Something is missing in Australia. It's been missing since about 9:30pm on September 14, 2015.

On that day, one note — a deep, rich vibrato that has been a constant part of the rattling, tooting orchestral manoeuvre that is Australian politics for about forty years, sometimes building, sometimes ebbing, but always perceptibly there — abruptly stopped.

Possibly forever.

What is this missing strain?

It's the sound of Malcolm Bligh Turnbull wanting to be Prime Minister.

Up until that moment, Turnbull's was a life hugely defined by ambition.

A life that began in modest circumstances, and was pierced early by maternal abandonment, but picked itself up and became — thanks to the efforts of its exuberant, brilliant, changeable occupant — extraordinary beyond the aspirations of all but the very few.

It is a life that has surged through journalism and activism and business and politics, absorbing literature and art, and intersecting — sometimes happily, sometimes unhappily — with giants in those spheres.

Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull have each been Opposition leader once and prime minister once. ( AAP: Daniel Munoz )

It is a life that was given constancy and depth by marriage and children, but whose raw fuel was the urgent need to get somewhere, as fast as possible.

The low hum of his ambition, all these years, has always been there in Australian public life; a composite note comprised of countless Turnbull stories, in which the protagonist makes millions, or pulls off some unbelievable legal coup, or goes to Siberia in search of gold, or picks a fight with a Prime Minister.

As Attorney-General George Brandis, a member of Malcolm Turnbull's leadership group, says, with lawyerly understatement: "Malcolm has more hinterland than any previous Australian Prime Minister."

A person who knows Turnbull very well told me that up until 2008, when he first became leader of the Liberal Party, his brain was occupied 50 per cent with whatever he was doing at the time, and 50 per cent by where he was going.

After the loss of the leadership in 2009 — a miserable experience — that proportion receded to something more like 80/20; a moderation born of pain.

And now that he's got what he and his mother wanted, he's achieved — in the estimation of his friend — something approaching peace.

Turnbull struggled as Opposition leader, while Abbott flourished

A month or so into Turnbull's time as Prime Minister, he was telephoned by Alexander Downer.

Presently Australia's high commissioner in London, Downer is a good friend of Turnbull's and the pair have a lot in common.

They both ran unsuccessfully for Liberal pre-selection in 1981: Turnbull for Wentworth, Downer for the South Australian seat of Boothby.

Recalls Downer: "We both lost, and we commiserated with each other on the grounds that it was perfectly obvious that the worst candidates had won. We agreed that we were the stand-out talent, and the tragedy for the nation was that it would now have to wait for that which could quite easily have been its at an earlier date."

The Liberal Party sufficiently overcame its reservations not only to pre-select them both in later years, but to make each leader of the party, both in Opposition.

Neither of these experiments was a happy one; Downer led the party for eight miserable months before resigning in January 1995 and Turnbull held out for thirteen before being whacked by his colleagues in late 2009.

"How do you like the job?" Downer asked Turnbull when he telephoned the Prime Minister from London in late 2015.

"It's absolutely brilliant! Best job ever. Fantastic! I'm absolutely loving it," Turnbull enthused.



Downer had a specific interest in Turnbull's response.

In Adelaide for Christmas in 2013, just three months after Tony Abbott had been sworn in as Australia's twenty-eighth prime minister, he had asked him the same question.

The answer was very different.

"Oh," groaned Abbott, pulling a face. "It's such a hard job! It really is just so unbelievably difficult. Every morning I wake up and I can't believe it, how much of a responsibility it is."

Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott have circled each other all their lives, and have each been Opposition leader once and prime minister once.

Each man has deprived the other of the Liberal leadership once, too.

They both were journalists in their earlier lives.

They have ridden out against each other — most notably, outside Canberra, in the republican debate.

They have affected and confided in each other, and gone surfing together.

They have said dreadful things to each other in moments of conflict, but have always found away back to civility.

Tony Abbott testifies that when he fell into a lengthy malaise after the Howard government's defeat, it was a spirited argument with Turnbull which spurred him to pull himself together.

