The day before Malcolm Turnbull lost the prime ministership, Craig Laundy called home. “On Thursday, in the middle of the day, when I knew we were gone, I rang my wife and said why don’t you jump on a plane and come down here because Malcolm and Lucy are going to need some support this afternoon and tonight.”

The call was motivated by the most basic of human instincts, empathy. The Sydney Liberal moderate, then on Turnbull’s frontbench, was concerned about the prime minister, not as a boss, or as someone to cultivate and flatter, but as a human being. He saw a man under exceptional pressure and understood the toll that would take on his spouse. Laundy’s wife got on the plane, and they spent Turnbull’s last night in the job “chatting through things, and consoling, basically”.

It’s the weirdest team I’ve ever been part of Craig Laundy

By Thursday night, after two weeks of high octane intrigues, strikes and counter-strikes, it was just them. Everyone else in the praetorian guard had left, busy crunching numbers for the new regime. “In the heat of battle, the thing that most surprised me … was the minute my team-mates knew Malcolm was gone, they left. They worked with Scott. I stayed with Malcolm. I was worried about him. I wanted to make sure he and Lucy were OK.”

Politics is a deeply human business that specialises in acts devoid of basic humanity. Laundy shares the anecdote to try to capture the brutal, transactional nature of politics – one of the dynamics he’s found alienating since arriving in Canberra in 2013. He wants to talk about the lived reality of contemporary political life in the hope of explaining the inexplicable, possibly to himself, and certainly to voters watching from the outside; and he wants to talk about it while he’s still in the job in the hope of starting a conversation about how things could change.

The Liberal MP is something of an outsider in politics. Before he joined the party and sought preselection, he’d worked for two decades in the prosperous family business, Sydney pubs. The Laundy’s are a Labor-leaning family. Craig is the first in the clan to go into politics, and to vote Liberal.

Moving from business to politics was a steep learning curve. The family business had bumped up against state politics, not the national scene. There was no apprenticeship for the new MP as a staffer, or a lobbyist. Laundy quickly discovered things worked differently in Canberra. His mindset forged in the family business – be pragmatic, be personable, form alliances – was out of step with the default political culture.

“It’s the weirdest team I’ve ever been part of,” Laundy tells Guardian Australia’s political podcast, Australian Politics Live.

He uses a rugby analogy to try to explain. “If your inside centre, or the five eighth, misses the tackle and there’s a breakaway, then you cover defend. [Politics] is the only team I know where cover defence is a rarity. It’s almost like your team-mates see you miss the tackle, but instead of making the tackle to cover you, then they turn around and blame you for missing the tackle.”

The weeks leading up to the conservative-led strike against Turnbull was the worst of it. He says when Turnbull unseated Tony Abbott in 2015, he was on the winning side. Now he’s experienced being on the losing side, keeping vigil beside a leader being blasted out of office. “I saw the worst of politics. I had a ringside seat.”

But Laundy wants to push deeper than simply reflecting on one mad political fortnight, culminating in the destruction of another Australian prime ministership. There are three things on his mind: assessing how government works, or doesn’t optimally; the pernicious influence of Sky News at night on his colleagues; and the impact of the internal war between small “l” Liberals and conservatives that has defined so much of this period in government.

On the first point, how government works, Laundy believes the whole decision-making dynamic is back to front. He says people rise to ministerial level in politics through a combination of ability and “tenure”. The practical effect is people in safe seats dominate the power structures and the policy-making at the core of the government, and not the group defending the marginal seats, who are closer to their communities by necessity. He thinks this is the wrong way round. A better litmus test of whether a policy idea flies or not is the over the horizon radar of marginal seatholders, who find themselves at the bottom of the information pyramid.

Craig Laundy and Malcolm Turnbull at Strathfield North Public School in Sydney, 3 May, 2017. Photograph: Dean Lewins/AAP

Then there’s the “Canberra bubble” – often cited, not particularly well understood. “The part that gets missed for people outside Canberra … is when you are in Parliament House, our side of politics spends their whole time in their offices with Sky News playing in the background, and you are watching colleagues going head-to-head with Labor on policy, but once it gets to 6pm, it goes from panel-style shows to commentary shows.

“Look that’s [Sky’s] business model, it isn’t sour grapes, they are entitled to do this, they are trying to go the Fox News, US-style controversial rightwing shake-it-up … and a lot of my colleagues take what they say as gospel.”

Parliament House, for security reasons, is literally walled off from the outside world. It’s like a cloister, or a hot-house incubating exotic plants.

As a sense of crisis builds inside a government, the inhabitants of the building are isolated in their offices, and even intelligent people get swept up. “That’s the power of the Canberra bubble, the fact that [Sky] commentators, in the isolation of your office, can whip people up into a frenzy.” Laundy says those broadcasters have no impact on public consciousness in Australia at all, but “the impact they have is in the mind of the politician whilst in Canberra – and that’s something we need to break”.

Then there’s the impact of the rolling factional war. Laundy, a moderate, says conservatives cannot demand winner-takes-all and expect to retain government in a country like Australia. “The challenge we are facing right now as a party is to recognise that conservatives and ‘small l’ Liberals … are all our base. The base is not the conservative element of the Liberal party.

“If that were the case, then you are talking about 15% to 20% of Australia … and the sheer mathematics, and this is the beauty of politics, it comes down to simple maths. You need 50% plus one of the vote in each seat.

“You need to be pragmatic enough to understand that, and learn to live together. If you don’t, if you want to be ideological and not pragmatic, then the reality is because of the pure mathematics, you are going to spend a lot of time in opposition.”

He says the government cannot afford to ignore the message of the recent Wentworth byelection, because the Liberal party holds too many other seats like it. The reaction of the community in Turnbull’s old seat is not an anomaly, he insists, it’s a harbinger of what’s to come. “If you want to lurch hard right … you are never going to win.”

There are two big questions in our podcast conversation. Can he recover from being inside a leadership contest, from the insights and epiphanies of that period, and remain in political life; and does he think politicians in 2018 can serve the national interest, or is that objective constantly derailed by the difficulties and the dysfunctions of the life?

On the first question, he says “time will tell”. On the second, there is a heavy pause before he answers. “I’ve tried [to serve the national interest] and I think we all try to, but it’s tough.

“You are surrounded by switched-on cookies on both sides with differences of views, that are accountable to different subsets of people within the party and the community more broadly.”

He says representation is a privilege. “Whenever I do leave, my parting message to the people of Reid will be thank you so much for the opportunity to serve. I will walk around my electorate in years to come with my grandkids and point to things like the new soccer amenities in Concord, and say you know what, your grandpa played a hand in that.

“You do get to do stuff at the local level – and geez, it’s good.”