LONGTIME AUSTRALIAN ESTABLISHMENTARIAN WOULD WELCOME CONVERTING TO A REPUBLIC; LIKENS CLIMATE-CHANGE DENIAL TO DISBELIEVING IN GRAVITY; SAYS HE’S ‘CONSERVATIVE’ BUT SUPPORTS GAY MARRIAGE, GUN CONTROL AND ABORTION ‘RIGHTS’
By Mark Anderson
STOP THE PRESSES! News Association
BENTON HARBOR, Mich.—Malcolm Bligh Turnbull has worn many hats in Australia’s establishment. Being Prime Minister of “the land down under” from 2015-2018, while it was the apparent peak of his political career, was just one of many challenges he has handled, as he outlined at Lake Michigan College’s Mendel Center Sept. 15 as part of the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan’s Speaker Series.
While his wit was immediately evident—he was relieved to learn “there are no sharks in Lake Michigan,” unlike the waters surrounding Australia—Turnbull recognized the significance of Queen Elizabeth’s recent passing and the ascendancy of Prince Charles to the British throne.
“The Queen was keenly and intelligently engaged in the issues of the day until the day she died,” Turnbull somberly stated, wanting to dispel any notion that she was a mere figurehead. “There won’t be another one like her and I wish Charles well.
Speaking with moderator Zack East, Vice President of Business Development at Mid-West Family (WSJM Inc.), Turnbull covered various episodes of his career. [Turnbull is shown in the above photo, sitting on the left, speaking with Mr. East—Photo by M. Anderson]
Among other things, he worked as a journalist while studying law at Sydney University and continued reporting while studying at Oxford for his Rhodes Scholarship, a grant now in its 100th year.
During those Oxford days, Turnbull was hired as a reporter by Harold Evan of London’s Sunday Times newspaper. Interestingly, the record shows that, soon after marrying his wife, Lucy, while at Oxford and returning to Australia to practice law, he quickly established a reputation as an effective advocate, most notably when he successfully defended former MI5 agent Peter Wright against the British government in the “Spycatcher” trial.
Referring to Australia’s origins, Turnbull told East that the British, jaded from the American revolution, subsequently established various dominions (colonies) that, according to Turnbull, “became independent in every respect,” though Australia, like Canada, still has a Queen’s representative known as the Governor General whose position is largely ceremonial but is supposed to ensure the laws are faithfully and fairly applied to all.
Turnbull is an apparent advocate of, and predicts the eventual success of, transforming Australia from a parliamentary democracy to a republic more like the United States.
“There will be another referendum to make Australia a republic . . . within a few years,” he noted, while hinting that other Crown countries may go that direction. “We’ve borrowed a lot from the American Constitution, by the way.”
In a related matter, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) noted in a Sept. 19 article: “Nearly 60 per cent of [our] readers believe Australia should keep an image of Britain’s monarch on the $5 note, despite the same proportion believing a royal should not be its head of state.”
Turnbull, a self-described “center-right conservative” (the “liberal” party he led as Prime Minister means largely the opposite of what it means in America), nevertheless expressed support for gun control, abortion and gay marriage, although in the economic field he said he’s on the conservative side. “The idea that [Donald Trump] is a conservative is ludicrous,” he quipped, while saying that Trump’s famous slogan, Make America Great Again, in his opinion, is based on a false premise, since America “already is great.”
Unlike in America, Australia has “made it compulsory to vote and if you don’ vote, without a good excuse, you get fined $500, so voting [turnout] is around 90%,” Turnbull approvingly added, while estimating: “A dozen countries have a compulsory vote.” He did acknowledge, however, that mandatory voting would require sufficiently broad ballot choices.
CLIMATE CHANGE MAJOR ISSUE
One of Turnbull’s main issues is climate change—which he has written about extensively on his personal website. In an Oct. 20, 2021 column there, he wrote: “The stakes have never been higher. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned last month, the world is on catastrophic path to a 2.7 degrees Celsius increase in global warming . . . far beyond the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit that was agreed [upon] by the international community as part of the 2015 Paris Agreement.”
At LMC he likened not believing in climate change to not believing in gravity, though in so doing he dodged the caveat that while most may agree the climate is changing, not everyone agrees on whether the changes are largely man-made or whether they chiefly stem from changing solar activity and other natural processes.
Well before entering Australia’s House of Representatives in 2004, Turnbull established an investment banking firm in 1987 before joining the investment giant Goldman Sachs in 1997 and becoming a Goldman partner. In 1996, he also co-founded the first large Australian Internet company, OzEmail Ltd., listed it on the NASDAQ and sold it to MCI WorldCom a few years later. He bought an initial stake for $500,000 and sold it for $57 million.
Turnbull is not without his critics. While some Australians see him as a corporate raider who bought up smaller independent internet providers in the process of creating OzEmail, leaving a virtual Internet monopoly and higher prices in his wake, The Australian, one year ago, noted: “Malcolm Turnbull gifted a multimillion-dollar stake in a fund manager to his children to avoid accusations of wrongdoing from ‘numerous enemies’ while prime minister, a longstanding confidant claimed.”
At LMC, Turnbull, who held several cabinet positions in government before becoming Prime Minister in September 2015, went so far as to say that he never lied in public office, a rare claim among modern politicians.
“I’ve never been like that—power without a purpose; there’s a lot of that around,” said Turnbull, who’s now a senior adviser at the global firm KKR & Co. (Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts). The Guardian in the UK called KKR “one of the world’s biggest private equity firms . . . responsible for some of the biggest international buy-out deals in history.”
BILDERBERG CONNECTION VIA KRAVIS COUPLE
Interestingly, Henry Kravis of KKR is a longtime fixture at the infamous Bilderberg Meetings, as is his wife Marie-Josee Kravis. In fact she co-chairs the Bilderberg Steering Committee that organizes the highly secretive meetings. She’s also president of the New York-registered “charity,” the American Friends of Bilderberg (AFB) which in the fiscal year ending in Dec. 2020 held $1.3 million in assets.
The AFB handles funding and planning for the American contingent to the Bilderberg Meetings, which started in 1954 and have been heavily protested over the decades for representing world-government planning and networking toward a largely private and unaccountable governing structure—with the ultimate goal of a creating a heavily technocratic, highly centralized world state.