Many Liberal MPs feel slighted by their Prime Minister. Credit:Andrew Meares The world looks at us and says: "What are you guys doing down there? Nobody can keep up." But a tattered international reputation is symptom rather than cause. And it is small beer compared to the injury already done within the Australian polity – injury some would now willingly compound. Past ructions have not merely shredded faith in politicians, but in the mainstream media, whose members are accused of having egged on the circus, too often participating rather than reporting, and of having a bias for the spectacular. Charges of fake news abound. Trust is in short supply.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has Malcolm Turnbull in a difficult position. Credit:Andrew Meares In short, for everyone except maybe Bill Shorten (for whom a case can be made that it is his job) and Tony Abbott (for whom no rigorous case can be made), the mid-term collapse of a fourth Prime Minister in a row, would do longer term harm. The Liberal Party stands on the precipice. It has already repeated the supposedly unthinkable Labor act of replacing an elected PM and now some would do it again. That its thinly stretched self image would not survive such bastardry is obvious to all but the people who might make the decisions. Matt Golding This is the oil and water relationship between the immediate prizes of political power on the one hand, and the more diffuse concept of the national interest on the other.

In a double-irony, Turnbull's own career is itself exemplar of this incompatibility courtesy of his own removal by Abbott and then of Abbott, and of his Faustian pact to secure the prime ministership. Self-evidently, Abbott's idiosyncratic duumvirate with an unelected chief of staff was done-for by mid-2015 but there was no public clamour nor public interest case for Turnbull's unilateral surrender on marriage equality and climate change. In fact, quite the opposite. Turnbull's positions on both were high among the reasons many wanted him to replace Abbott. Surrendering these commitments may have been the price Turnbull had to pay (internally), but that goes to his interests alone, not those of the community. Hyper-ambition is like that. It is an inherently selfish project and often self-destructive too. In Turnbull's case it hard-wired in his subsequent problems, by casting him to voters as a hollowman, while doing nothing to strengthen his grip on his party. For all these faults however, Turnbull arrived after all the chaos and mediocrity, as the great corrective. And for better or worse, the nation simply cannot now afford for him to fail. Americans might have installed a vainglorious adolescent, but at least they can plead (at this stage) that it was a one-off.

Nonetheless, the fact that so many supported the defiantly unqualified disrupter, Donald Trump, and that Australia's political culture is trapped in the self-loathing eddy of internecine warfare, are hardly worlds apart. Rather, they are the two ends of the same problem: a withering of public belief and even familiarity, in our institutional mores. Australia's political-media class loves to tut-tut about foolish American voters, or the small-mindedness that propelled the Brexit result. Yet Australia has also departed the highway traversed by cool-headed democracies. The danger is that the route back becomes lost. Institutions, like traditions, need to be regularly observed, reinforced through use and re-use. Australia is doing this with bad habits now and setting out to repeat them. Like the Carlton fan who worries that his 18-year-old son has never seen a premiership and perhaps never will, anyone eligible to vote for the first time in 2018, will have no personal memory of governmental stability in their lifetime. To them, chaos, disloyalty, and unvarnished self-interest, constitute the Australian norm. Loyalty is ephemeral. Courage merely rhetorical. Governing parties turn on their own and thus flame out shortly after gaining office (a dysfunction once confined to the defeated). Loading Government, since the John Howard years, as one of its key players Kevin Rudd would have had it, has been a "rolling clusterf---".

This, even more than the particular beliefs Turnbull so breezily dispatched, was what his preferment was supposed to remedy.