Back in 2011, then-prime minister Julia Gillard decided to use the Sydney Institute’s annual nosh-up to attempt to define herself and her government better. She’d already used an oration in honour of Gough Whitlam that month to outline a peculiar fetishising of manual labour in which, she explained, “we respect the efforts of the brickie and look with a jaundiced eye at the lifestyle of the socialite”. When speaking to Gerard Henderson and co, she went further and devoted most of the speech to the “dignity of work”; Gillard appeared eager to define herself as an avatar of a stern, self-punishing obsession with hard yakka.

Gillard’s problem at that point was that it wasn’t very clear exactly what her vision for Australia was, and because Kevin Rudd had deliberately sabotaged her election campaign, she lacked a majority government that would have better enabled her to do so. 

Malcolm Turnbull, who spoke at the Sydney Institute last night, might be in similar circumstances to Gillard with a feral ex-PM trying to destroy him and a bare parliamentary majority, but he has the opposite problem. At the start of his prime ministership, Australians had a very clear idea of what Turnbull stood for and his vision for Australia. Only problem is, he has spent every waking moment since then negating every aspect of that definition, to the point where the only reliable guide to Malcolm Turnbull now is what the right of his party demands.

Given the opportunity afforded by the Hendersons to free-range in any direction he chose, Turnbull decided to focus on the quintessentially Australian virtue of … competition. Yes, you may have thought mateship, or a fair go, or something equally cliched was at the core of the Australian character, but in the view of the Prime Minister, it’s competition:

“There is nothing more Australian than competition — deep in our DNA is the drive to be first, to show that we can take on the world, and win, in any field. Whether we are breaking sporting records like Danni Roche did in hockey, just down here in the front row, or achieving the most consecutive years of economic growth, we compete on our merits and we expect excellence. Australia needs to draw on that spirit more than ever as we face our biggest test — the race to compete for jobs, investment and exports with the most dynamic markets of the 21st century.”

“Complacency is deadly,” Turnbull went on to warn. “Only the keen competitive eye can see the way to continuing success.” You can keep Gillard’s “jaundiced eye” — now we have the “competitive eye”.

A keen eye of any kind would spot a number of factual errors in what follows. “Most of the burden of high company taxes is borne by workers,” Turnbull says. This is a repeatedly discredited falsehood from company tax cut advocates, as explained by, inter alia, the US Congressional Budget Office, which has shown the burden falls primarily on capital.

Turnbull claims “Australian businesses are reaping the rewards” of the government preferential trade agreement with China, when, as the Productivity Commission has noted, such agreements simply involve export diversion from one market to another, with “modest” impacts on national income at best.

“India wants to provide energy security to its people through a full range of technologies, including nuclear, clean coal, natural gas and renewables,” Turnbull said. “Australia is well placed to provide many of the raw materials.” Sadly for Turnbull and other believers in the myth of “clean coal”, Australia is not well placed to provide coal to India because the Indian government has repeatedly — last year and then again this year — stated its intention to end all coal imports.

Turnbull’s claim that “there used to be a time when both sides of politics recognised that cutting company tax was the way to deliver greater investment, greater productivity and more employment” overlooks how Turnbull and his party blocked Labor’s company tax cut designed to offset the impact of the mining boom.

But, whatever — Turnbull is as entitled as any other politician to make shit up. What’s more interesting is his theme of competition. However clunky that speechwriter-sackable segue from success on the sporting field to economic growth, much more so than Gillard’s attempt to portray herself as an Iron Lady of early-rising, hard-working, callus-handed tradies, Turnbull’s theme rings true.

Australia does love competition. That’s why we waste hundreds of millions of dollars on funding elite sport, in the hope of winning a few medals at the strikingly corrupt Olympic games. That is, we like our competition government subsidised, thanks very much. And, as it turns out, that’s entirely appropriate for Turnbull’s idea of competition, too.

We impose huge costs on the economy — especially the construction sector — to protect and subsidise our unviable steel industry, via our spectacularly inefficient anti-dumping system. We’re spending up to $15 billion more than we need to to make naval submarines in Adelaide for the sake of around 2800 jobs and a few Liberal seats. We are propping up unviable dairy farmers with half a billion dollars in cheap loans (like anti-dumping, a singularly inefficient means even of achieving protectionist ends). We’re imposing an expensive and inefficient tax on imports to deter consumers from shopping online. We’re preparing to throw money at a vast, unviable coal mine in Queensland under the guise of a “northern Australian infrastructure fund”. 

That “keen competitive eye” lauded by Turnbull is an eye for a handout, for a subsidy, for a tax break, for protection from genuine competition. Australian businesses enjoy one of the G20’s lowest average company tax rates, but they want more — or, rather, less, a lot less, even those who pay little or no tax. If nothing else, Aussie businesses are world champions at convincing governments to look after them.