And when Malcolm Turnbull called his new cabinet together after ending Tony Abbott's prime ministership before even its first term had elapsed, he told them: "I know what he's going through. I went through it myself, and it's the worst thing you can possibly go through. I was only Opposition leader when it happened to me, so I can only imagine how much pain he's feeling. Anything that anyone can do to help him and ease his pain, please do."

But their experiences in office make a fascinating study in opposites.

Mr Turnbull struggled as Opposition leader, Annabel Crabb writes. ( AAP )

Tony Abbott relished his work as Opposition leader, a job into which he poured vast amounts of energy and enthusiasm.

He was potent, focused, absolutely deadly, and ultimately he succeeded.

The most abiding recollection of his Opposition leadership is the discipline with which he repeated his trio of slogans: Stop the boats. Scrap the carbon tax. End the waste.

So good was Tony Abbott, in fact, as Opposition leader, that he never entirely left the job.

His most significant achievements as prime minister were acts of dismantlement or shutting down: ending the carbon and mining taxes, stopping the boats.

Malcolm Turnbull, in contrast, struggled as Opposition leader.

He was often chippy and irritable.

He grew quickly frustrated with colleagues and sometimes sought to overwhelm or bully them.

He struggled, too, with the negative aspects of the job; if Abbott's biggest failure in government was that he used too much of his time as prime minister to take things apart, Turnbull's in opposition was that he overleapt his colleagues in an attempt to build something; his crowning misadventure was to seek a grand deal with the Labor Party on carbon pricing, a quasi-suicidal endeavour for which his party punished him with ultimate force.

It's an odd part of our political system that the traditional audition for the prime ministership is to be leader of the Opposition, when those two jobs have such different requirements.

Bob Hawke, who served what he describes as "the ideal period" of one month as Opposition leader, says he wouldn't have been any good at the job longer term.

"You've really got to love belting your opponents," he says.

"That's the essence of it. It's just not my cup of tea. And you've got to have a capacity, I think, almost for hate to be a good Opposition leader, and I don't have that capacity at all."

Kim Beazley, Hawke offers, is an example of a Labor leader who would have been a better prime minister than he was an Opposition leader.

"Kim was not a good Opposition leader because, if I can use the vernacular, he didn't have enough shit in him. If he'd won the '98 election, which he so nearly did, I think he would have made a great prime minister."

'Turnbull's genuine fascination for gadgetry is boundless'

Some of the differences between Australia's twenty-eighth Prime Minister and its twenty-ninth are obvious. Malcolm Turnbull is more upbeat, more expansive ("waffly," his critics would say), less disciplined and less aggressive.

Abbott freaked people out by eating onions and winking in radio interviews.

Turnbull is more given to jovial digression.

"I must say that I love this standing studio!" he enthused at the end of a fairly hostile exchange with Radio National breakfast host Fran Kelly.

"Don't know if people watching us on television can see us standing … It is so much better for us. We should all spend more time standing."

Unlike Abbott's, his staff appointments have been studiously uncontroversial.

He cleaves closely to the decisions of his predecessor on contentious social issues. He has toned down the language on national security.

Soon after coming to office, Turnbull discovered and scotched plans for significantly increased security at Parliament House, commissioned by Peta Credlin and Tony Abbott after the Lindt Cafe siege at Christmas 2014 and budgeted at $300 million.

The Prime Minister's love for technology is no secret. ( ABC News: Andree Withey )

There were plans for a large structure to be built around the parliament's ministerial wing, creating a buffer around the prime minister's office, which currently occupies a section of the building's external wall, protected from the outside world by a courtyard and a steel gate.

Other proposals included a large fence around the building, and then a concrete ditch around that, to exclude pedestrians.

"This is a moat! It's ridiculous!" Turnbull protested when he learnt of the plans, and threw them out.

