Lachlan Harris, a former political staffer who ran Kevin Rudd’s press shop, coined the inimitable phrase “Kulia” to describe the toxic fusion of two warring leaders, locked in a grim battle which ultimately destroyed a Labor government in full view of the voting public.



We are not yet at “Mony” in Canberra – the dynamic of the contemporary political civil war between Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott is not a perfect replica of the Labor experience – but you don’t need to be a genius to observe the government is sowing the seeds of its own destruction if the dynamic persists.

Some éminence grise with tranquilising powers, such as John Howard, should step into the ring with a chair and a whip

Turnbull has no shortage of advice from the professional pipe smokers about how to address his problem.

Depending on who you read, Abbott should be brought back into cabinet, or given some sort of job, or better still some éminence grise with miraculous tranquillising powers, such as John Howard, should step into the ring with a chair and a whip. You can see it really, can’t you? Shut up Malcolm, Tony. Stand up and tuck your shirt in, Dad’s home.

Washed up on the sidelines of a melodrama, some government folks are quietly rehashing history. If only Abbott had made Turnbull treasurer in the months before the leadership change, everything could have been OK – perhaps the leadership change wouldn’t have happened.

If only Turnbull had taken the early advice to bring Abbott back into the cabinet after he booted him out of the Lodge, then everything might have been OK.

Some people think Abbott would be appeased even now if he was brought back into the fold; others insist Abbott is not now, nor has he ever been, a man of appeasement – there is only one tempo, and that’s crash through or crash.

This is how it goes when something fundamental inside a government breaks. The sideline commentary veers between wisdom with hindsight, regret, frustration.

It’s a strange sort of dynamic because Abbott himself is claiming he doesn’t want his old job back and people close to Abbott can’t see a resurrection outside some mass panic five minutes out from an election.

Kevin Rudd always had a constituency, both internally and with the voting public. His behaviour was self-indulgent and destructive but there were rational reasons to plot.

Abbott’s behaviour looks like nihilism.

Yet it’s more complicated than nihilism, and more multi-dimensional than malice. People close to Abbott insist his prime motivation is predominantly definitional: he wants to define the contemporary Coalition, shape the policy offering, determine where the centre ground is.

Abbott is also being nurtured psychologically and enabled practically by the rightwing Sydney shock jocks, Alan Jones and Ray Hadley – who act as an external, unelected caucus within the government, shoving the most powerful people in the country in and out of dungeons on a whim.

Alan Jones and Andrew Bolt take turns on Sky News elevating Abbott’s experience to the status of Greek tragedy

Hadley, evidently bored with toying with his house pet of choice, Scott Morrison, has tossed the treasurer and slotted in Abbott.

Jones and Andrew Bolt take turns on Sky News elevating Abbott’s experience to the status of Greek tragedy, because the contemporary reactionary right, the self-styled outsiders, have nothing to talk about if they are not being victimised by someone – the thought police, mouthy women, smug progressives, uppity foreigners, the ABC, the human rights commission, Malcolm Turnbull, secret communist.

Nurturing Abbott’s sense of grievance fits the default faux outsider narrative. Blessed are we, the downtrodden. On with the noble crusade.

I don’t know how Turnbull fixes his Abbott problem, apart from putting one foot in front of the other. I suspect he counters it by trying to find some connection with a voting public now inclined to give the government an absolute kicking.

In the last federal election we did see Turnbull try to find a connection with the voting public, largely by being himself.

The Liberals dutifully ran a Turnbull-heavy campaign, complete with presidential branding, which told voters innovation was the future, disruption was the future, tax cuts for big companies was the future – in other words, there were no lessons to be learned from the global financial crisis, Australia would continue on with the pre-1998 policy orthodoxy, never mind your low wages growth and your deep sense of economic insecurity because the winners of globalisation were more important than the losers.

We all know how that story ended, with the Coalition hanging by a thread.

The government is now attempting to remake itself before our very eyes.

The government could of course remake itself by thinking seriously about inequality, and how the centre-right redraws economic policy in an environment of corrosive public fatigue with neoliberalism – but that might offend its business backers and the witches of Macbeth on 2GB and Sky.

Perhaps the coming budget will deliver evidence of serious, centre-right, economic thinking. For the sake of the country, I really do hope so.

But in the interim the government is responding to the darkening public mood by flicking the switch to culture and values.

It’s familiar territory for the Coalition. Anyone who lived through the Howard era knows what inveterate culture warring looks like, and, in an era of mass fatigue with facts, experts and establishment wisdom, values are considered more cut-through territory.

If you can make someone feel something, perhaps they’ll listen. Trust me, whole business models are built on that very principle: it’s a working antidote to disruption.

I suspect this week’s citizenship and migration sortie will resonate where the government wants it to resonate, in areas of the country where the Coalition is under attack from populist insurgents ​such as One Nation.

If dog whistling and appeals to economic nationalism and xenophobia weren’t fertile political ground, Brexit wouldn’t have happened, and Donald Trump wouldn’t have been elected, and Bill Shorten wouldn’t be out tub-thumping with his new-fashioned labourism, and he has been for months, with his own little Australia-first campaign.

Both government announcements this week – citizenship and 457s – were designed, workshopped, carefully internally over months, to telegraph sovereignty first, which hits the front-bar nod test.

But I’ve said all week I really don’t think the prime minister, Mr Cosmopolitan, is at all credible as Mr Nationalist, particularly given he was Mr Cosmopolitan only five minutes ago and we were all here and saw it.

The nativist tone chafes against Turnbull’s entire public identity and his lived reality. I think that credibility gap remains a problem for the Coalition, and so do people inside the government.

Which leads us back to “Mony” and Abbott’s dogged desire to fashion the current incumbent of the Lodge in his own image.

When you step back and survey the sum of the parts, you can see Abbott’s incentive for hanging in there, waiting, influencing, campaigning, hoping for either himself or for someone he’d consider a viable proxy, Peter Dutton.

Dutton, who holds his Queensland seat by a wafer-thin margin, and is one of the few cabinet ministers who lives on the frontline of outer-suburban Australian angst, will feel ​ he has every incentive in the current climate to go full populist.

But in the meantime, waiting for the cards to fall as they may, the Australian voting public is dished up the discordant near-daily spectacle, the strange hybrid, of two political leaders, duelling prime ministers – neither of whom lived up to their promise.

Pretty depressing, that.