One of the most persistent themes of the Turnbull premiership is that whatever the Prime Minister does to placate the far reaches of his party, the more they seem to torment him. Some of this has been entirely on his watch, as with Turnbull's sacrificing of the Safe Schools program. Others, like policy on climate change or same-sex marriage, he inherited as a condition of him assuming Tony Abbott's job. Still others, like superannuation concessions, came only after he had made public pledges to the contrary. That wasn't him winding back someone else's idea. He was winding back his own. Right after an election.

The problem is that none of it seems to buy him any peace. And perhaps nothing is quite so emblematic of this as the same-sex marriage plebiscite, which this week Labor finally put out of its misery. There are two major political winners as a result of this.

The first is the Labor Party which, despite clearly exploiting this issue for political gain over the past month or so by dragging out its decision, has clearly found a clear voice on it. And the second is the anti-same-sex marriage brigade in the Coalition for whom the plebiscite was only ever a political strategy to defeat something that can only be defeated by such political trickery.

Same-sex marriage now joins serious climate change policy as one of Australian politics' unachievables, where the machinations of Parliament sit entirely at odds with the demonstrated popular will.