Malcolm the messiah - his recipe for dissapointment

According to polling, Turnbull has reached messianic proportions. In the short time he has become our new wonderful shiny prime minister, polling shows that he is the most popular new prime minister in Australia for the last 20 years. 

This is despite doing nothing since becoming PM. Apart from saying a lot and making noises about this and that, he's done nothing. He's kept asylum policy as it is, kept the coalition's  reluctance to marriage equality as it was, overseen the deportation of a pregnant raped woman back to Nauru, kept his money in the Cayman Islands, kept the Carmichael Reef wrecking coal mine alive in Queensland, kept the prospects of a penalty rate attack open, kept kids in jail, and made just a few indications that he won't stand in the way of renewable investment. 

And yet the latest polling appears the public think he's the bestest everest.

This gives him the blessing of enormous public goodwill – and the curse of impossible expectations. 

He is the most popular new prime minister of the past two decades, based on his debut rating in the Fairfax-Ipsos poll. His net approval rating is higher than those of John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. 

On a test of 10 positive leader attributes, most Australians rate Turnbull as possessing all of them. On the basis of their poll debuts, Turnbull is regarded as more competent than Howard, more open to ideas than Gillard and a stronger leader than Abbott. And he is rated as better in every way than Labor leader Bill Shorten. theage

These are impossible numbers. His policy won't live up to it. He's still got a resources minister who sees coal exports to India as having a "moral" imperative and a secretive immigration regime that abuses human rights. Such high expectations from the public are bound to fail in the face of policy reality.