There’s an old saying about the writing mindset – attributed to everyone from Dorothy Parker to George RR Martin – which essentially runs: “Writing is intolerable, not writing is intolerable; the only acceptable state is having just written.”

This pithy statement neatly sums up the fact that writing for a living is a horrible and stupid career, and that the people who do it are cursed to dwell in a never-ending nightmare of deadlines and run-on sentences.

That’s why it took nearly a decade of writing for money before I made the disappointing discovery that this was my career, and that I was not, in fact, the indie rock star that I kept reassuring myself I was mere hours away from becoming.

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In the same spirit, it only dawned on me that I was a political writer about a year into my writing almost exclusively about politics. It’s like that other old adage about how if you put a frog into boiling water it’ll thrash around in panic, but if you put it into a pot of water and gently heat it, eventually the frog will make the jarring discovery that it has spent 12 months writing about Tony Abbott.

As a person with a fondness for things like ethics, transparency, wisdom and the human experience of joy, there’s no way in hell I’d have volunteered to write about the last five years of Australian politics. Yet, somehow, that’s what I’ve been doing: in magazines, in newspapers, on websites, and now in two books.

I try to find humour in the subject of my writing, and there’s been plenty of opportunities for that. Over the last five years there have been some delightfully comedic moments that have been genuinely fun to write about, whether it was watching the attorney general, George Brandis, not know what metadata was while explaining why it’s imperative for the government to access it, or seeing the then defence minister, Kevin Andrews, melt down over the difference between a “tender” and a “competitive evaluation” for submarines, or Christopher Pyne insisting, incorrectly, “I’m a fixer,” before failing to change university funding.

Or Joe Hockey insisting that poor people don’t drive cars, or Eric Abetz angrily harrumphing that abortions cause cancer on national television, or pretty much anything Cory Bernardi has ever said in public.

Or Tony Abbott giving the Duke of Edinburgh a knighthood (which, technically, is a demotion). Or Tony Abbott eating an onion. Or Abbott threatening: “I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin, you bet you are, you bet I am.”

Or explaining that he’s not the “suppository of all wisdom”. Or soberly summing up the Syrian civil war as “baddies versus baddies”. Or … look, there’s been a lot.



In more recent times: Turnbull’s frontbench dissolved as Mal Brough, Jamie Briggs and Stuart Robert all resigned in disgrace within weeks of one another. Peter Dutton showed his support for Briggs by sending a text assuring him that Samantha Maiden is a “mad fucking witch” – but accidentally sent it to Maiden instead, because telephones are complicated. Scott Morrison faffed through an entire Australian Press Club broadcast because the previous day’s abrupt killing of the proposed GST rise, about which he was planning to speak, had left him with nothing to talk about.

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But here’s the thing: this would all be hilarious if these people were badly running the private democracy-company they appear to think they’re working within – but they’re not. They’re running the country. And that’s important, and not especially funny.

Politics is important because the government is the important. Decisions made in Canberra have direct effects on the lives of people – so it’s not remotely funny when they waste time and money on, for example, examining whether or not wind turbines cause sickness-ghosts, or if halal certification is secretly funding terrorism.

There’s nothing funny about the national broadband network turning into a cripplingly expensive white elephant. There’s nothing funny about the national disability insurance scheme becoming a political football or the Gonski education reforms being gutted.

There’s nothing funny about superannuation tax havens for the ultra-rich becoming more politically vital than ensuring home ownership is affordable for young and middle-aged working Australians, or watching trickle-down economics return as the rhetoric casts non-tax-paying leaners against the job-creating lifters.

And there’s absolutely nothing remotely funny about offshore detention. Both of my books get deeply unfunny on that topic, because when you’re writing about how your government sanctions child abuse and sexual assaults, withholds medical and psychological treatment for detainees and fails to prevent torture, even murder, on their watch while insisting that they’re worried about “saving lives at sea”, it’s impossible not to wonder what the actual hell is happening to us.

But most importantly, there’s the fact that the last few years have seen the government achieve … what, exactly? Abbott’s triumphs, such as they were, were all in cancelling programs and projects of the Gillard and Rudd governments, without actually creating anything of his own. Turnbull’s first year-and-a-bit hasn’t even reached that low bar: 100-plus days since the election, and the closest we’ve come to progress is the dead-in-the-water plebiscite.

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Government is a powerful force for good, when it’s given a chance to do what it’s designed to do. Our democracy was forged not by conflict or revolution but by a bunch of bickering bureaucrats angrily forcing compromises on one another – and messy though it is, that’s a system that actually works pretty well when it’s permitted to do so.

So no: writing about this period of furious inaction isn’t technically fun. Writing about it is, in fact, intolerable. But it’s more intolerable to not.

• The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: The Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat by Andrew P Street is out now through Allen and Unwin