It is indeed exciting times in Australia’s political scene. We have a brand new Prime Minister, the fifth one in the last five years after the reign of Tony Abbott came to a crashing halt when his own Liberal Party chose 60 year-old Rhodes scholar, multimillionaire Malcolm Turnbull, a former chairman of the Republican movement in Australia, as his replacement after only two years as the 28th prime minister.

In the past years, we witnessed constant turmoil within the Labour Party. They also voted out a first-term prime minister.

The new Australian Prime Minister will be heading to Malta for the CHOGM conference on November 27/29.

At least Abbott had indicated his acceptance.

Arriving on our shores, the new Prime Minister will certainly remember that it was a Maltese man that practically prevented him from becoming prime minister earlier.

The 2008 OzCar scandal, also known as Utegate, was one of the main reasons that accelerated the end of Turnbull’s leadership of the Liberal Party, which he won in September 2008 and held until December 2009.

Godwin Grech

It was a public servant by the name of Godwin Grech, son of Sam and Ġużeppa, born in Malta in 1930 and migrated to Altona suburb in Melbourne, Victoria, who featured prominently in the scandal.

Grech went to study commerce at the University of Melbourne and, in the late 1990, he joined the public service and rose rapidly in the Treasury Department. By 2003, he was general manager of the Treasury’s competition and consumer policy division. He also worked in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

In 2008, Grech returned to the Treasury Department as a principal adviser in its financial systems division.

His new position saw him responsible for formulating and administering the $850 million OzCar scheme.

This scheme provided aid to car dealers and was part of the government’s stimulus spending following the global financial crisis.

While in that position, he set up a fake e-mail in which then prime minister Kevin Rudd’s economics adviser, Andrew Charlton, purportedly sought help in seeking special treatment for a political donor.

He gave a copy of the e-mail to Turnbull, then leader of the Opposition, and also to the press. Turnbull went to Parliament with the false allegations made against the prime minister and then treasurer Wayne Swan.

The Australian federal police began an investigation into Grech and it was concluded that, although there was evidence Grech had broken the law, he would not face criminal charges over the affair.

The investigation took over 16 months, which reportedly took a heavy toll on Grech who was suffering serious kidney and bowel disease at the time. He spent more than a month in the psychiatric ward of a Canberra hospital for depression as the OzCar affair played out.

It was a Maltese man that practically prevented Malcolm Turnbull from becoming prime minister earlier

He quietly sold his Canberra home in 2010 and moved in with his Maltese parents in Melbourne.

The disgraced former Treasury official behind the Utegate scandal is believed to have won a payout from the federal government for his ill health.

However, the details of the settlement remain confidential.

When he served as minister for telecommunications (since September 2013), the new Australian Prime Minister did not win any friends from the Maltese community in Australia. Under his watch, the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) suffered a mammoth reduction of $55 million in funding, meaning that the Maltese language programmes on SBS Radio were cut by seven hours, the most pronounced adjustment for any ethnic language group in the past three years.

Turnbull also demanded that TV community-based programmes should not be screened free-to-air but via the internet, causing the only Maltese segment on Saturdays to disappear from television as well.

Turnbull, who hails from the affluent suburb of Point Piper, became the 29th Prime Minister of Australia a week ago.

The son of a hotel broker and a radio scriptwriter mother, he was raised full-time by his father, Bruce, from the age of nine. He graduated from Sydney Grammar and then the University of Sydney in arts and law.

He is described as intelligent, urbane, short-tempered and convinced of his own brilliance.

Turnbull made it to Parliament in 2004, representingthe affluent electorate ofWentworth, residing around the eastern suburbs.

His wife, Lucinda (Lucy) Hughes, is the former first female Lord Mayor of the city of Sydney.

They were married in 1980 and have two adult children: Alex and Daisy.

Over the past 24 years, three sitting prime ministers have been dispatched by theirown party.

All but one were Labour and only one excision so far has led to success, Paul Keating’s ousting of Bob Hawke in 1991, which was followed by his 1993 election victory.

Abbott harassed and brutalised two Labour governments all the way to his 2013 victory but he too was counted by his own party as incapable of directing the coalition in government.

The kingmaker in this upheaval was Julie Bishop, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who was strongly re-endorsed by 70 votes to 30 to retain the position of deputy leader of the Liberal Party, a position she held since 2007. The challenger was Kevin Andrews.

In his final speech, as prime minister, Abbott pledged not to snipe anymore and said that the nature of politics has changed over the past decade.

“We have more polls and more commentary than ever before. Mostly sour, bitter, character assassination. Poll-driven panic has produced a revolving-door prime ministership, which can’t be good for our country and a fertile media culture had developed that reward treachery,” he said.

Lawrence Dimech is the co-editor of The Voice of the Maltese, a newsletter published every fortnight in Australia.