The demise of Turnbull: a thread.
(1/n).
(1/n).
2. The Liberal Party is a venerable force in Australian politics. Founded by Robert Menzies in 1944, the party has united anti-Labor political forces in this country for seven decades.
3. Unlike the ALP, the Liberal Party has never looked in serious danger of breaking up or splintering.
Until now.
Until now.
4. Let's start with the obvious: Turnbull's prime ministership is terminal. There’s no way he can come back from this. He’s toast.
5. Only a truly gifted politician could escape from such a tricky crisis, and we all know by now that Turnbull is not that guy. He has let the initiative pass to his implacable enemies. They shall certainly make him pay.
6. Turnbull’s destruction is the product of many factors, not least his own mistakes. As often happens in politics, the most important errors came early, when Turnbull baulked at calling an election to cement a popular mandate as Prime Minister.
7. An election held in October or November 2015 would likely have been won handsomely by the Coalition, confirming Turnbull’s internal authority. It would have ensured an influx of first-term MPs who owed their seats in Parliament to him.
8. Of course, Turnbull did not call an early election. He stumbled and bumbled through 2016 and nearly lost the 2016 election, all but wiping out the Coalition majority, and killing off many of the moderate MPs he needed to control the party room.
9. The result of the 2016 near-defeat was a second term for Turnbull, but a backbench controlled by his enemies. A gambler all his life, Turnbull sowed the wind. Now he reaps the whirlwind.
10. The fall of Turnbull is likely to become a seminal moment in Australian politics. I reckon it will reverberate for years. He will be the last moderate to hold the Liberal leadership for a long time.
11. All the dark predictions of the most Machiavellian observers have come to pass: the cynical destabilisation of Tony Abbott; the ever-rightwards ratchet of the backbench blackmailers; the jelly-like spinelessness of Turnbull’s response.
12. But Turnbull’s appeasement has not been entirely craven: he really has lacked the numbers on crucial policies, and the right of the Liberal Party really has held his government hostage.
13. For these reasons, Monday’s moment was always likely to come. Unless Turnbull could vanquish his internal foes in the internal opposition, they were always likely to destroy him.
14. For the Liberal Party as an institution, Turnbull’s downfall is an implosion of bewildering proportions. Right-of-centre governments are simply not meant to be this unstable.
15. The Turnbull government is not even three years old; the Coalition government only five. It is not a particularly unpopular government. Recent polls put the Coalition at 49-51; voters tell pollsters that Turnbull is still their preferred PM.
16. On any sensible reading of the political situation, there is no pressing need for the Coalition to change leaders. What is required is patience and unity. But those are two qualities that this mob sorely lacks.
17. The folly of Monday’s leadership spill reveals something more: a fatal ideological rift in the Liberal Party. It is a rift that amounts to something close to a genuine split, a conflict for the soul of the party.
18. As Tim Colebatch writes in Inside Story, the struggle for the future of the party is existential: “the Liberals’ shrinking party branches increasingly comprise a narrow base of cultural protesters rather than the broad base of mainstream Australians." 
19. Here's a link to that Tim Colebatch story insidestory.org.au/a-party-too-di…
20. Lenore Taylor in the Guardian makes a similar point theguardian.com/australia-news…
21. As I wrote on Monday, modern conservative thinking has moved rapidly to the right in recent years. For the current conservative base, an angry tribalism has replaced enlightenment values like scientific knowledge, liberal pluralism, or academic expertise.
22. I was specifically talking about Fraser Anning, but of course little separates the rhetoric of Anning from that of the Christensens or Hasties or Tudges. newmatilda.com/2018/08/20/ris…
23. It’s no coincidence that energy policy was the spark that ignited the current Liberal conflagration. The passage of virulent climate denialism from fringe right-wing conspiracy theory to the centre of current Liberal policy shows the radicalisation of the Liberal right.
24. Similar trends are apparent on issues like immigration. Such is the drift, a section of the party was willing on Monday to sabotage a sitting Liberal prime minister in order to secure political and ideological hegemony.
25. Such actions do not auger well for sensible and balanced politics in this country. In fact, they suggest the opposite: the rise of a powerful and dangerous far right movement, well on the way to taking over one of the two major parties in Australia’s democracy.
26. In the longer term, genuine questions must be asked about the future of the conservative project. Can the Liberal Party continue in its current form? Will conservatives succeed in taking over, as they have in Victoria? Or will the party split apart?
/ends.
