Turnbull's rise: There's rage in Canberra, but outside it's a different story

Extract from ABC The Drum

Opinion

By Barrie Cassidy

Posted about 2 hours ago

Photo: The atmosphere in Parliament House this week was poisonous. (AAP: Sam Mooy)

Malcolm Turnbull's elevation as Prime Minister was met with outrage by some on the Liberal right, but Australia at large doesn't share their disappointment, writes Barrie Cassidy.

If you're still puzzled as to why the Liberal Party cut down Tony Abbott this week - though it seems not too many are - then have a chat with Craig Laundy.
He's the backbencher who challenged the Attorney-General when he tried to amend the Racial Discrimination Act seeking to remove the sections that make it unlawful to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" on the basis of "race or colour".
He's also the MP who earlier this month cried with his family at the dinner table when his daughter showed him the image of the three-year-old refugee lying lifeless on the shore. That inspired him to contact senior ministers and go public with a demand for a sizeable increase in the refugee intake.
Laundy is the Liberal Member for Reid in Sydney. He won the seat at the last election, and he's the only Liberal to have held it since it was established in 1922.
He's also independently wealthy. His family owns 30 hotels. So when he decided he wanted to put an end to the grip Labor held on the seat of Reid, he took a year off work and knocked on 43,000 doors.
In the early months, Julia Gillard was prime minister, and he says the overwhelming response was, "I don't care what you do. Just get rid of her."
Then Kevin Rudd resumed the leadership "and that required a conversation". But he usually won them over.
After he was elected, Laundy picked up where he left off, going back to the relentless door-knocking. And after a year or so, the mood became clear:

They would say they liked me... but then they would raise Tony Abbott's name, and you can fill in the expletives...

He realised very quickly that if that view prevailed, it would be almost impossible to get the message out. And so when the challenge came, he backed Malcolm Turnbull.
Laundy was not, as Tony Abbott suggested of others, just part of a "poll driven panic". It went much deeper than that and it was sustained over a long period.
Trade Minister Andrew Robb put the polls in perspective this week when he said polling is the politician's share price "and if it's down low enough and long enough then there's almost a responsibility ... to do something and they've done something".
And he voted for Abbott!
But now that it's done, the challenge for Malcolm Turnbull is to unite the team behind him. That is quite a challenge.
The atmosphere in Parliament House this week was poisonous. So many on the right are vicious in their private assessments of three people in particular: Julie Bishop, because as the deputy she should have been watching Abbott's back; Scott Morrison, because, though he voted for Abbott, he didn't urge his closest mates to do likewise; and Christopher Pyne, for no other reason than that he switched sides.
Of course, Turnbull supporters are entitled to ask, what price loyalty when Abbott himself was trying to do a deal with Morrison that would have thrown both Bishop and Hockey overboard?
Having said that, there is a real disconnect between the mood inside the beltway and outside around the country.
It doesn't really matter how many stories are written about Abbott supporters and their private rage, the damage is limited unless the public sees and hears that rage for themselves.
Outside Canberra, there is no such rage. Quite the opposite.
The ABC asked you how you felt - in a word - about Turnbull replacing Abbott, and overwhelmingly the most popular word was "relief".
The morning after the change 4,374 readers nominated that description. The only other words to capture more than a thousand responses were "hopeful" and "good".
After that, readers nominated "great", "optimistic", "happy", "positive", "elated" and "better" before, finally, "disappointed" drew 469 responses.
But then Craig Laundy would probably say he knew that already.

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of the ABC program Insiders. He writes a weekly column for The Drum.