Reflecting on a decade of Guardian Australia columns and Malcolm Turnbull's legacy

I wrote my first column for Guardian Australia in August 2016, when the winds of chaos were sweeping the globe, the forces of division were finding their voice and a centrist leader named Malcolm was scrambling to hang on.

A decade provides enough space to give events real definition in the rear-view mirror while more recent events still feel like passing traffic or roadkill. So, let’s strap ourselves into the Essential DeLorean and go back to the future.

Malcolm has just narrowly survived the double-dissolution election he foolishly called, having been forced to dig into his own substantial personal wealth to sandbag what would end up a one-seat majority.

My debut column is about Pauline Hanson, who has returned to the parliament for the first time in nearly 20 years. I link the backlash against the levels of immigration to a growing sense of economic insecurity, something I argue should be harnessed rather than rejected as extreme.

“We’ve seen the rise of the outsider overseas, from Brexit to Le Pen to Trump and Sanders. One Nation is poised to become Australia’s expression of that international pushback on globalisation,” I write.

In October, Malcolm and Bill Shorten, whose energetic leadership and ruthlessly truthy election campaign have put Labor back in the game, reach across the partisan divide in the name of social cohesion, issuing a joint rejection of discriminatory immigration policy.

When Malcolm had wrested control from the political wrecking ball that was his long-term nemesis, Tony Abbott, I (like many progressives) wished him well, a centrist leader from the other side who would confront the future with a modicum of shared purpose.

But by September our poll shows the weakness of his position, especially for a man who had used Newspoll to justify his own challenge on a sitting PM who remains deeply embedded in the right’s echo chamber waiting to pounce back.

In exile from his first leadership, Malcolm had made action on climate his cause celebre, donning the leather jacket to become a regular truth-teller on Q+A. In power he had begun the process of redesigning a working energy market after Abbott had destroyed the carbon trading scheme (CPRS) but was constantly stymied by the coal club and the fossils in his own party.

In 2016, the fossil fuel industry and its political and media mouthpieces have pivoted from denial to the reliability of renewables. When freak storms wiped out the South Australian grid, this was blamed on the fragility of the new technology rather than the urgent need to address climate chaos. Ten years on, batteries may be mainstream but the hostility to renewable technology continues to be weaponised even as evidence of an impending climate catastrophe becomes more incontrovertible.

Malcolm is battling a divided party fixated on culture wars; he manages to usher through a tortuous but ultimately successful postal ballot on marriage equality but can’t stifle the intermittent, unhinged breakouts, such as a confected fight over the Racial Discrimination Act.

These identity schisms sow the seeds of the Liberal party’s ongoing identity crisis. When the majority of Australians who see themselves as middle class can’t name a party for them, the teal writing is already on the wall – and Abbott will be the first to fall.

All this noise is diverting Malcolm from delivering on his big economic play, a national innovation drive to deliver “jobs and growth”, a pitch to the future that has failed to translate into votes when it is delivered to tech start-ups rather than workers.

As November approaches, the prospect of a Trump presidency is becoming more real and we are at pains to differentiate ourselves from the madness over there. We hold our breaths and turn blue when the “red wall” breaks and the reality TV show conquers the White House. By year’s end we are in a state of existential limbo, Trump is elected but the full catastrophe is yet to begin.

In 2016, all that will follow is yet to be: that Malcolm will join the revolving door of PMs; that his treasurer will slip through the middle and morph into ScoMo and conjure an election win from nowhere; that Albo will reinvent himself as Anthony and stumble into power after the pandemic and then secure an historic second-term majority.

Pauline will spend the decade on the fringes, the occasional cosplay stunt, the shift in targets from Asians to Muslims, until the times arrive for her and support surges as a fresh wave of anti-immigration populism, which stands as a proxy for economic inclusion.

Ten years on it feels we have come full cycle: a centrist government is confronting a global bin fire in the face of a fresh resurgence of the nativist populism. Even Abbott is back trying to break his own party.

Before the last election I described Albo as the John Howard of his generation but, in character, perhaps he is closer to Malcolm, a leader trying to find a centre ground in a world that privileges the extremes.

Looking back on my 10-year opus it strikes me that I never once wrote anything remotely kind about Malcolm. Despite his integral role in the establishment of Guardian Australia, there was never any suggestion we should play nice. He was always such a big target: his self-assuredness, his lack of anything resembling popular cultural literacy and, most profoundly, his inability to rise to the level of his own rhetoric.

So here goes. On the nation’s broad direction towards energy transition, innovation-driven prosperity, social cohesion, civility in public life and, of course, the need for a counterweight to Murdoch in the Australian media and a healthy scepticism of the US alliance, Malcolm was mostly right. But in assuming that being right is enough, Malcolm was ultimately wrong.

It is to our collective detriment that he couldn’t execute but, a wasted decade on, a new government seeking to occupy the centre can learn things from his failure; not least the corrosive power of those who resist change by turning people against each other.

Albo has things going for him that Malcolm never did – a unified base galvanised around a plan to govern; a thumping majority and a public that may be looking at the nihilism of Hanson but have not yet signed up to her actual agenda, whatever it is.

The challenge for anyone trying to navigate the middle of the road is to keep their hands on the wheel and their foot poised between accelerator and the brake. The highway ahead is so uncertain, we need our driver to keep their eyes on the horizon.