So Malcolm Turnbull has managed to fend off a challenge to his leadership by hard-right insurgent Peter Dutton using that most time-honoured of techniques: blasting out of the proverbial gate before his opponent had a chance to count the numbers. It's a shaky victory at best, and represents the culmination of a decade's worth of increasingly diseased politics and a media machine which naturally incentivises instability.
Dutton's grand scheme is probably the most flagrant power grab in recent Australian political memory, and has not come as a surprise in any way whatsoever. Fresh from consolidating policing and border powers under a single super-portfolio, the now-former Minister for Home Affairs has clearly been skulking around the battlements waiting for his opportunity to go for the top gig. So transparently, in fact, that journalists have been alluding to it for years.
What are we to make of this sense of tedious inevitability to the endless churn of leadership over the past decade? Australian politics has found a weird equilibrium between the government and media on this subject; a perpetual motion machine feeding leadership speculation constantly. The government backgrounds journalists, who then write stories which fuel more backgrounding, which become more stories, until there's absolutely no sense where any of it started or why. The public doesn't care about the nitty-gritty. All we know is this: it's on.
Already we've moved seamlessly into the next phase: puff pieces engineered by Dutton's media unit to sand away the rougher edges of his image. The administration of the violent bureaucracy of offshore detention doesn't really fill out a leadership resumé on its own — now he has to be a guy with a 'self-deprecating sense of humour' who 'loves a beer'.
Despite all this posturing, it's not like there isn't an actual war for the heart of the Liberal Party happening right now. Turnbull represents the last vestige of metropolitan neoliberalism against the febrile populism represented by Dutton. The fact that they both push fundamentally the same policies — from corporate tax cuts to the brutalisation of asylum seekers — is immaterial. We know Turnbull's ostensibly small-l liberal bona fides evaporated the moment he became Prime Minister. It's the vibe of the thing.
The primary vote of Australia's major parties is atrophying in the face of an electorate who increasingly seek radical solutions at both ends of the political spectrum. Such solutions are outside the purview of the aged student