The country has dodged a bullet. I’d like to say that more diplomatically, but I have no energy to say it more diplomatically, and I strongly suspect voters don’t need diplomacy from me right now.

What’s needed is clarity.

So let’s have that.

There have been big stakes in this leadership ballot. A party of government fractured right in front of us. That political party contemplated its immediate future: would it be government by reason, steady deliberation by the technocrats, or would it be government by crass populism, by feelings, by resentments, by roiling, by the gut, by the vibe?

This same choice has played out in democracies around the world, post global financial crisis. This is the moment history has handed us. How we respond to it will determine our future.

The Liberal party teetered on the brink of that choice, descended into several days of abject madness as it sought to resolve it, and in the end, chose to stay within the lines; to not succumb, or at least not fully, to Trumpism and nativism. It leaned into the worst scenario, and pulled back by five votes.

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So we’ve been spared the destruction that easily could have been. The question is what have we got instead?

On Friday, we had a leadership ballot between a former cop and the son of a cop. The latter, Scott Morrison, prevailed.

Morrison is an uneasy compromise between the Liberal party’s now openly warring moderate and conservative camps. He started as a moderate and drifted into conservative territory. Perhaps he will possess the art of the compromise that Malcolm Turnbull could never quite master, despite his best efforts at capitulation at the feet of his enemies.

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Perhaps Morrison will be able to put the pieces back together, with sticky tape and glue and Band-Aids. Perhaps he’ll be able to tune the instrument sufficiently so it doesn’t shatter.

But this is a very big ask. I’m not sure he has superhuman qualities. I’m sure he will give it his best, to try to plot a path between the party’s broad church, which has descended into a baying lynch mob for the want of tending, for the want of the leader with the magic touch.

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The jury is very much out on whether Morrison is the person who can set this right. In any case setting it right is a longer game. Right now he has to steady the show in preparation for an election. Right now he’s going to have to find something coherent to say.

It will need to be something compelling, because the Australian voters aren’t mugs, and they won’t forget what they’ve seen over the past week or two.

They won’t forget that their politicians, their elected representatives, convened a dumpster fire at their expense, and staged a revenge tragedy that was meant to be an epic and in the end was just botched tactics and bathos.

They won’t forget that the Liberal party has made the most compelling case of all that Bill Shorten should be Australia’s next prime minister.

They won’t forget.