The Super Hornet debacle perpetuated by Brendan Nelson when he was defence minister gives good insight into how he would govern. It would be executive whim, without deliberation or oversight. In other words Schmittian conservatism. Robert Merkel writes:
The decision was then rushed through cabinet without following the usual defence procurement procedure, possibly with the aid of a slide show to cabinet directly put together by Boeing. ... The thing that makes this particularly farcical is that if a capability gap exists, its origins allegedly lie in Howard's decision to commit to the Joint Strike Fighter back in 2002, after being sweet-talked by the salespeople at Lockheed Martin while on a visit to the United States, bypassing - you guessed it - the defence bureauracy's evaluation process.And Robert again three months later:
If this is true, we've just spent six billion dollars, without a tender process (and thus quite possibly bought a dud), to replace an aircraft that was still serviceable - or, at least, wasn't going to fail because of the faulty wings Nelson was spouting to his Cabinet colleagues and the public.Nelson would govern as Howard did. In my opinion this was the main reason the Howard Government was voted out - because of its poor governance that was dominated by emergency, exception, whim, executive imposition, executive rule and ignoring the constitutional boundaries of federalism and limited government. Brendan Nelson is a Schmittian conservative not a liberal.
Update I: Guy writes an excellent piece at Polemica on the tensions between the conservative and liberal wings of the Liberal Party and how that plays out with Nelson and Turnball.
Update II: William Bowe writes something similar, that Turnball is the leader the Liberal Party requires to become competitive again at the national level. The consensus from nearly all quarters is that Turnball is a superior choice to Nelson.
I agree.