Turnbull also reopened the corridors around the prime ministerial suite and removed the layers of builder's plastic which had been laid over the steel vehicular gates to the prime minister's courtyard, installed to obscure the line of sight from outside and assuage Credlin's fears that Tony Abbott would fall victim to sniper fire from a long-range rifleman or rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

Turnbull "stopped the moats," convinced that a political leader who chooses to live in a fortress thereby accepts a spirit of besiegement.

He chafes at the $550,000 BMW commissioned by his predecessor, which features unpuncturable tyres and is designed to be invulnerable to AK-47 fire.

It has only two seats in the back, and the prime minister — still mourning his dinky Prius — hates being unable to give more than one person a lift in his heavy new gasguzzler.

He continues to take the train wherever possible.

He likes to go kayaking on Sydney Harbour, while listening to podcasts.

(One feels for the prime ministerial police detail. After six years of Rudd and Gillard, who lived obediently in the Lodge, fighting viciously among themselves but otherwise observing a decently sedentary lifestyle, suddenly there's Tony Abbott who wants to live in a barracks and cycle 80 kilometres before dawn, then Malcolm Turnbull who favours his own waterfront home, small flimsy craft and public transport. His kayaking expeditions, apparently, are monitored closely by the water police, who chunter along in his wake as the twenty-ninth Prime Minister of Australia, happy as a clam, paddles across the harbour listening to Slate's Political Gabfest.)

The prime ministerial suite itself is perhaps the most-renovated patch of real estate in Parliament House.

Six prime ministers it's hosted, in ten years.

John Howard's green Chesterfields, the desk belonging to Menzies and the oil painting by Winston Churchill were trucked out in 2007 to be replaced by the burnt-orange tub chairs and Chinese artworks of Kevin Rudd.

They were in turn usurped, three years later, by Julia Gillard's Sherrin football and Western Bulldogs scarf, whereafter the Churchill painting made a reappearance under Tony Abbott, along with the youthful portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that accompanies the Member for Warringah from office to office.

And in September 2015, the office underwent a Turnbull Rethink.

Out went the Queen and Churchill.

Mr Turnbull cannot help but be "the smartest person in the room", one minister said. ( AAP News: Mick Tsikas )

Up went the net value of office artworks, thanks to a large John Olsen painting commissioned by the Turnbulls — Sydney Seaport Table — which hangs nicely in the eye-line of any vigorous modern Prime Minister who happens to step up to the standing desk.

The modernity is no accident.

Turnbull's genuine fascination for gadgetry is boundless.

He was an early enthusiast for information technology, and made a bundle when he and his buddy Trevor Kennedy sold their stake in OzEmail in 1999 (Turnbull's cut was $57 million, from an initial investment of $500,000).

He had a Kindle in parliament before they were even available for sale in Australia.

His enthusiasm for the iPad, when it was invented, was that of a starving man for a sandwich.

When the Apple Watch arrived, Turnbull had one straightaway.

The Fairfax photographer Alex Ellinghausen, in a wonderful 2015 article on photographing Australian political leaders, listed the individual tics that — over the years — became unmistakable photographic memes.

Kevin Rudd's elaborate hair-flick.

Julia Gillard's open-throated victory laugh, head thrown back, when she elicited a concession at the dispatch box.

Bill Shorten's "Grumpy Cat" frown, in which the corners of his mouth turn comically down.

Tony Abbott's wink (a tough one, this — harder to photograph than a snow leopard. "It's so quick that you have to pre-empt the shot when you feel it coming," explains Ellinghausen.)

So far, the two memes Malcolm Turnbull has given photographers are Gesticulation with Spectacles and Checking the Apple Watch.

Tony Abbott, who declared early in his leadership that he was no "tech head," never became one in prime ministerial office.

He uses technology where necessary, with a Luddite tendency to stick to familiar ground.

Years ago, when Abbott was a Howard government frontbencher writing regular newspaper columns, a staffer helped him with a computer problem and was horrified and amused to discover that then enthusiastic two-finger typist was using a single Word document to write all of his speeches and articles.

He hadn't cottoned on to the fact that you could have more than one.

