What the "Status Quo" looks like. At times, each of the last three federal governments has resembled a confused nursing home patient wandering through traffic looking for their old house. Their inability to deal with the changes going on around and within their parties made a nonsense of the idea of extending terms in office to four years. Four years ago, iron ore was worth three and half times what it is now, we had a car manufacturing industry, barely anyone in Australia had heard of Uber, or Google's self-driving cars, ice was still something you put in your drink and we thought Rolf Harris was a harmless old duffer. Computing power has doubled more than 27 times since the integrated circuit was invented in 1958. A lousy iPhone 4 has the same processing power as the world's fastest super computer in 1985, the Cray 2. We are all sitting atop a screaming rocket ship of digital power that will transform just about every industry in the world. But let's dig up some more coal.

One of the key problems of having so little diversity in a political leadership group is - to paraphrase former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld - they don't know what they don't know. Leila Takayama, a roboticist at Google's moonshot division Google X, did an interview recently about the gender imbalance in the tech industry, but she could have just as easily been talking about political leadership when she observed part of her job as a user experience researcher was "to find out what other perspectives I don't have". "There's waaaay more stakeholders than just the few engineers in the room building the system. If you don't represent the views of the customer - and customers include both men and women, people of many different ages, people with many different capabilities - you make something that only one person in the household loves, the rest of the family hates and guess where it ends up? In the closet," said Takayama. This, ironically - given his stance on same-sex marriage - is where the product Tony Abbott is selling, is going to end up. The frustration many Liberals have expressed with Abbott's leadership team - with even senior MPs asking of them "where are you?" - has to partly stem from the fact they are hearing a compelling narrative for change from their electorates and not one from their bosses.

People outside of Canberra - and many within - know how fast the world is changing and, though they may not want their government plunging headlong into every tributary of social, economic or environmental change, they want them to know how to swim. What Abbott effortlessly achieves in his Speedos, he seems incapable of when clothed. This is not just a question of his obstinacy on gay marriage; it's renewable energy, climate change, immigration, taxation reform, STEM funding and research, negative gearing, the Republic and bloody knighthoods. The future beckons and Abbott sees threats where a leader should see hope. Author Yuval Noah Harari notes in his new book Sapiens: "Today, even a thirty-year-old can honestly tell disbelieving teenagers, 'When I was young, the world was completely different.' The Internet, for example, came into wide usage only in the early 1990s, hardly twenty years ago. Today we cannot imagine the world without it." "Hence any attempt to define the characteristics of modern society is akin to defining the colour of a chameleon. The only characteristic of which we can be certain is the incessant change. People have become used to this, and most of us think about the social order as something flexible, which we can engineer and improve at will.

"The main promise of pre-modern rulers was to safeguard the traditional order or even to go back to some lost golden age. In the last two centuries, the currency of politics is that it promises to destroy the old world and build a better one in its place. Not even the most conservative of political parties vows merely to keep things as they are." Except if you're Tony Abbott. You can follow Sam on Twitter here. His email address is here.