Politics

This trashing of the Liberal Party’s defining philosophy has some on the back bench shaking their heads. It is one thing for the Nationals, often dubbed agrarian socialists, to call for a renationalisation of energy supply. It’s quite another for the champions of market forces and free enterprise who are supposed to inhabit the Liberal Party room to do so.

The fact is Abbott has given up on the Coalition winning the next election. Last weekend he told an invitation-only meeting in his Sydney’s northern beaches electorate that the government ‘is heading for a massive defeat’. The upside to this prospect, he told the 20 or so people present, was it that would ‘help the Coalition to rebuild’. But the former prime minister says there’s no appetite to change the leader ‘even though the political situation is so dire’.

In the great scheme of things the cricketers are small fry. They haven’t killed anyone, raped small boys or turned widows and orphans out onto the streets. Their chief crime was to lay bare the national delusion that our sunburnt country produces generation after generation of clean-limbed superheroes, morally spotless whether they are bayoneting Johnny Turk or hurling cricket balls at South Africans. So much for that. Appalling as it was, the cricket cheating scandal is merely a symptom of a wider national sickness. A culture of greed, selfishness, envy, cruelty and often criminal corruption is gnawing at the nation’s heart.

The atmosphere was electric when Labor’s victorious Batman candidate, Ged Kearney, entered the room flanked by Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. You would think they had just won the general election rather than retained a seat they had held for the past 50 years. But this was no ordinary byelection result.

There is a moral case for moving Malcolm Turnbull on. If principles of right and wrong mean anything, using one standard to unseat a rival and another to hold on to the job you stole from him while failing to meet that standard yourself is hypocrisy on a very grand scale. It is the marker of a weak, untrustworthy person.

Bill Shorten seized the political agenda in a dramatic way on Tuesday, overshadowing practically everything in domestic politics. He did it by homing in on a tax concession that is costing the budget billions but is a sacred cow for the Liberals. Donning his Sherwood Forest finest, the Opposition leader vowed to fight the government’s scare campaign ‘because I’m going to choose the battler over the top end of town’.

Of course preferred prime minister is not an indicator of an election outcome – it is not unusual for a premier or prime minster to be preferred right up until the time voters dump them and their party. But this metric was for a long while a morale booster for Turnbull and his team. Now even that shield has gone and the PM is left languishing with Shorten in deep negative territory of disapproval.

The fate of the Turnbull Coalition government depends on McCormack holding his party together. It is no easier task than Turnbull has with his party – although the Liberals seem to have come to the realisation that Tony Abbott is no longer the answer to their problems, nor is anyone else on offer. The government’s one-seat majority makes every member – Liberal and National – capable of bringing down the whole show.

If the Nationals were paralysed by fear that if they sacked Joyce he would set about destroying the government from the back bench, they will now see if his own resignation spares them that. As one National MP told me before Joyce’s announcement: ‘If you think Tony Abbott is bad, Joyce would be much worse.’

It will take quite some work to restore credibility to the Nationals as the “family values” party. If the party room sticks by Joyce, they are endorsing his hypocrisy – nowhere more on show than in his support of the “No” case on marriage equality. He spoke at an Australian Christian Lobby rally about the need to give children the stability of a committed, heterosexual relationship.