Turnbull's technological revolution, by comparison, is seemingly endless.

In recent years, he has expanded boldly into discreet messaging platforms like Confide, Wickr and WhatsApp (favoured by political conspirators and sexters alike) for the capacity they offer of communications beyond even the considerable range of George Brandis's metadata recovery laws.

Ministers flounder in his wake, crashing through the App Store in pursuit of whichever platform the man's currently using.

"I have always been very curious," is Turnbull's explanation.

Unlike Mr Turnbull, Mr Abbott relished his work as Opposition leader. ( AAP: Tracey Nearmy )

"So I've always enjoyed studying and reading and learning, and of course the fabulous thing about the internet is that all of the knowledge of the world is — you know — available on your smartphone, so that's incredible."

Regardless of Google's asymmetry of purpose with the federal tax system, Turnbull enthuses that "it's certainly done a great service to the curious."

Turnbull's delight in knowledge is — in the right moment — a powerfully charming attribute.

In a political landscape increasingly choked by the smog of 24-hour opinion, sham outrage, grandstanding and the rest of the clutter that dogs a politician's day, a leader who still has the enthusiasm to look up the etymology of a crazy-sounding word just for the fun of it is a rare bird and a marvel to see.

Unsurprisingly, for a man constantly torn between real-life conversations and the siren call of the digital omniverse, Turnbull tends to switch on and off.

You can be in an absorbing exchange with him and then notice that he has gone quiet, his conversational contribution reduced to the occasional sonorous "Mmmmm."

Then you realise that he's fidgeting away at his phone, or is subtly vetting phone messages.

Waiting with him in an airline lounge once, I plumped down in a seat next to him and asked if he wanted a cup of tea; I was fetching one for myself.

Knitting his eyebrows and staring straight ahead, he replied sternly: "Well, I can't see how that could possibly work."

Scanning his face for clues (perhaps he was a coffee man?), I noticed the flash of the busy Bluetooth device clipped to his ear, realised my error and stole away.

Sometimes, he can be in two places at once.

In April 2010 the Walkley Foundation arranged a panel discussion on media and politics, featuring Turnbull, recently dethroned as Opposition leader, Laurie Oakes, the ABC journalist Quentin Dempster and the US journalist and academic John Nichols.

I was on the panel too; it was too big a group for the purposes of the discussion, and by about the fifteen-minute mark Malcolm had pulled out his iPad and his smart-phone and was scanning both.

Mr Turnbull "can deploy his charm like a lethal weapon", one cabinet colleague said. ( ABC News: Angelique Donnellan )

Fascinated, and sitting immediately to his left, I peered out of the corner of my eye at what he was doing.

Emails on the phone, as far as I could make out.

On the iPad, an article with diagrams that looked a bit aqueducty.

Five minutes later, the panel discussion arrived at the gristly heart of the media-and-politics argument: are politicians naturally just shallow and cowardly, or are they trained to be that way?

Oakes quoted Tony Abbott's recent comment that he "wasn't looking at any policies that went further than his lifetime."

It was, said Oakes glumly, not a very inspiring attitude.

Suddenly, Turnbull surfaced from the world of Appian plumbing and push notifications.

Removing his glasses and waving them (that gesture!) with a calorific smile, he interjected: "But then, Laurie, you do have to remember: he is incredibly fit."

'It's perfectly understandable that Malcolm Turnbull would have quite a low boredom threshold'

The periods of inattention don't always end with a game-saving one-liner.

For all Malcolm Turnbull's lifelong career as a deal-maker, he has a terrible poker face.

Just as it's easy to see when he is seized and intrigued by an issue or a conversation or a person, it's easy to see when he isn't.

It's like a little light going off.

When he's bored by a conversation, his eyes wander.

His fingers creep towards his smartphone.

He wants to get back to the universe, with all its thrilling possibility.

When he's in a press conference that bores him, his sentences get rangy and circuitous, like the tracks of a lost dog.

He'll trail off, start a new one.

