Canberra is full of political delusions, but Turnbull's is the biggest
All eyes will be on the WA state election next Saturday to see how Labor polls.
Mark Kenny is Fairfax Media's national affairs editor. 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.
All eyes will be on the WA state election next Saturday to see how Labor polls.
All of a sudden, Labor went quiet on Friday, right when it was gearing up to hammer Malcolm Turnbull over slashed penalty rates for hospitality and retail workers.
Descending east from Jerusalem into the Rift Valley, the landscape turns decidedly hostile, and that's just the start of it.
For most of its life, the Turnbull Coalition government has mysteriously underperformed – like a luxury car with persistent mechanical problems.
An inward-looking America could prove to be a blessing in disguise for Australia
The whole double-D drama could have been avoided had the government made the concessions that secured the Australian Building and Construction Commission's passage this week.
How many votes do you reckon Kevin Rudd lost when it was revealed he had gone into a seedy New York strip club known as Scores in a drunken manhattan bar crawl? Or what about Donald J Trump? How many do you imagine he lost from the notorious bus tape where he was recorded boasting of preying on and sexually assaulting women?
Once again, a government has put politics before policy, at the expense of the latter.
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
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