The political class likes to think the Liberal spill happened because voters are fractious and fickle, but it's more likely that new media and ways of engaging with politics has empowered people to be heard, writes Tim Dunlop.

So another leadership change, another prime minister removed in the Australian fashion, and suddenly Bill Shorten is the new Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull is the old John Howard and it's sort of like the '90s again, except on speed.

Nothing has changed and everything has changed and we are really none the wiser. What does Australian politics now look like? What drives it? What counts and what doesn't? Where are we going?

Well, here's one thing we do know: voters are now much less willing to give governments a second chance. Mr Turnbull himself said as much when he announced his challenge:

If we continue with Mr Abbott as Prime Minister, it is clear enough what will happen. He will cease to be Prime Minister and he'll be succeeded by Mr Shorten.

In other words, a sufficient number of Liberal Party members had decided that Mr Abbott would cause them to lose the next election. It was therefore worth getting rid of a first-term prime minister - despite having spent years chastising Labor for doing exactly the same thing - in order to maximise their chances of re-election.

It's a bit tempting, given the speed of these things, to shrug that one through, but it is really worth lingering on.

One of the great verities of Australian politics has been that first-term governments always get a second term. That no longer holds and it is incredible.

Labor dumped Kevin Rudd because they thought there was a chance he would lose (and because they thought he was a creep); Julia Gillard did actually lose a majority at the next election and held onto government only with outside support.

Liberal/National governments in Queensland and Victoria were tossed out by voters after a single term.

Things have fallen apart. The centre is not holding.

There are two ways of looking at this. The first - the preferred interpretation of the political class - is that the electorate has become fractious and too easily swayed by the speed of the 24/7 news cycle, is disengaged and thus vulnerable to the whimsical appeal of alternative candidates, or has, for reasons they rarely examine, become fickle.

There are stories in the media all around the world about the "instability" of Australian politics.

But I'm not so sure that's what it is.

The other way of looking at things is that with the rise of social media and other forms of non-traditional news outlets and forums for discussion, voters have found a way of talking about politics that is no longer beholden to the narrow interests of the mainstream media and the political class of which they are a part.

What has been disrupted is not so much our democracy as the agenda of that political class: their ongoing obsession with "reform" and "bipartisanship" and "centrism".

All of these terms are used liberally by the political class but they are really just euphemisms for a particular view of the world - a neoliberal agenda around privatisation, globalisation and workplace "flexibility" - that has become detached from the interests of voters more generally.

For the political class, to have this agenda challenged must seem like "chaos". For the rest of us, it is potentially empowering.

Consider: voters are now able to talk amongst themselves in a much more meaningful way, thanks to endless online forums. They do this without the "guidance" of the so-called political experts - the press gallery et al - and so they are much more likely to trust their own judgement on matters political.

Online, they can find discussion that supports their concerns and allows them to talk it through in a way that wasn't possible when they had to wait in a queue on talkback radio or hope that some editor would publish their letter days after they sent it.

In this way, voters can find that their misgivings are shared and it gives them confidence in their sense that something is wrong and that they can do something about it.

Maybe this is instability. Maybe it's democracy.

Certainly, this sort of thing is often derided by the mainstream as an echo-chamber effect but I'm coming to believe it is the opposite of that.

The real echo chamber is the mainstream media itself and its shrinking and aging audience. What we are seeing online is the voice of a younger, more engaged demographic breaking free of the narrative constraints imposed by the professional class of political observers and players.

The instability in the leadership of the main parties, then, is at least partly driven by the fact that voters can no longer be assuaged quite so easily as they were in the past, and the politicians know it.

Pre-emptive strikes on party leaders are just that: an attempt by politicians to reset things before we, the voters, can do it for them.

This is a pretty good position for an electorate to be in, but where does it leave us?

Mr Turnbull has done us all a big favour in getting rid of Mr Abbott, and that is true whether you are inclined to vote Labor, Liberal, National, Green, independent or for any of the other pop-up parties that flit into existence and fill the spaces left by the increasingly unappealing majors.

Mr Abbott broke a lot of promises. He did it in such a barefaced way that it kind of took your breath away. He treated his opponents as enemies to be destroyed, not as adversaries to be argued with, and he thus elevated retribution over policy and future direction. He was the pinnacle of everything people hate about politicians.

But let's not forget: he was installed by a party - and with the support of significant sections of the media - who were happy enough for him to do it as long as he could get away with it.

And that's where the lesson really lies: social media will find you out, and very quickly. Within a term.

There is probably enough good will towards Mr Turnbull - and enough relief at the departure of Mr Abbott, and enough doubt about the prospect of Mr Shorten - that he will win the next election quite comfortably.

But the electorate has changed and it is now time for the politicians to change with them. Dumping Mr Abbott was a good start, a necessary but insufficient condition for real progress.

More than ever, though, Mr Turnbull will have to take the electorate with him. If his party won't let him, the righteous impatience of a newly empowered electorate will rain down upon them.

It will be leadership spill deja vu all over again.

Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. You can follow him on Twitter.