Rough as it is, Malcolm Turnbull can take some comfort in the sheer regularity of negative events engulfing his government because it at least ensures nothing remains front-page news for long.
Whether it is incompetence, bad luck, or bad judgment, controversies glow white-hot but fade when the next disaster hovers into view.
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Malcolm Turnbull's crucial fortnight
He's starting the year with poor polling numbers, so Malcolm Turnbull needs some wins as parliament resumes, says Mark Kenny.
Consider the pattern. Adrift on a sea of electoral ennui since January's robo-debt/pension cuts and the MPs' expenses scandal, Turnbull moved to wrest control of national politics last Wednesday with his National Press Club speech.
Yet somehow, he had chosen the very day the political donations for last year's election would become public - minus, it turned out, his own $1.75 million gift. Under intense pressure, Turnbull spilled the quantum on Wednesday night, proving the original decision to conceal it until 2018 had been naive.
The donations story truncated the usual extended analysis of his speech.
Perhaps even this was a stroke of luck given what it had emphasised: expensive, unsupported business tax relief; unpopular welfare cuts; and Turnbull's jarring Abbott-like embrace of coal as good for Australia and the world. It might have been music to the partyroom, but for voters searching for the old green-tinged Turnbull, it simply underlined his disappearance.
In any event, the secrecy focus was itself "Trumped" by lunchtime the next day when The Washington Post broke Turnbull's toxic telephone stoush with the new US President.
Cue the weekend. Monday brought a significant slump in the Coalition's primary vote according to Newspoll and then even this bad news was upstaged by the imminent defection of a Liberal senator who would use the first parliamentary day of 2017 to jump ship.
![Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during a service in Canberra to mark the start of the parliamentary year.](/web/20170209190936im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/6/y/3/q/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu6zrc.png/1486476257743.jpg)
Cory Bernardi's vote of no-confidence was exquisitely timed to garner maximum attention and ruin any chance Turnbull had of taking prime ministerial command of the parliamentary resumption.
In damage control, stunned government ministers claimed nothing had changed and that voters still faced a simple choice between Turnbull and Bill Shorten.
![Tony Abbott during the joint party meeting at Parliament House in Canberra.](/web/20170209190936im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/7/1/h/i/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gu6zrc.png/1486526794587.jpg)
This was heroic, given Newspoll's finding that nearly a third of voters want anything but these two options, and that conservatives in Turnbull's partyroom are desperate to give it to them.
While Bernardi's spectacular insult will not go away completely, the above pattern suggests another controversy will soon replace it.
Cory Bernardi's vote of no-confidence was exquisitely timed to garner maximum attention and ruin any chance Turnbull had of taking prime ministerial command of the parliamentary resumption
One is reminded of how the famous Texan, Red Adair, pioneered a way of extinguishing explosive oil-well fires by using even more powerful explosives to blast the inferno out of oxygen.
Hell of a way to run a government though.
![Illustration: John Shakespeare](/web/20170209190936im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/7/f/v/q/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gu6zrc.png/1486476257743.jpg)
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