Illustration: Rocco Fazzari. Certainly, there was a lot of talk about alternatives, and Malcolm Turnbull in particular, but that was a symptom, not a cause, of Abbott's implosion. Turnbull interpreted this accurately. It was all about Abbott. Turnbull didn't try to make it about himself. He pledged his loyalty to the prime minister and sat it out. The prime ministership is coming to him. He is content to wait. Some of his more ardent advocates wanted him to strike at Abbott. But his prudence and patience has only raised Turnbull's standing in the eyes of most of his colleagues. Abbott is fatally wounded. He is unpopular with the country. His government is perpetually behind in the polls. And now most of his own backbenchers have voted no confidence in him. Labor has stood agog, irrelevant to the Liberal breakdown. The spill motion was a personal and political crisis for Abbott. It was also a crisis for the model of politics that he operates.

Tony Abbott: His political pugilism is driving the electorate to despair. There are two starkly different ways of conducting politics. It can be problem-solving, or it can be pugilism. Both were on display in Australia's Parliament this week. The Liberal insurrection against Tony Abbott's prime ministership was an unmistakable sign that politics as pugilism had failed. It was a mutiny against the model of politics that Labor and Liberal alike have developed and that Abbott perfected to the point of failure. Content to wait: Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen In this model, emphasis is on delivering for the party, not the people. Priority is given to the professional apparatchiks, not the elected members.

Action is premised on the desirability of aggression, political aggression and ideological aggression. Election promises are discarded. Policy proposals are developed in secrecy and sprung upon an unready backbench, parliament and electorate. Media relations are an extension of this construct. Partisan media are succoured, and all other media are treated as hostiles. We think our politics is pretty brutal, but I have to say, your politics makes ours look positively genteel. British Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond In this model, voters are mug punters, elected members are given "political lobotomies" as Labor's Doug Cameron once complained, the public service is suspect and policies are developed as the chief weapon of assault. This is the style of politics that has driven the electorate to despair. At the last election, Labor was rejected. But the Coalition was not embraced. Labor lost 4.6 per cent of its primary vote. The Coalition picked up less than half of this, 1.8 per cent. Many voters chose neither major party; the informal vote went to a record high and Clive Palmer and friends reaped the rest of the disenchantment, a disenchantment which now extends to Palmer's party too. The world has marvelled at Australia's global outperformance as it heads into its 24th year of unbroken economic growth yet tears down prime ministers at a postwar Italian pace.

Outside observers "looked on askance, like freeway rubberneckers passing the scene of a major pile-up made all the more inexplicable because the driving conditions seemed so perfect at the time", wrote the former BBC correspondent in Australia, Nick Bryant. "As the country has grown stronger, its politics have become nastier and more adolescent," he wrote in The Rise and Fall of Australia. I spoke to one of those outside observers, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Phillip Hammond, just before he went to dinner with Abbott at Kirribilli House two weeks ago as the confidence crisis loomed. "We think our politics is pretty brutal," the Briton told me, "but I have to say, your politics makes ours look positively genteel." But it's not the driving conditions so much as the drivers that are the problem, not the country but the politicians. Politicos are all looking in amazement at the increasing volatility of the electorate. One-term conservative governments have fallen in sudden and savage swings in two state elections in the past three months – one in Victoria and one in Queensland.

Abbott implied that the problem was that the voters were wrong or stupid, dismissing the state results as "a fit of absent mindedness when people elect Labor governments". What's wrong with the electorate, the apparatchiks and professional politicians wonder? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with the electorate; perhaps the people are reacting rationally to the political choices put in front of them. Prime ministers and opposition leaders have successively increased the degree of hyperaggressive partisanship and overcentralised control until they bring us to this crisis point. This mode of politics is a sickness when it is visited upon any country, but it might work in one with optional voting. In the US, for instance, hyperpartisan pugilism is destroying the country, yet it can succeed politically because a party need only whip up its support base into a greater frenzy than the other party's to get greater voter turnout. And that is their way to victory. But in Australia, where voting is mandatory (or, technically attendance at a polling place and having your name crossed off is mandatory), it cannot work. In Australia, where everyone must vote, elections are won at the sensible centre, not the partisan periphery. So politics as pugilism is harmful to the country and ultimately must fail politically, too. The other model is politics as problem-solving. In this model, political leaders engage their own backbench and even reach across the aisle to the opposing party to seek solutions. This is vastly rarer in the current Parliament, yet we saw it twice this week. On Wednesday the Parliament conducted its annual review of the Closing the Gap plan, a bipartisan effort to reduce the shocking disadvantage of Indigenous Australia.

On Thursday all parties came together to plead for Indonesia's President Joko Widowo to spare the lives of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, the rehabilitated Australian drug smugglers. In both cases, extreme human suffering has brought parliamentarians together as Australians to work for a solution, no matter how tough the problem and how forlorn the chances of success. Why must it take dire human calamity in the most intractable situations to bring our parliament to unite in search of solutions? As Abbott contemplated what he called his "near death experience" this week, he had both models in front of him, pugilism and problem-solving. As he sought for a way out of his crisis, guess which he has chosen to pursue? Abbott has concluded that his problem was not that he'd been too aggressive but that he hadn't been aggressive enough.

"I'm no good at fighting Liberals, but I'm very good at fighting the Labor Party," Abbott told his party. "I can beat Shorten." Yet Abbott's problem is not Shorten. Abbott's problem is Abbott, as his deputy, Julie Bishop, told him in a private moment of utter frankness: "You're your own worst enemy." He also failed to heed his own backbench. He understood one part of the problem, his high-handedness with his backbench MPs and senators. This week, for the first time, ministers attended backbench policy committees to listen, not to lecture. "In the past a minister turned up and presented you with legislation," says a backbench Liberal. "You could ask questions, but the legislation was non-negotiable. This week they turned up and sat there listening to our views." And the chief enforcer of the prime ministerial will, his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, retreated somewhat as ministers were given some greater freedom. For instance, ministers can now hire their own junior staff rather than submitting their choices to a central "star chamber". The star chamber still exists to vet senior staff choices, but Credlin no longer sits on it. seats. "Open debate is the lifeblood of every democracy, but political collaboration from opposing parties should not be an anathema. These are the conversations we need to have, but instead debate is reduced to a robotic regurgitation of stale talking points that resonate with the public like an overdose of Mogadon." "It is not enough for leaders to listen: they must also hear... and finally, a leader should not lie – to their colleagues or the Australian people." Gambaro was asking Abbott to embrace a problem-solving model, to make a wholesale change to his way of politics, to take the people and the whole parliament into his confidence. Yet Abbott, after surviving his party room crisis, blundered on regardless, throwing a flurry of increasingly frantic punches. In just a few short days, he inflicted new injuries on himself over apparent duplicity over the government's plans to acquire a vital new fleet of submarines, over the trivialisation of the Holocaust, and by responding furiously to a report on children in detention. Australia wants solutions. Abbott seems to want to offer only more anger.

The leading alternative Liberal leader, Turnbull, understands a more co-operative way of politics. He is a centrist who has shown that he can appeal to voters across the spectrum. He offers more than just a change of leader. He represents an entirely different model of politics. A flailing, failing Abbott is inadvertently making Turnbull look increasingly attractive to his own backbench. Peter Hartcher is the political editor.