Not long after Labor’s 2013 defeat, Julia Gillard dissected its years in government and got to the bloody heart of the disaster.

“Purpose matters. Being able to answer the question what are you going to do for me, for my family, for our nation, matters,” she wrote.



“Believing in a purpose larger than yourself and your immediate political interests matters.

“Labor comes to opposition having sent the Australian community a very cynical and shallow message about its sense of purpose … [It] unambiguously sent a very clear message that it cared about nothing other than the prospects of survival of its members of parliament at the polls.”

Last weekend, a similar penny seemed to drop for the treasurer, Scott Morrison, as this government begins to contemplate political mortality.

He told the Liberal federal council that after 10 years of political brawling, Australians simply didn’t care about the “old political fights” and had “collectively reached for the remote and turned down the volume on Canberra’s noise”.

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The only way to get them to listen again was to “communicate candidly and with authenticity” about things that mattered to them.



Gillard and Morrison are right. Politicians seem to be losing the capacity to explain their purpose in words they make up themselves.

There are many, in all parties, with a deep and driving purpose to improve Australia, who disagree on method but whose motivation is genuine. But as institutions, governing parties have excelled at obscuring and spoiling genuine attempts at policymaking with internal battles motivated by power and revenge. And when their leaders deal with those battles by pretending there’s nothing to see, it erodes their authenticity even further.

And so it goes, a descending spiral they can’t seem to stop.

As if to prove Morrison’s point, his own party embarked this week on another spin down this well worn and self-fulfilling track of pointless leadership destabilisation.

It was all so depressingly familiar. First, the confected (and for added hype, leaked) pretext, in this case a “secretly-recorded” late-night and exuberantly unguarded private speech in which Christopher Pyne said stuff everyone already knew but wouldn’t usually say out loud in public – the moderate faction is in the ascendancy (well, yes, Malcolm Turnbull is the leader), would like to legalise same-sex marriage (like they’ve been saying for years) and that he hadn’t ever voted for Tony Abbott in a leadership ballot (of interest to almost no one outside the party). Then the outrage, cue headlines from media outlets supportive of the destabilisers insisting that the leak is a “bombshell”, that the party is now in crisis, or will be, unless the leader does something unspecified by some kind of arbitrary media-imposed deadline. Then the back-up, speeches and media appearances (several by Abbott this week and more by his handful of supporters) to extend the life of the story. And then the attempts at shut-down, the admission, in this case Pyne apologising for causing the “distraction”, and the supportive ministers running interference.

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None of this is candid or authentic. It has no bearing on anything that matters to voters at all. There is no actual crisis. The conservatives present it as a grand ideological battle for the soul of the party, but Abbott advances no coherent or workable alternative policy proposals – his central gripes are mostly retrospective, regrets over policies he now wishes he’d set differently when he was prime minister. If only he’d commissioned nuclear submarines instead of spending $50bn of our money on conventional ones after a highly politicised process, if only he’d set the renewable energy target even lower in his disastrous climate policy that stalled electricity generation investment and helped bring the market to the brink of crisis, if he’d only been less generous on immigration.



The only live policy difference is over same-sex marriage, which somewhat bizarrely, is being presented as a “line in the sand” as though all true Liberals should be opposed to this inherently liberal concept, or at the very least signed up for life to the current policy of holding a plebiscite, an idea even more ridiculous when you consider the chaotic process overseen by Abbott though which that particular policy was invented.

They then make the generalised complaint that politics has “lurched to the left” under Turnbull, because he does outlandish things such as providing more money for schools or acknowledging the reality of climate change. If you completely missed the visceral national rejection of Abbott’s politics of inequality, climate denial and general retribution, I guess that’s how it might seem.

Like every leader, Turnbull does have to accommodate differing views within his party. Many will disagree with where that takes him. Some wonder whether accommodation remains possible.



Because Abbott’s coulda-been regrets list is not about alternative options for this government, it’s more like notes he’d make if he were writing a prime ministerial memoir/manifesto for the future, which, oh look, he is! And his lack of internal support means it isn’t really a serious Rudd/Gillard come-what-may bid for the leadership either, but more like a campaign for some kind of personal vindication.



There’s cause for reflection here for the media. Even those of us who sought to report the original Pyne provocation in context, who named the response as a determined attempt at distraction, weren’t able to ignore it entirely as it proceeded through its predictable paces.



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And the way these issues are reported feeds the dilemma as to how political leaders respond.



Anything would be better than Turnbull’s fixed-smile insistence that the Liberal party was in fact “harmonious”, a denial as convincing as “pining for the fjords” was for Monty Python’s parrot. But when he was more direct, at a late week press conference, the “aren’t you a divided party” and “won’t you demote Christopher Pyne” questions kept coming, irrespective of the answers or the substantive things he was there to talk about. And if he goes much further, he’s creating the “war” Abbott is so obviously intent upon provoking.

Gillard’s essay was a rallying call for Labor as it entered another bleak stint in opposition carrying an almost unbearable burden – the knowledge that leadership divisions meant it had squandered the full opportunities to exercise power in government, to do all that it could to achieve its vision for the country when it had that hard-won, precious opportunity. For the most part, Labor has now learned that lesson.



And that, too, is contributing to the likelihood it will soon be former Liberal prime ministers reflecting on what might have been. Whether or not that feels unbearable to them probably depends on whether they were in it for authentic policy reasons in the first place.

