It really is the political story of 2016. Malcolm Turnbull waiting for the emphatic political validation that never quite arrives.



In the winter, the prime minister’s great gambit was to clear out the Senate and race to a double-dissolution election, which would deliver him the validation he required to be the prime minister he aspired to be.

Turnbull failed to clear out the Senate, and scraped back into office by a whisker.

In the final sitting week of 2016, all the choreography in the parliamentary precinct had been building up to Wednesday as Validation Day.

Wednesday would be the day Turnbull would finally declare victory over 2016, the year that kept threatening to smite him.

The V-Day plan was as follows.

Turnbull would declare the government had successfully legislated the Australian Building and Construction Commission, which would of course justify that long winter election the prime minister had called, and very nearly lost. All could be finally well, because it had ended well.

The great symbolic victory was supposed to be sufficiently momentous to screen out inconvenient truths, such as the fact the ABCC is now a quantifiably different proposition than the one that entered the parliament in 2013 – and it comes with a bunch of undertakings attached to it that the government would never have proposed in a pink fit if it didn’t need this legislation passed for political reasons.

But despite having been generous enough to give away some of the dinner party cutlery, the kitchen sink, and some nice soft furnishings to secure the necessary legislation, the Senate wasn’t quite finished with the prime minister.

Freewheeling place that it is, the Senate delivered a rebuff.

Just moments after the ABCC landed, the backpacker tax entered the upper house for a second time set at 15%. It came out at 10.5% in a vote the government never saw coming.

The poor finance minister, Mathias Cormann, a disciplined political machine if there ever was one, was so discombobulated that he declared Labor would wear the backpacker tax like a “rose of crowns”.

Separately to the Senate’s Argentinian tango, a damaging leak emerged from Fairfax Media about internal deliberations within the government on new categories of visas. Who would know the motive of the leaker, but could it be that someone isn’t entirely happy with the immigration minister, Peter Dutton?

Because there wasn’t quite enough clutter in the landscape, a protest erupted in question time at 2pm, sufficiently robust to bring the parliament to a screaming halt.

The manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, smelled a rat, or perhaps a useful opportunity to pile diversion on diversion.

Pyne declared the protest the most serious incident at the parliament “since the riots organised by the ACTU in 1996”. He demanded the rapid identification of “the miscreants” who may have signed the disruptors into the building.

Turnbull, for his part, pressed on with V-Day, chiding anyone with the temerity to point out it had become something of a hot mess.

The validation day media conference, having been scheduled, was duly staged, and the victory was insufficiently acknowledged by the pitiless hacks with their notebooks, prompting a brief waft of prime ministerial regret, laced with the tiniest tinge of irony – or was it self-reproach?

“I regret it as a fact, some of you are being perhaps a little less optimistic, less filled with a spirit of innovation and agility that is so fundamental to our success in the 21st century,” Turnbull told the assembled knockers after being on the receiving end of questions not entirely to his liking.

It remained, Turnbull insisted, a good day, everything being relative. The ABCC was through the parliament. “I believe what we have produced here is going to make a fundamental change for the better in the construction sector, in our whole economy, this is a fundamental economic reform.

“It is a great day for Australian families, for Australian jobs, and for the economic growth on which all of our aspirations depend.”

The prime minister has developed a habit of smiling into the adversity that now hurls itself in his direction thick and fast – a fixed smile through mid-air turbulence that never quite creeps to the eyes.