Australia is in a wretched fix if the best available solution to the political malaise is Bill Shorten. After months of willing Malcolm Turnbull to succeed, to prevail over the lunar right holding his potential to ransom, to prove it is possible for a federal government to be both conservative and reasonable, recent events indicate that hope is lost.
Not all hope, but most of it. It is possible that Turnbull could hang on for the next two years, recover in the polls sufficiently to thwart a challenge, win a thumping mandate at the next election, use that victory to thwart his hostage-takers, and go on to be the transformational Liberal leader, who deals with Australia's approach to climate change, reinvigorates the economy, reforms the tax system, closes the Pacific gulags, allows all couples to wed, and is so stunningly successful at all he does that he can set up a second referendum on the republic, and win it, bumping the Queen off the $5 note and installing himself instead, as the first Australian president.
It's possible, but then so is Donald Trump emerging as an effective president, sane and rational, a leader of the free world who contains Vladimir Putin rather than is beholden to him for helping him into the White House.
In reality, the likelihood is that Turnbull will not be the prime minister after the next election, or before it if the astronauts of his party room decline to heed the lesson, given several times over, that political coups achieve little more than a temporary sugar hit in the polls, and create far more problems than they fix. (Their only positives were saving Australia from having to endure Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott as prime minister for longer.)
Turnbull remains the Coalition's best candidate for prime minister, as he has for years, if only he didn't have to deal with the Coalition. Last week's astonishing capitulation to the spacemen of Coalition politics – Cory Bernardi, George Christensen, Eric Abetz, and Abbott – shows that any remaining realistic potential the Turnbull government had has gone.
Most Australians want serious action on combating climate change: 65 per cent of respondents to a Climate Institute-commissioned Galaxy poll in early August said they wanted Australia to be a world leader in finding solutions to this most difficult of problems.
After junking the country's most effective recent policy, Julia Gillard's emissions trading scheme, it is incumbent on the Coalition to deliver a decent alternative to meet the Paris agreement targets, and preferably exceed them.
There isn't one yet, and Turnbull ruling out a sensible and limited market option to reduce the vast emissions of Australia's dirty power stations is likely to make that job much harder. According to some expert analysis, it's also likely to increase power prices.
Rather than becoming the leader most Australians wanted, we now have in The Lodge a captive reading scripted lines to the camera, descending to the point last week when he ruled out an option likely to mean lower power prices because the government wants lower power prices.
So a leader famed for his determination to deliver action on climate change action collapses into relative inaction on climate change. A gay-friendly leader is pincered on marriage equality. The anti-slogan explainer-in-chief resorts to empty sloganeering.
Near the end of the year, again we should ask: what point Turnbull if he is but a less irritating version of Abbott?
So, the alternative, Bill Shorten, the knifer of two prime ministers. The grateful nation may have forgiven one coup – that against Rudd – were it not for the leadership dreary-go-round it started.
An ideal prime minister, Shorten would not be. He's wooden on TV. In no way is he inspirational. His zingers are notorious, and not in a good way. His judgment lapsed when backing a former staffer and union functionary, Kimberley Kitching, into the Senate despite the trade union royal commission recommending charges against her.
Still, the alternative prime minister offers a better future than the one in place. An economically rational scheme to reduce emissions for the lowest cost. A resolute intention to allow marriage equality, that most simple and obvious of reforms helping a few people and harming no one, and a sensible rejection of the loopy attacks on the anti-bullying Safe Schools program. An education policy that has a decent chance of avoiding future embarrassing worse-than-Kazakhstan test results.
Plus, he has the advantage of a party unified, largely, after copping the consequences of years of division. It won't take much for the Turnbull government to lose its slender majority, and right now that could be the best thing for the country.
Tim Dick is a Sydney lawyer. Twitter: tim_dick
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