, also let us welcome you all to the land you stand on” which.

The very notion of Australian republicanism

Again, *pinches bridge of nose* the Australian constitution doesn’t recognize aboriginal peoples or lands (or Torres islanders or really anyone who was there before the penal colony)

You wanna know what’s included in the Australian constitution still

Guess.

No guess

ANYWAY so it’s so fucking lovely that my dude here went for full Constitutional revision and also has refused to support efforts to revise this bit

No, I swear to god, take it from an American in 2020

ENUMERATE THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT. NONE OF THIS “ALL POWERS NOT DELEGATED” SHIT EVEN AS A FEDERAL REPRESENTATIVE

Anyway I’m sure this paragraph, because it ends with an explanation mark, is very politically important

I read it and thought “I wonder is that minchin related to Tim minchin, the Australian comedian”

Yes. Yes he is. Australia is that small.

Folks

For y’all that do not know tim minchin

I would also say: look him up

Give him money

Anyway, now we’re here and tbh I’m maybe two shots too far in to look up was this satire or criticism because like not a chapter ago turnbull was talking about starting federalism over some white wine, and is his wife’s uncle a Tudor-style rivalry or a Borgia-style sworn friend

Oh wait

Oh I spoke too soon

The dude I *just made fun of* for comparing himself to brodude antiheroes is mad someone called him Gordon gekko

So starting there, there’s also:

No but fuck tony Abbott

And then also this is the most tony Abbott shit to say about Malcolm fucking turnbull

I can’t think of the word. I’m quizzing people to find the word.

Like schadenfreude isn’t the word for “the feeling of watching it all come full circle”

Pause, I have to roll out pasta

Okay. It was pasta and also caramel popcorn. Let’s commence.

“It was an extraordinary gathering of Australians from all walks of life: the great, the good, the garrulous.”

I am a writer. I am tired. I’m just going to say this slipped past the first few reads because alliteration and something like this could happen to any writer I’m sure.

With respect to the fact that this must have been written months ago why would you mention any association with Pell if you didn’t have to, I am confused

I am now picturing myself reading this sentence aloud to pretty much any trump supporter

Okay we’re back to “people offer Turnbull projects which he does or does not take, and here are the details of them all”

Oh wait no, these are relevant as it turns out he was put under investigation for these deals and that was kind of big but he beat the rap and it was so not true that we’re gonna spend some time on how bullshit the rap was

Not enough popcorn in the world for what’s gonna happen later in this book

Malcolm turnbull can’t write dialogue

Or it’s possible they do speak like this privately now I’m thinking on it

Did you know that in 2003 various people endorsed Malcolm turnbull

I now have a list I could share

No really did you know

It’s politics and it’s not pretty but tbh what a wonderful blow at labor when he’s like “basically they said I was both labor and corporate”

Anyway the average house race costs like a million bucks. This is fucking adorable, and that’s more an insult to us politics than anything

This bit is just a whole onion

And with that, I’ve got to be done for the evening

I will pick this up in the morning

Okay we are back at this!

Any questions so far from my non-Australian audience about all this?

Also: we recommence at 4pm eastern, which will be 6am Sydney time

Anyway. Y’all got your drinks? Or coffee?

WE ARE BACK ON TURNBULL

You will remember that he was just bemoaning how his wife, who was Lord Mayor, along with the rest of his family, might pay some cost for him to keep doing politics

And now we’re into the part where he carries on

I’m already so tired reading this

Like dude, knock up a conversation with people, it’s a normal thing people do

It’s fucking weird you need to feel they’re forced to chat and enjoy that actually

Like that last bit

That’s fucking creepy mate

There’s always a Peter King

Tbh I won’t subject you to how the PM wants to remember his rosy first days in parliament, to include long excerpts of his first speech and also that thing where he’s mystified that he didn’t really mention climate change

He did, later, get into it. And tbh, in 2004 it was a rare politician that had climate change as a priority anywhere in the world.

I think that’s just about when it came to my notice as an “oh fuck” moment rather than a policy concern

Thing about turnbull is that he *presided* over a lot of fuckery but he didn’t necessarily want to. Running any country is hard; that’s been more true lately what with the weather and the pandemic and the global power restructuring.

He’s not ted Cruz is my point.