Sometimes it looks compellingly as though he is trying to jog his own interest.

On bad days, it looks aimless.

On one level, it's perfectly understandable that Malcolm Turnbull would have quite a low boredom threshold.

To a man who has fought hand-to-hand with Kerry Packer and survived, gone searching for gold in Siberia and teamed up with a reviled former spy to win a towering, unlikely victory over the government of Margaret Thatcher, it's easy to see how the duller encounters of government — the boardroom lunches with their ranks of suits, the endless fundraisers with their mutually obsequious small talk or interactions with busybodies who just want to tell you this one thing — might seem rather thin gruel.

There are wild cards which always pique his interest: a pert child, an entrepreneur doing something wildly innovative, someone who knows a lot about water.

There is no doubt of Turnbull's charm.

"He's one of the most charming people I've ever met," says a cabinet colleague.

"He can deploy his charm like a lethal weapon."

But there is charm, and then there is political charm.

Political charm is being able to summon the ordinary kind at a moment's notice.

Even when you are tired, even when you couldn't think of anything on earth about which you could possibly care less than this conversation, even when the half finished article in the Economist is calling you so strongly that you can almost read it like Braille on the phone in your pocket.

Political charm is no one being able to tell when you're bored.

Malcolm Turnbull is working on that, but he's not there yet.

One business observer says that while Turnbull's government is an improvement on Abbott's in that ministers genuinely have carriage of issues and Turnbull himself is accessible, there is no mistaking the junctures at which he is tired or unfocused.

"The face that says 'Gosh, I'd rather not be here,' is so evident," he laughs.

"You never got that with John Howard, who was so professional, you never knew when he was tired, he always looked and sounded exactly the same — interested, courteous, engaged."

"I think at his best he can be extraordinary," says a colleague.

"Malcolm is a real confidence player. You can tell when he's across something, he believes in it and he knows why he's doing it. The challenge is: how do you get him to feel that way more often?"

'He still has to be the smartest person in the room'

The universe is never far from Turnbull's fingers.

Even in meetings he's chairing as Prime Minister, when there's a dispute underway, Turnbull is quick to call in Apple's third umpire.

Not as much as he used to do, but it's still there.

"He still has to be the smartest person in the room — he can't help that," says one minister.

"You'll be having a talk with him and he'll pull out his iPad and look up some legal precedent or whatever, just to settle the argument. It's endearing, because you have someone who's quite genuinely learnt running the show, but it's annoying because you're all sitting in this meeting and he's burrowing into 1920s constitutional law."

The Prime Minister opted for the longest election campaign in memory despite advice from colleagues to go to an election soon after coming to the job. ( AAP: Lukas Coch )

Turnbull's ambition is boundless.

He came to the job of Prime Minister determined to change not only the Government and the way it did business, but the nature of politics itself.

He resisted advice from colleagues to go to an election soon after he became Prime Minister, because he did not wish to be seen as a cheap political opportunist.

He opted instead — in the end — for the longest election campaign in memory despite every historical precedent shrieking that long campaigns are very bad news, especially for leaders who have not fought any campaigns at all before.

He wanted to end the bitterness and negativity of Australian politics, and tackle personally the accelerated news cycle by making decisions in a slow and deliberative way, not driven by ideology or expediency or panic in the face of the daily media churn.

All these decisions violated, in their own way, certain rules of politics.

Never have a long campaign.

Always go to an election when you're best placed to win it.

Feed the media beast, or it will feed on you.

But Malcolm Turnbull, in all his years, has never been one to obey convention.

In business and in law, his most distinctive feature was his capacity for deep insurrection to the orthodoxies of his environment.

His faith — very often justified, it must be said — was that brilliance and force could overcome such barriers.

And when he became Prime Minister he intended, by sheer force of personality, to transform a political culture that has broken half a dozen prime ministers in a decade.

He's always aimed high.

This is an edited extract from Stop at Nothing by Annabel Crabb. Published by Black Inc. on Wednesday, May 18.