Under the wire: Malcolm in a muddle

OPINION: The manoeuvring in the upper echelons of the federal Liberal party took a bizarre twist recently, with millionaire banker and political hobbyist Malcolm Turnbull making a bid for the title of ‘visionary’.

By outlining his bold plan for the future, he wishes to position himself as the obvious successor to John Howard, the current leader.

Or, actually, since Peter Costello reckons he’s the current leader, maybe Turnbull wants to take over from him. It’s very confusing.

Anyway, Turnbull’s grand plan is to issue every Australian with a permanent, unchanging email address (or, as he put it, an ‘electric mail box’ -- how quasi-Victorian). The idea is that every Australian citizen would be issued with an address something along the lines of firstname.lastname. dateofbirth@australia.org.au. This address would then remain yours for the rest of your life, no matter where you moved physically.

Indeed, you would be able to retrieve messages from this address wherever there is internet access, "which nowadays is almost any place on Earth", according to Mr Turnbull.

The reason for the grand plan is to reduce wastage on post. "The government would send its correspondence to you at that address and, if you agreed, not send it to you by snail mail at all," he says.

But it’s not just the government that would gain: you could nominate it as an electronic address to banks, super funds and employers. Over time it could become as common as a Tax File Number and a lot more useful, said Mr Turnbull who, one suspects, might not get as much use out of his Tax File Number as some of us.

Mr Turnbull laments the fact that the government spends so much money every year sending out messages to its constituents, only to find that a large portion of them are misdirected, lost, mislaid or -- gasp -- not read.

Sending it all using the electric mail, he’d wager, will result in so many more of us actually reading the things.

Let’s put aside the social folly for a moment here -- the fact that many Australians don’t have access to a telephone, reliably clean drinking water or a roof over their heads, much less electric mail boxes -- and just examine the idea on its own merits.

For a start, not everyone keeps the same name their entire lives. For a variety of reasons -- marriage, religious conversion, witness protection, simple change of pace -- people change their names.

Neither of my parents, for example, currently uses the name they were given at birth. Now, if only they’d tell me the names they are using...but that’s a whole other thing.

Turnbull does not say whether this universal email address will change if your name does. If it doesn’t, then the government’s messages will not reach you. If it does, then it’s not the permanent, unchanging address he’s waxing lyrical about, is it? It’s just another email address. So what’s the point?

For another thing, the government is not an email provider, except inasmuch as it owns a chunk of Telstra, which in turn runs a thing called BigPond, which is, in part, an email provider. Given the government is in the throes of divesting itself of any part of the infrastructure required to perform the service Turnbull describes, it seems a poorly-timed suggestion.

And finally, perhaps the biggest spanner in the ointment: he’s presuming that the reason so much government correspondence goes unread is because of the medium in which it arrives.

The citizenry is not averse to reading pronouncements from Canberra, he surmises -- it just does not like paper. Weird, tree-hating people. Should ministerial missives arrive electrically, they would be greeted with enthusiasm and wild acclaim.

I’m being ridiculous, of course -- but so is he.

malcolm turnbull mobility under the wire