There is one thing that current opinion polls will not tell you and that is that both sides of parliament need a profound shake up. When politics leaves you feeling sick in your stomach, bored out of your mind – the idea of new hope and blood is overwhelmingly appealing. The most admired potential future Prime Minister of Australia is almost certainly Noel Pearson. If Malcolm Turnbull has any sense he will now use whatever power he has as Federal Coalition leader to bring Noel Pearson into the Federal parliament as a conservative.
 

A lot has been written about Malcolm Turnbull’s failure of judgement in relation to the fake email apparently concocted by Liberal stooges within the Federal Treasury. Turnbull needs the opprobrium. The impression of the general public is that Turnbull was involved up to his eyebrows in dishonesty. The minimal tarnish against Turnbull is that he was, as the government have suggested, narrowly opportunistic in the pursuit of political advantage. However it is way too soon to write Turnbull off. The majority of the national media have used the current opinion polls to argue that Turnbull is on the way out as Federal Leader of the Liberal National Party.
 

To my mind Turnbull needed the kick in the pants. Turnbull’s colleagues probably already realise, as all who have worked in some fashion with him, that the man performs best when he is an underdog and when his back is against the wall. He is certainly in that position now.
 

Turnbull makes mistakes when he gets too confident and cocky and his ego takes over from his intelligence. Turnbull’s extra-ordinary own goal will do him the world of good. The atmosphere of Peter Costello leaving parliament and leaving Turnbull as the undisputed leader of the Federal Liberal Party was very unhealthy. The bad Malcom was quick to appear. Anthony Albanese suggested Turnbull was the Liberal National Party’s Mark Latham. But Turnbull is much better than that, and Albanese knows it. Most Labor frontbenchers, including Albanese, cannot believe their luck.
 

Latham folded under pressure, Turnbull is the opposite. What Turnbull needs at all times is pressure from his colleagues and from the Opposition and then you will see the best of him. Joe Hockey’s move to cast himself as a potential alternative to Turnbull is a good thing. But does anybody really think that Hockey would make as good a potential leader as Turnbull?
 

Turnbull has only one chance. He now needs to really show Australians that he is an innovator and reformer of Australian government. He needs to put aside the political point scoring and get on with the creation of an alternative big picture. This is where the great opportunities for the Opposition await. It is delicate balance between arguing for reform and re-assuring Australians that the wage earners welfare state which is embedded in the national psyche must be bettered. The message is that if Australians continue to rely on the wage earners welfare model it will have catastrophic consequences in coming decades.

Labor has failed dismally in delivering change and in taking on the Canberra bureaucracy. From its national curriculum standardisation to its school building program to laptops for kids to the usual Labor hyperbole with no substance on Indigenous affairs, Rudd Labor has been full of spin and no substance. It is ironical that the only thing it can really claim as a victory is the economic stimulus package put together by Treasury, no doubt by the same group who once loyally served Peter Costello and John Howard and which probably included the unfortunate Mr Godwin Gretch. There is nothing in the Labor platform from the last election that can be taken as particularly successful. Labor can only be viewed as having changed the image of Australia from unfashionable Howard brown to a trendy Ruddy green.

Turnbull needs to start to play on the national policy front. He also needs some new blood in Canberra. I have watched Noel Pearson now for a decade or more. He is a natural conservative politician. He’s the kind of person that Turnbull needs by his side in Canberra. Who knows whether Turnbull will ever be Prime Minister, but the greatest contribution that leaders can make is to strengthen the nation’s political fabric, if Turnbull delivered Pearson to the conservatives and to the national parliament he could go to his grave knowing he had done something of importance.
 

I have not talked to Turnbull or Pearson about any of these matters but blind freddy can see that in the current circumstances, Pearson would be a god-send to Turnbull and Turnbull would get Pearson out of his current political rut in far North Queensland post-Howard. Of course all this is simply wild speculation but what a natural partnership. Just as Turnbull needs Pearson, Pearson needs to move out of the incestuous troppo politics of North Queensland and start to challenge himself on a national stage against people of his own calibre. There are not enough people challenging Pearson's ideas and like Turnbull he needs bigger challenges to really show his stuff. I cannot imagine anything worse than Pearson disappearing from civic life to contest the Wild Rivers legislation in far North Queensland for the next five years.
 

It is presumptuous of me to assume that Pearson would join the Liberal National Party. The person who probably gave Pearson his greatest chance in life - to attend university - was Gough Whitlam and the leader whom he admires most is Paul Keating. But of course these things would make Pearson a persuasive representative for the Liberal National Party and he would bring new credibility for the Liberal National Party amongst the election winning swinging voters of middle Australia.

What would make Pearson veer towards the conservatives? It is not just that Pearson distrusts Queensland Premier Anna Bligh and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and that there is no-one of Keating’s leadership quality in Canberra. Pearson has clearly become distrustful, as have many of us, with the symbolic bullshit of Labor. It is easy to become bitterly distrustful of all that Labor stands for. Beyond that, several conservative politicians have had a profound effect on Pearson. Joh Bjelke Peterson provided the only stability for Pearson’s Hopevale community in the post war period, the war time Labor government brutally exiled the entire community into purgatory at Woorabinda because they were German Lutherans, resulting in enormous suffering, many deaths and massive dislocation and alienation whose effects continue to this day. The red neck factor has a magnetism in remote and regional Australia. Pearson was one of the first to see again that the Labor sponsored equal wages for Aboriginal cattleman was yet another recipe for bitter dislocation and disempowerment of Aboriginal people across the North. All his life Pearson has seen that what people in the inner city viewed as civil rights triumphs were in fact bitter injustice for ordinary Aboriginal people.  Bob Katter famously brought him to earth at St Peters College. He told Pearson to stop whinging and get on with it. It was Katter of course that really did deliver for Aboriginal communities. He gave Aboriginal people control of Church and State missions and Noel’s brother Gerhardt became one of the first Aboriginal managers at Hopevale. The realisation that conservatives often delivered on their promises led Pearson to revise his initial impression of John Howard.
 

Over recent years Pearson has become close to the views advocated by the conservative Centre for Independent Studies to the point where it is hard to distinguish between the CIS and Pearson on several matters including advocacy of the profoundly flawed Northern Territory intervention. But Pearson’s views are not some ideological fashion, they have a profound resonance with all he has experienced in his life.

I disagree with Pearson and the CIS on many of these matters but I admire Pearson’s intelligence, skill and determination and everyone recognises that Pearson would bring extraordinary oratory power, high minded thinking and knowledge to the increasingly forgettable and stale national parliament.
 

Pearson has an admiration for Turnbull because he views him as someone who is determined to get things done in real practical terms on the ground and not just in the rhetorical realm of the parliament. If Turnbull could engineer a safe conservative seat for Pearson and bring him to Canberra it would make any current fillip in the polls look temporary. Pearson continues to be the nation’s favourite potential Prime Minister and Turnbull would know that before that possibility could become a reality, Pearson would need a long period of tutelage and apprenticeship with the national parliament. Who better to broker that possibility than Turnbull. I suspect if Turnbull does stumble or falls it will be the end of any possibility of Pearson coming to Canberra. What a tragedy that would be.