During a conversation this week with a senior Liberal, referencing the Coalition’s approaching winter of discontent, this was the take on Peter Dutton’s chances of becoming leader of the Liberal party: “He is probably the most unlikely person to lead a major party since Bill Hayden, who happened to be another Queensland policeman.”



If you are too young to remember Hayden, he did in fact lead the Labor party in opposition before being pipped at the post by the hugely popular Bob Hawke, the Australian Council of Trade Unions star recruit, just a few weeks before the 1983 election.

What the opening observation tells us, if it wasn’t already obvious, is that the government – having passed the grim milestone of the 30th Newspoll loss – has assumed both battle and brace positions.

While the specific outcomes are difficult to predict, what’s certain is we’ve all been here before. There have been six cycles of leadership instability inside the major parties since the first killing season in 2009: Turnbull/Abbott/Turnbull, and Rudd/Gillard/Rudd – Canberra’s own deeply depressing version of the Ring Cycle.

No one needs to send up a flare, or sound a trumpet. We know what it looks like.

Recent history has shown us when the future in politics is uncertain, basic human instincts start to kick in. People scope out options and take out insurance. They hedge, which is precisely what we’ve seen over the past few days – small but meaningful blips on the radar.

Malcolm Turnbull’s office asked ministers to fan out in the wake of the bad Newspoll, to declare Business As Usual, and Loyalty to the Leader. A couple of critical players, Dutton and Scott Morrison, took the opportunity afforded by their live-to-air expressions of loyalty to articulate their own future leadership ambitions, in response to questions, of course – hammering stakes in the ground.

Interestingly, the red-hot issue of immigration also made an reappearance, courtesy of a leak to the Australian reminding whomever might need reminding that Dutton was in favour of cutting of the rate and was, sadly, getting pushback from the higher-ups.

While government folks are happy in the current restive climate to speculate about the source of that story – and there is even an official theory doing the rounds – pick the source is a game that insiders can and do get completely wrong.

So without drawing any conclusions about where the story came from or ventilating anyone’s theories, this much can be observed. If you watch events in Canberra closely, you might know that Morrison – like Dutton, a conservative – has not been advocating a cut in immigration.

Morrison’s dedication to not making the populist case led Tony Abbott to accuse his fellow Sydneysider of being captured by the abacus-wielding Big Australia shiny bums in the Treasury department.

The horror. Captured by the evidence-based policy merchants of the commonwealth Treasury. Whatever next?

So just to recap, in the little play within the play of the political week, never mind the provenance of the information, just look at the practical effect – we have arrayed before us one conservative who favours a cut in the immigration rate and another who doesn’t – information that might prove relevant down the track, or might not. You never know.

Quite separately from any future calculations about leadership, which may or may not become a thing, depending on how barking mad things ultimately get, we need to bear in mind that this is a group of people looking for options right at the moment.

This is a group of politicians looking for ways to turn the negative poll tide, looking for ways to burst back into the contest, looking to be that particular genius with that good idea.

Right at this point I can hear all of the readers of this column scream out in unison: that’s simple, you bloody idiots, just be a competent government, have an agenda and implement it and stop boring us all senseless with your telenovela.

Wonderfully observed, all of you, thank you. But when you are government with a tiny majority and the poll trend is stubbornly against you, people do start fantasising about rabbits to pull out of hats.

There is an appetite in some quarters to signal an immigration cut or pause because of a belief that message would resonate politically in some regions and in the outer metropolitan areas of the big cities, where congestion and suboptimal infrastructure is now linked to immigration as an issue, fanned of course by Abbott, the King of All the Feelings, who has been out validating these perceptions to take a break from trying to destroy the government’s energy policy – variety being the spice of life.

While there are entirely legitimate debates to be had about sustainable rates of population, and whether migration needs to dial up or down depending on economic circumstances and the global demand for humanitarian resettlement – it would be good if the debate could be informed by the odd fact.

Quite apart from the obvious one: that a well-run migration program is good for the economy, good for the country – there are a couple of contemporary points that shouldn’t get lost in the rush by sceptics to craft the sweet soundbite that will have Ray Hadley nod so hard in agreement that he falls off his chair.

The fact of the matter is the permanent visa program is already running under the cap, largely because of the government turning the screws on the program.

There are additional foreigners in the country on a temporary basis, as the prime minister noted this week, largely because there’s an additional 200,000 overseas students in Australia than there were three years ago.

One assumes the vice-chancellors of Australia are delighted, given how hard it is to squeeze a higher education dollar out of the government, not to mention all the businesses happily selling good and services to these students.

So rather than plunging the country into a zero-sum, fact-free, political debate about immigration, driven by a growing sense of desperation and the imperatives of short-term political gain, the answer is of course to run the program competently, at a sustainable rate, and be a functional enough government to telegraph to voters that you’ve got a plan to build infrastructure, and address blood-boiling frustrations, such as major motorways being more like carparks than freeways.

With that imperative very much front of mind, this week we’ve seen Turnbull and Morrison burst out of the blocks with some shock-and-awe effusiveness about a new airport rail link in Melbourne, a project that will, wait for it ... ease congestion on the Tullamarine freeway.

The prime minister unveiled the promise in full possession of his excited face. Standing beside him, Morrison intoned: “This is not just another railway” – an observation delivered with an impeccable poker face.

Perhaps Morrison was secretly hoping to himself that it may be a magic fast train to sanity.

Wherever sanity now lives.

– Katharine Murphy is Guardian Australia’s political editor