Turnbull: Australia's fifth PM in five years

Australia has a new prime minister – again. Malcolm Turnbull became the country’s 29th leader this week.

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Australia's Malcolm Turnbull: PM number 29

Australia has a new prime minister again. Malcolm Turnbull became the country's 29th leader this week when he deposed Tony Abbott as the head of the ruling centre-right Liberal Party in a sudden coup. Turnbull, considered a centrist, defeated the more right-wing premier by 54 votes to 44. Abbott had replaced Turnbull as Liberal leader in 2009 when the party was in opposition. The previous Labor government swapped leaders twice between 2010 and 2013. Australia has now seen four prime minsters in just over two years, and five in five.

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Andrew Van Sickle
Editor, MoneyWeek

Andrew is the editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He grew up in Vienna and studied at the University of St Andrews, where he gained a first-class MA in geography & international relations.

After graduating he began to contribute to the foreign page of The Week and soon afterwards joined MoneyWeek at its inception in October 2000. He helped Merryn Somerset Webb establish it as Britain’s best-selling financial magazine, contributing to every section of the publication and specialising in macroeconomics and stockmarkets, before going part-time.

His freelance projects have included a 2009 relaunch of The Pharma Letter, where he covered corporate news and political developments in the German pharmaceuticals market for two years, and a multiyear stint as deputy editor of the Barclays account at Redwood, a marketing agency.

Andrew has been editing MoneyWeek since 2018, and continues to specialise in investment and news in German-speaking countries owing to his fluent command of the language.