Malcolm Bligh Turnbull (born 24 October 1954) has been a member of the Australian House of Representatives since 2004 and was Leader of the Opposition of the Liberal Party for 15 months. Before entering politics he was employed as a journalist, barrister, company legal counsel and merchant banker. In 2009, his estimated wealth was $178 million and he is considered to be a man of many talents.
Turnbull graduated from the University of Sydney with a double degree in arts and law. He then studied law at Oxford and like his colleague Tony Abbott, is a Rhodes Scholar. While at Oxford he worked for the Sunday Times and wrote for magazines and newspapers in the United States and Australia. I wonder if there is anything this man can't do.
When he was Leader of the Opposition, he was keen for his party to support the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme proposed by Kevin Rudd to take to Copenhagen, but there was a lot of opposition circulating in the Liberal Party at that time and many members weren't convinced that climate change was real. People were saying that he should move over to the Labor Party because he was so adamant that it should be introduced. This resulted in a challenge to his leadership and he was voted out on 1st December 2009 and Tony Abbott suddenly found himself Leader of the Opposition by one vote.
In April 2010, Turnbull announced that he was going to retire from politics but changed his mind a month later. Yesterday, Tony Abbott saved him from a life on the back benches by promoting him to the Opposition's Communications Minister - he said there was no better qualified person to prosecute a case against the National Broadband Network (NBN) adding that it was his intention to "demolish" it. Fighting words indeed! The Labor government intends to spend $43 billion on a plan that many believe is far too expensive and it's now his job to prove that it's a waste of money and that the Coalition has a much more efficient and cheaper alternative.
"It is such a waste spending $5000 per houshold to deliver an information super-highway whether people want it or not" he said yesterday. He added that the Coalition was "hungry to hold the government to account". He replaces Tony Smith who was demoted to parliamentary secretary for tax reform.
No comments:
Post a Comment