All of a sudden, Labor went on light duties on Friday morning, right when it was gearing up to hammer Malcolm Turnbull over slashed penalty rates for hospitality and retail workers.
Strangely enough, the Fair Work Commission's historic ruling which so bravely cut the remuneration of the least well-off, offered a political payday for Labor.
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Ministers take aim Abbott's 'five-point plan'
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and other senior ministers fire back at Tony Abbott's 'five-point plan' manifesto and his criticism of the government's current policies.
The political significance of the Thursday decision has yet to be appreciated. Minimum wage claims have been rejected or attenuated before, in the interests of the economy and employers' capacity to pay. But actually cutting earnings for poor?
Somewhat unwisely, the Coalition had declined to make a submission to the long-running case despite a credible argument that cutting the buying power of the lowest paid might be a bad way to deliver a "high-wage economy", not to mention, being pretty unhelpful in a flat economy.
As a result, Labor believes it can make Turnbull own the pay cut, even though Bill Shorten had previously undertaken to respect the independent umpire's decision.
But on Friday morning, Labor's reserve was informed by the principle in warfare: never interrupt an enemy who is busily making a mistake.
And Turnbull's party was doing just that – wrestling loudly and publicly with its Tony problem.
Abbott's speech the night before and an accompanying appearance on a friendly TV program had unleashed a storm.
![Former prime minister Tony Abbott says he would cut the Renewable Energy Target.](/web/20170225080833im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/u/f/o/e/l/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gukefc.png/1487986025480.jpg)
The dumped PM's incendiary criticisms of Turnbull were more direct and designed to be more harmful than any previous.
But Abbott did most of the harm to himself in this process, managing to lose powerful party-room friends even quicker than he shed voters, by egregiously flouting his "I won't be a wrecker" principle. It was "flabbergasting" in the words of Mathias Cormann.
Cormann had been an absolute Abbott man, a conservative loyalist par-excellence, who had stayed true to the tawdry end.
Not any more.
Five years to the very week after Labor's leading lights had spectacularly lined up to explain why they ended Kevin Rudd's idiosyncratic prime ministership, the same movie was playing again.
As fans of Nordic noir know, the Hollywood remakes don't need subtitling and can be almost as good, if slightly less dark and brooding.
That said, it would be hard to compete with the menacing theatrics of Nicola Roxon's original script: "Removing Kevin was an act of political bastardry, for sure," she conceded, "But this … was made possible only because Kevin had been such a bastard himself to so many people already."
"Good people were burnt through like wildfire."
Fellow minister Stephen Conroy piled on saying his old boss had failed because he had "contempt for the cabinet, contempt for cabinet members, contempt for the caucus, contempt for the parliament ... and ultimately what brought him down a year or two ago was the Australian public realised he had contempt for them as well."
Tony Burke accused Rudd of chaotic management and Wayne Swan said Rudd had put "his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop."
It was brutal and yet five years later, after all the moralistic tut-tutting from the Liberals, they find themselves two terms in, two prime ministers in, and reading an uncannily familiar script.
Cormann went first, branding his former friend "sad": "I was flabbergasted by Tony Abbott's interview last night ... there is nothing good from an interview like that. It was deliberately destructive ... it was not trying to help our cause or help our country. It was quite self-indulgent."
Turnbull later referred questioners to Cormann's withering critique – a sign of just how significant moderates saw the fracturing of Cormann's trust.
Then came the "fixer". Christopher Pyne set up each Abbott proposition and then smacked it out of the park.
"He said that we should freeze immigration yet when he was the PM, he had record levels of immigration; He said we should abolish the Human Rights Commission and yet when he was the PM, he shut down the debate on whether we should reform section 18C; He says we should cut taxes, and yet when he was the PM he increased taxes, whether it was the deficit levy on high-income earners or whether it was the fuel tax; He says we should slash spending and yet when he was the PM in 2014 he attempted to slash spending and all he did was create zombie bills that couldn't pass through the Senate; and the fifth subject, of course, was the renewable energy target and the truth is of course he set the RET at 23.5 per cent and described it at the time as one of the achievements of his government."
Before the final kick: "So when you're throwing stones, it's important not to stand in a glass house".
According to some optimistic thinking, Abbott's incendiary blast was his last gasp – killing his own credibility and pushing conservative waverers closer to Turnbull.
Maybe. But they thought that about Rudd this same week in 2012.
Mark Kenny is national affairs editor.
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