Three words with more influence over our national life than any others
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In the unimaginably distant past, when Malcolm Turnbull was still a fledgling prime minister, he told Leigh Sales and her viewers an anecdote about his time at Goldman Sachs. You might expect that such a tale would ram home Turnbull’s distance from the ordinary voter.
In fact it did the opposite. Turnbull’s chief executive had given a pep talk in which he’d said: “We’re making lots of money, ’cause we work hard and we deserve it.” Turnbull had taken him aside, saying, “You know, there are taxi drivers in this city that work much longer hours than anyone does here and they don’t earn very much at all.”
Turnbull himself had been “extraordinarily lucky”. “The fact is we’ve all got to recognise that much of our good fortune is actually good fortune.”
Lucky man: Malcolm Turnbull admitted to Leigh Sales something most of us would prefer to overlook.
Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
Turnbull was not the first politician to talk about luck. When it comes to bad luck, MPs speak with one voice: everyone can hit hard times, and that’s why, they loudly boast, they pump money into national monuments like Medicare. But when it comes to success, luck is given short shrift. Hard work, smarts, and courage get most of the credit. That is why Turnbull’s statement stood out. It dismantled the mythology around his own success, and risked telling voters something they didn’t want to hear. He concluded his story in blunt terms: “So, the truth is, we don’t really deserve our good fortune.”
This is an idea most of us choose not to stare at too hard, because it risks undermining much of how we think about ourselves. We know on some level that we have been lucky – our parents taught us the value of hard work, or believed in the importance of education, or worked hard to send us to a good school – but at the same time we take pride in the long hours we have put in, the depth of our knowledge, the breadth of our networks.
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