And yet still, there’s this

Okay, tbh it might be worth getting this book at the library for the bits about water policy; politics aside he knows what he’s talking about and is pretty clear-eyed in his description of the geography

This is the rage of someone who spent ages looking at the data and negotiating solutions and shepherding a deal through and then Alex Jones shows up to hell about gay frogs

*yell but tbh I’m letting it stand

Also, *that* is foreshadowing

Gay fish and tinier dicks if you do anything to get ready for climate change!!!1!1!1!!!!

Just. Looking at the absolutely bonkers people protesting how they can’t deal without service for a month or two, it’s sounding a bit deja vu

Crazy political corners

Folks

Folks are we ready

I waited until Sunday afternoon Sydney time

Anyway: turnbull made water his issue and tbh knows a lot about it, it’s good if we pay attention to water shortages

I’ve rarely read a more depressing joke than “well if LABOR hadn’t won we’d have clipped this whole environment thing”

Okay so you write books months in advance of publication but just imagine writing “we didn’t invest enough of the country’s money in the market and I absolutely went to that hill to die on” in 2020 during a pandemic

Like cool, oil is trading at a negative but FUCK IT. PRIVATIZE EVERYTHING.

Okay come with me on this

Imagine a US where people routinely thought folk in their 40s-60s were the political prime

Just a thought exercise; what do you think America would look like if we actually handed down leadership every generation

Malcolm turnbull describing a political opponent while trying desperately not to sound like tucker Carlson

This dude is out here bragging about his win and also telling us that his opponent was such a dickhead a journo slapped him on Election Day

I mean congrats on that 1.3% swing I guess Mal

I am here for the ritual mudding of abbott however it comes

Turnbull says “it tormented me” that he lost leadership because he liked the Kyoto treaty and thought Australia should maybe apologize for generational baby theft

Ahem.

“Perhaps the most brutal was barnaby Joyce” is a sentence that tbh needs no clarification

With no editorializing here is a paragraph from Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir

Okay folks get a beer, we’re carrying on

*drops phone, walks away*

1. For US audiences, “GFC” is Great Financial Crisis, by which he means ‘08.

2. Subprime sure the fuck wasn’t the driving force behind 08, it was a sizeable inevitable collapse but nope

Someone better explain a tranch to the finance dude

Tbh, I spoke too soon

Should have given dude credit, that’s my bad

I’m too used to reading American political memoirs, if I’m honest.

A few things

First off idk I’d be excited to publish I hired a climate skeptic, generally, especially after I just spent a few chapters on the water basin and it’s importance. In Australia.

Secondly is this an insult to credlin cause it seems like a bit...

Okay, so I’m assuming that some Australians are in my audience but that it’s mostly US folk

So a quick thing: Australians are generally high-information voters, which is to say that you never hear a US politician talking about the OECD and expecting voters to get it.

Partially that’s just down to the size of the country; Australia has to be outward-facing and in the states we’ve got a lot to manage internally.

Anyway. Australia was one of the few OECD nations to come out of 08 not in crisis.

So essentially what Turnbull is saying here is “things went better here than most places and also the government refused to implement our policies which were what other countries with worse outcomes did”

Very VERY loosely, the Liberals are conservatives and Labor is sort of moderate left.

Australia is a multi-party system so technically the tea party types aren’t proper Liberals, they join minor parties.

(This is how there’s such a thing as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, which is a proper party run by a woman who, on the basis of sheer silly fuckery, refuses to eat both haram and halal food. I am not kidding, it’s real.)

This dude loudly loathes tony Abbott and it’s fucking glorious

I would pay money to hear Patrick Stewart read this sentence with high Shakespearean dudgeon

Similarly how was this speech delivered without a pair of leather gloves and a duel

The fucking cheek of Rudd to write a paper that correctly identified the source of a global crisis

In which Malcolm Turnbull argues that the US banking system collapsed in 2008 because we had *too many* banking regulations

Seriously imagine arguing that any of this was a bad idea

Fuck libraries for kids amirite

Australian politics

This dude fucking HATES Abbott holy shit

Imagine any US memoir with this in it

Talk about a scene change

This dude was bragging about hiring a climate skeptic not a few pages ago

This is how he describes people he *likes*

I have no idea what’s about to happen but I’m making popcorn cause it’s gonna be at least five pages of some giant scandal and how turnbull, although intimately involved, is blameless