It's the repetition that gets me. How precisely every Coalition minister presently denying there is any reality to the current bout of leadership speculation sounds like Gillard's ministers in 2013. How assuredly the unstoppable backbench revolt makes a mockery of these denials. How Abbott now, like Gillard then, pleads with us to focus on policies rather than personalities – as though we've all just simultaneously decided, completely unprompted, that we'd rather our politics took the form of glossy magazines.

But there's one inescapably large problem with this plea: the government's in trouble precisely because we have been focussing on policy. That was true for Labor, whose collapse in public support occurred the moment Kevin Rudd decided he no longer thought climate change mattered that much, and it is perhaps even truer for Abbott. In time, his first budget will become legend for the sheer breadth of its political self-destruction. It's not that the electorate didn't understand the suite of policies, or was distracted by personality politics. It's not that it was poorly explained (though on several levels, it was). It's that the electorate grasped the underlying values of the government's maiden offering, and found it repugnant. It still does.

That is perhaps the most significant unifying factor between the Liberal National disaster in Queensland and the one now unfolding in Canberra. All the arguments about "federal vs state" factors overlook that these were perhaps the two most similar governments in Australia. Both debuted with monstrous budgets that showed a penchant for austerity politics. Both attacked the public service and declared an unshakeable love for privatisation. Both hacked into health. And both did so without declaring their intentions to the people who had just elected them. The problem is that both ran into the ideological limits of the electorate: limits they simply assumed didn't exist.

So if it is to be leadership change for Abbott, what then? It's a far more important question than the one about whether or not a spill is coming in the first place. To see this, let's return to Labor's sorry experience. "What then?" is precisely the question Labor could never ultimately answer, and which ultimately condemned it to ignominy. Recall Bill Shorten's revealing admission in 2013 that he would vote for Gillard's demise, and Rudd's return, as a way of protecting Gillard's legacy. He would deliver us a new King, but in the service of his vanquished predecessor. A predecessor Shorten would slay so she might live.