AUSTRALIANS are fed up with politicians talking among themselves, an exasperated Malcolm Turnbull said this week.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
And then the nation’s politicians got on with talking among themselves.
They talked about Christopher Pyne’s apology (assistant treasurer Michael Sukkar reviewed it as “heartfelt”) for his boast that the moderates were in the ascendancy in the Liberal Party and that same-sex marriage would be a reality sooner than anyone thought, even as they urged everyone to move on.
They talked about former prime minister Tony Abbott’s alternative policy manifesto he revealed this week, which continued the white-anting and sniping he promised wouldn’t happen when he was deposed in 2015.
And that was before former Queensland premier Campbell Newman made a public declaration that Mr Turnbull should step down as prime minister because what he’s doing “clearly isn’t working” – giving everyone in the Coalition more to talk about.
If the Kevin Rudd-Julia Gillard-Kevin Rudd years taught us anything about Australian politics, it’s that voters will not tolerate politicians who appear to spend more time focusing on themselves than they do the nation.
Labor tore itself apart over six years and three prime ministerial terms, destroying political careers in the process.
Coalition MPs, watching from the Opposition benches, should have been seeing a cautionary tale.
Instead, it is increasingly apparent, they saw a template for government.
How else to explain the sense of deja vu as a weakened prime minister leading a minority government is shadowed by the leader they dispatched? All while the Opposition enjoys the show, emphasises its own comparative stability and looks forward to the next election?
There is even talk now that Mr Abbott can save the furniture for the Coalition at the next poll – which was the reasoning for Mr Rudd coming back to the top job before the election in 2013.
Have any lessons been learnt? Has anything changed?
Mr Turnbull had every right to be exasperated this week when he said his colleagues needed to change their public conversation.
But even if they start talking about something of more importance, how many people will be listening?
