On Friday, Malcolm Turnbull’s tanty at Bill Shorten continued. No doubt encouraged by the rare praise of the newspapers who hyped up his petulant spit on Wednesday as a “withering put down” and an “aggressive new course” from the prime minister, he called his opponent a “hypocrite” on radio.

But I can’t blame my media colleagues for giving it a go. Here they are in the business of selling newspapers yet all the recent political news from Canberra has less tension than a shrivelled balloon on a damp day.

It’s a metaphor that defines the very character of the Turnbull government. The Liberals and Nationals have started the new parliamentary year with no national vision, no new policy and no great willingness to face the actual challenges of the global moment.

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Climate change may be on the mind of every Australian obliged to wander outside in record heat, but Turnbull’s Coalition is too exhausted from passing lumps of coal around parliament to summon the energy even to face Australia’s regional unemployment crisis let alone sort out anything as complex as housing affordability. I guess they’re out of puff pretending everything is fine with the Centrelink computers and pleading to retain their post-retirement travel entitlements, because they work so gosh-darn hard.

They work so hard that their policy vision extends precisely as far as recycling their already rejected ideas. The Abbott-era govern-to-punish measures of the 2014 budget are lurking in sneaky attempts to force young people without jobs to wait four weeks for their youth allowance, while having actually won the passage of their ABCC legislation, they’re returning to the very same bill to fiddle its dates of implementation. Oh, and the government is planning some deeply unpopular tax cuts for corporations, in a country where corporations barely pay tax, anyway. That’s it. This is all that Turnbull’s got.

The problem the prime minister has is that Australians can spot the difference between tiddlywinks and a policy agenda. Turnbull promised the electorate “jobs and growth”, has delivered neither and is at a gut-crushing 54-46 down in the polls. So of course the usual suspects at the newspapers are going to beat up anything that may suggest Turnbull’s leadership is still competitive. They’ve got the most challenging job in news entertainment since the publicists spruiking Crawford Grimsley against Jimmy Thunder. They’re the network trying to sell advertising for a season of Game of Thrones where the entire Stark family die of dysentery in the first episode.

Because everyone in Canberra knows the polls are merely symptomatic of the trouble Turnbull’s in. The extremists of his own party to whom he has kowtowed with such deference have grown bored with his placation and are leaving him.

His international emasculation by Donald Trump and Sean Spicer – not even deliberate, just careless – has had the public longing for the return of Paul Keating. And how obvious is it to anyone who’s seen the YouTube videos of Keating at his finest how the politically broken, withered, spineless Turnbull has been up at night studying them, too. Any amateur theatre critic who viewed Turnbull hissing “sycophant” and “parasite” at Shorten for his daring to occasionally dine with the big end of town can see not only the influence, but the failure to copy.

Keating’s talent was for a verbal barb that deflated the pomposity of the rich who would seek to rule over us – whether threatening to “do” an upstart financier like John Hewson slowly or mock a vain old Tory like Andrew Peacock’s reach into “the dye pot”. Keating’s subject was never so much the individual target as it was a born-to-rule attitude fundamentally out of step with Australia’s persistent egalitarian values.

But Turnbull’s values are those of the born-to-rule and – as his tirade made just so obvious – openly resentful of anyone like Shorten who’d dare wander unaccompanied into any realm of the ruling class. The point of Turnbull-frequented establishments like the Athenaeum Club are not merely who’s let in, but those kept firmly out.

For a prime minister who invested so much of his party’s advertising spend in a pre-election insistence that he was – despite his millions and his mansion – really, truly, just so ordinary, just such a battler, just “lads together” with his dear old dad, the classist spray he delivered in parliament was a pure distillation of the elitism of which he is so rightfully accused.

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This was not great rhetoric, Keatingesque brutality or a “withering attack” – it was blueblood schoolboy bullying; more “Raffles the Gentleman Thug Goes Aussie”, than “I’ll Show You, Donald; Keating Part II”. We know enough about bullying in Australia now to know this kind of personal attack reflects the weakness of the perpetrator, not the victim. What we’d be wise to identify are bullies who invoke their class status as the basis of a privilege they cannot affirm through talent, or strength.

To those seeking to compare Turnbull’s posh-boy putdowns of Shorten to the electric incision of Gillard’s misogyny speech – for the double delight of engaging a bit of sexist erasure while defending the derivative at the same time – let me offer a more appropriate touchstone. Former Tory UK prime minister, David Cameron, once levelled a classist sledge at his own Labour opponent, Jeremy Corbyn. “Put on a proper suit, do up your tie and sing the national anthem,” barked Cameron.

The British PM subsequently led his divided party into the unnecessary Brexit referendum, and his side lost – thunderously punished by an electorate raging against entitlement and political establishment.

Where is David Cameron now, I wonder? Malcolm Turnbull, do you know?