The media is falling over itself with praise for Malcolm Turnbull's double dissolution move and is asking us to believe his months of dithering and being beholden to the right was just some ploy. Give me a break, writes Tim Dunlop.

In a world of disruption, it is nice to see some stability. No sooner did the Prime Minister announce that we are going to have an election than the media announced that they have a narrative about it.

This narrative emerged seamlessly, and it was stunning in its uniformity and in the way it relentlessly presented Malcolm Turnbull's decision to go to a possible early election in the most favourable light possible.

Not since they told us all that "Australia needs Tony" has the media seemed so certain of itself.

On the Facebook page for The Drum, they summed up nicely the response of contributors to a session on Drum TV:

Our panelists have agreed that Malcolm Turnbull has made a bold but positive move today. Annabel Crabb has called the PM's announcement a "striking and authoritative move", Paul Bongiorno says he has finally united the Coalition party and Sue Cato believes he's made a step towards addressing voters' disillusionment.

Indeed, Annabel Crabb was full of praise for Mr Turnbull:

What I think the Prime Ministers's done today, in a classically Turnbull-ian manoeuvre, he's employed the elements of surprise; he has creatively interpreted a little-used part of the constitution and said bang, we can do this; he's put all of the onus back on the Senate to make up its mind rather than this being about him bullying them; he's allowed them to kind of determine their own fate which is an interesting Hunger Games sort of scenario. So it's kind of a striking and authoritative move.

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher, if anything, was even more impressed:

Malcolm Turnbull has transformed his prime ministership at one stroke. The picture emerging from his first six months was that he was wasting his time. We now see that he has been biding his time. ...Turnbull silently endured weeks of dismissive commentary branding him a hopeless ditherer as he arranged the plan he unveiled on Monday. From hopeless ditherer to decisive leader in a moment, Turnbull has now staked his Government on a challenge and put all the other political parties on the defensive.

Writing in Western Australia Today, Mark Kenny joined the chorus:

Have no illusion, this is less bluff, more statement of intent. And it represents strong leadership of the kind some had worried might have abandoned the Prime Minister.

Even the exemplary Laura Tingle was singing from the songsheet:

Turnbull has given himself both considerable room to manoeuvre, and created a new uncertainty among his opponents about where he may go next. The Prime Minister is fond of the idea that politicians who think out loud lose their "optionality": that you should not make final decisions on things until the last five seconds before you have to. Hmm, sounds a bit like being agile.

Have you ever heard such a load of nonsense?

The idea, as Mr Hartcher suggests, that Mr Turnbull has just been pretending to be pathetic for the past few months - "Turnbull silently endured weeks of dismissive commentary branding him a hopeless ditherer " - is spin worthy of, well, Mr Turnbull's office.

All Mr Turnbull's chopping and changing on tax policy; of letting Tony Abbott and his supporters have free rein in their sniping and undermining of him; of letting the likes of George Christensen and Cory Bernardi run him over on the Safe Schools scheme; of having no viable response to Labor's new policy on negative gearing, was, we are asked to believe, just a ploy.

So, apparently, was Mr Turnbull's abandonment of the Republic, and his capitulation on marriage equality, where he is retaining Mr Abbott's plan for a plebiscite, despite opponents of equal marriage - the very people within his party who insisted on a plebiscite in the first place - announcing that they wouldn't abide by the results of it anyway.

I have no idea where this desperation to accentuate the positive for Mr Turnbull comes from. I do know that it was also apparent when he took over the leadership from Mr Abbott.

As I said at the time:

To read the media at the moment is to be lulled into a sense that Mr Turnbull's leadership has returned us to "normal" politics, that somehow we are back in the time of Hawke and Howard rather than that of Rudd and Gillard and Abbott. It is based on the idea that somehow the right leader can pull everyone into line and square all circles, and that Mr Turnbull is that leader.

My point was, they were wrong.

All we were seeing was massive relief that Mr Abbott was gone. What we were going through, I argued, was "less a honeymoon for Mr Turnbull than the sort of psychic relief that comes from waking up alive in intensive care after a particularly horrific car crash. We are scarred and bruised and in need of ongoing care, but all our limbs are intact and our organs are functioning. We are still in recovery, sipping through a straw."

Since then, Mr Turnbull has dithered. He has shown himself, time and again, unable to stand up to the right wing faction within his party and has struggled to say anything of substance, preferring the sort of slogans for which people used to mock Mr Abbott: "be agile"; "be innovative"; "there's never been a more exciting time to be an Australian".

So successful has this "strategy" been that Mr Turnbull has plunged from the stellar approval ratings he had post-Abbott into actual negative territory in the latest Newspoll.

And yet, key players in the mainstream media are now asking us to believe that this was all part of some master plan capped off by his "striking and authoritative move" to call an early election.

Give me a break.

When a prime minister feels obliged to - as one headline had it - "throw caution to the wind" and bring on an early election that he had previously indicated wouldn't happen, that isn't bold, decisive leadership. It is desperation.

Tim Dunlop writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. He hosts the podcast Washington Dreaming, discussing the forthcoming US Presidential Election. His new book, Busted Utopia: The Future of Work, Rest and Play will be released in 2016. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.