![Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: the arithmetic is running coldly against the Coalition.](/web/20161115040854im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/m/7/n/5/image.related.landscape.460x307.gsl9vo.png/1479075071981.jpg)
The stark choice facing Turnbull's internal critics
That unelectable weakling, Bill Shorten, has demonstrated to devastating effect that the combination of party unity and focus can take you very close to the top in politics.
Mark Kenny is Fairfax Media's chief political correspondent. A director of the National Press Club, he regularly appears on the ABC's Insiders, Sky News Agenda, and Ten's Meet the Press. He has reported from Canberra under three prime ministers and several opposition leaders.
That unelectable weakling, Bill Shorten, has demonstrated to devastating effect that the combination of party unity and focus can take you very close to the top in politics.
Rational debate, with its unspectacular promise of sensible compromise, is now discredited or rendered politically unfeasible
It is hardly earth-shattering that ministers make things up, leave things out, speak beyond their knowledge, and simply get things wrong.
Coalitionists are left licking their wounds and wondering which way this could go next.
What if marriage equality is suddenly three years away at best? Two terms? A decade?
To my mates and me, the acrid fumes from the automotive paint and subsequent baking booths merely provided enough cover for our most daring stunt yet – smoking cigarettes right under the nose of one of our most reviled and authoritarian teachers.
Trump's arrival presages possibly the biggest and most traumatic upheaval to the global power balance since the Second World War.
An increasingly sure-footed Malcolm Turnbull spent last week in New York and Washington jawboning legislators about two complicated challenges nipping at the sovereignty of the modern nation state and its collective conscience: protectionism and irregular migration.
Politicians worldwide are beating up resentment, adopting strong positions that make major parties look weak and half-committed.
A tough-talking libertarian, born into the most advantaged cohort in western society, being a highly educated white middle-class male, and a member of the governing class no less, has scurried to the apron strings of the state because he has had his feelings hurt.
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