Hasbeen I'm amazed at your attitude. Like you I don't trust Turnbull to even know what needs to be done, let alone to do it. However I'd use the dinner party as an opportunity to tell him what needs to be done.

And how many current Federal MPs do you know of who aren't slimy?

I particularly pithy point is:

"As an aside, the right wing voter, whilst many regard Turnbull as possibly “the best Labor Prime Minister we’ve had”, seems to have locked in behind him for lack of anywhere else to go."

Turnbull has seized much of the center - thus snaring some ALP and Green votes and the Conservatives (many of them OLO commenters) have no-one else to vote for.

No-one else as:
- PUP is gone.
- Abbott is still in the Libs - and waiting-plotting to unseat Turnbull
Abbott will probably try it late 2016-early 2017.

On the Rudd comparison - Turnbull is also unlike Rudd because Rudd developed notable nastiness that turned off many voters, public servants, advisers and ALP politicians (who turfed him out) before Gillard.

So if Turnbull can organise a soft Budget that postpones the hard, necessary measures until 2017, Turnbull will win in 2016.

Double Dissolution Election MIGHT even occur in late April 2016 before the Budget?

The problem with trying to grow our economy, rather than focus on reducing debt, is that essentially whet we have done since 2007 is to take a debt free house, spend ten million on it in the hope of attracting better returns, however, the extension is worthless and has simply increased the debt and achieved little.

So to grow the economy we have to knock down the extension and have another go, but that's a huge risk to take because at some point the financiers will simply say No!

By far the best way to grow the economy is to find some way of making the non productive, productive, but that will take balls and cost votes, so nobody will dare go there. Heck, they wont even put a stop to welfare waste simply because the handout brigade is so huge now.

Until politician's focus returns to what's best for the nation, rather than how to secure votes, little will change. Of cause the 'set for life' pensions don't help as a second, third term make life after politics so much more attractive.

The best time to judge our current PM
will be after the election to see what
the real Malcolm Turnbull will do.
At present he is being cautious to make
sure that he will remain the leader of
the Coalition running for office in his
own right at the next election. After the
election will be the time to show us what
he's capable of - or eventually get turfed out.

"It could be the case that Turnbull has taken us back to an earlier paradigm of politics where government is actually won in the centre, rather than being a tussle for the working class conservative vote out on the edges."

Hopefully it will be over with them all - left, right and centre.
Let both those paradigms be consigned to history!

Thanks to the changes in senate-voting, we will no longer need to even mention or consider those old parties of the old paradigms in order to cast a formal vote. When will we be allowed the same for the lower house as well?

rehctub,
"The problem with trying to grow our economy, rather than focus on reducing debt, is that essentially whet we have done since 2007 is to take a debt free house, spend ten million on it in the hope of attracting better returns, however, the extension is worthless and has simply increased the debt and achieved little."
rehctub, if you're going to use the house analogy, at least get it right! The money spent on it prevented parts of the house from collapsing, and the extension certainly isn't worthless to the people living in the house.

"So to grow the economy we have to knock down the extension and have another go,"
No, the sensible thing now would be to add another storey. We don't need to knock down the extension, we need to build on it!

"but that's a huge risk to take because at some point the financiers will simply say No!"
Wrong again! We have unlimited credit because we own the bank. As long as we only borrow in Australian dollars (as has been general policy for over three decades and absolute policy for two) it is IMPOSSIBLE for us to run out of money.

"By far the best way to grow the economy is to find some way of making the non productive, productive,"
And that's something that the NDIS is designed to achieve, but still people oppose it and claim it to be unaffordable!

But we also need to run a more expansionary combination of fiscal and monetary policy so that more employers are willing to hire people. And we also have to focus on enabling productive people to be more productive. Improvements in education are needed, but the same people who oppose the NDIS are also unwilling to fund Gonski, even though there was a bipartisan commitment to both before the last election.