Any politics watcher left mildly agog by the spectacle of duelling prime ministers on the floor of the House of Representatives knows we’ve been to this rodeo before.



But we are in new territory in a couple of respects.

Kevin Rudd’s implacable shadowing of Julia Gillard after the leadership coup of 2010 didn’t ever escalate into a direct confrontation on the floor of the house, in full view of the voting public.

In 20 years of political reporting, I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

The other essential difference in the dynamics is Labor’s leadership struggle wasn’t a policy fight – Rudd and Gillard’s world views were substantially similar; the differences were confected for strategic effect. Rudd v Gillard was exactly what it looked like – a simple, brutal wrestle for power.

The Coalition’s power struggle is between a conservative prime minister, who believes he has unfinished business and won’t leave the parliament, and a moderate prime minister, with diminished internal authority, who regularly has to sublimate his own views to cultivate some kind of internal stability and esprit de corps in order to manage a parliament with a one-seat majority.

That’s a highly complex set of factors.

Abbott v Turnbull is not just politicians being politicians – two testosterone-fuelled bulls stomping in a paddock – this is an identity struggle, and a multi-pronged one. Even as the Turnbull government exhibits signs of getting its act together organisationally, and practically – it remains riven by factional differences and philosophical ones.

One sensible and measured government MP who watched on in horror in the chamber during Thursday’s events later told me the dynamic could escalate into a complete split, “conservatives against liberals, where absolute chaos reigns”.

“Never mind Tony Abbott being thrown under a bus,” the MP said to me afterwards, quoting the locution Bill Shorten had used with delight in parliament on Thursday, “the government was thrown under the bus.”

Other senior players close to the prime minister are adamant that a line had to be drawn. Abbott had left Turnbull with absolutely no choice, given that he had indulged in a series of deliberate provocations for the best part of a fortnight.

A range of government sources, including people not unsympathetic to Abbott, say the former prime minister did himself absolutely no favours with his sorties this week. They said if he continued to escalate he would isolate himself from fellow travellers, particularly younger conservatives.

Senior players say that Abbott, during a discussion with Peter Dutton on Thursday morning, was told there was evidence contradicting his public statements, made both to Guardian Australia on Tuesday night and to the ABC on Wednesday night, that neither he nor his office had authorised a deal with the Liberal Democratic party senator David Leyonhjelm to put a sunset clause on an import ban on the Adler lever-action shotgun.

This version of events has Abbott agreeing during the conversation with Dutton to issue a clarifying statement before question time – then reneging on that undertaking. A clarifying statement before question time would have avoided Thursday’s direct confrontation in the chamber.

But people closer to Abbott say he declined to issue a statement during the meeting with Dutton, arguing that would only inflame the situation.

In any case, the intricacies of Thursday don’t matter as much as the underlying condition, which will now roll into the coming weekend and beyond.

The philosophical and factional standoff between the right and the moderates has manifested itself in Sydney – the home of our duelling prime ministers – in a fight over democratisation.

For the past two weeks Abbott has been baiting Turnbull over his commitment to party reform, attempting to strand Turnbull between his factional fellow travellers, the moderates, and a bunch of party heavyweights, from John Howard down, who are intent on winding back the power of moderate factional players and lobbyists.

People in the party reform camp have been worried that Abbott’s politicking, which has presented rightly or wrongly as a proxy war with Turnbull, has risked derailing the substantive push.

On Friday, before a state council meeting on Saturday, Turnbull – backed by Mike Baird – made it clear he would not go as far as Abbott wanted him to go on opening preselections to party members, at least not immediately, and not in isolation from other changes at the organisational level.

Abbott’s initial response to the Turnbull/Baird position was more positive than he’d been during the week, superficially at least. Picking an overt fight, after the week just gone, would be incendiary behaviour. But this particular fight is a long way from being over. Given that this issue will now go to a party convention for resolution, all the positioning and proxying will roll on.

There’s an irony in all this too. It was completely overshadowed during a high-octane parliamentary week but the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, was also battling internal ructions in his home patch in Victoria.

Over the past week two serious things happened to Shorten. He was visited by a deputation of leftwingers demanding he intervene in Victoria to stop institutional friends of the leader threatening people’s preselections, including those of two female shadow cabinet members.

Anthony Albanese also shirtfronted him, delicately but comprehensively, over the leader’s unfathomable decision to back a Senate candidate to replace Stephen Conroy who is already generating considerable controversy.

Shorten is in a spot of bother at the moment by any objective measure, bother that could escalate from its current scale of inconvenient to a one you could characterise as downright troublesome.

Anyone notice?