Hard times have come for the Coalition and nothing will change

Extract from The Guardian

Coalition

Katharine Murphy

The government’s habit of self-destruction seems so ingrained it’s hard to see it shifting
• After losing 30 Newspolls, can the Coalition be written off?

@murpharoo

Malcolm Turnbull with Peter Dutton, the polarising conservative some see as a likely short-term alternative. Photograph: Glenn Hunt/AAP

Relax everyone. We can stop marking off days in calendars because the dreaded 30th Newspoll has now been lost.
It would have been a miracle to see any other result given the sustained negative trend against the Coalition since it almost lost the last federal election in 2016. The tide is in, and has been in for at least 12 months.
Despite the grim news, Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership doesn’t seem to be under any immediate threat. The government has a budget to prepare and deliver, and the parliament doesn’t resume until May.

There is also a strong sense inside the government that one of the reasons they can’t ever get their collective head above water is because of the heavy transaction costs associated with the change of leadership from Tony Abbott back to Turnbull in 2015, and the cycle before it, when Turnbull lost the leadership to Abbott during their period of opposition.
Sensible people know that playing another round of revolving door at the Lodge would create as many problems as it solved, unleashing a fresh chapter of angst and internal retribution.
Turnbull has also benefited from the fact the two colleagues considered the most likely short-term alternatives – Peter Dutton and Julie Bishop – are not held up internally as miracle workers when it comes to turning around the government’s political fortunes.

Sensible people know playing another round of revolving door at the Lodge ​would create as many problems as it solve​​d

The conservative Dutton is polarising and, by many internal accounts, singularly focused on culture warring as a strategy to try to hold his Queensland seat. The moderate Bishop, who would be fiercely resisted by the right, would offer voters more of the same.
So for Turnbull – a political leader who has comprehensively underwhelmed the nation and seems possessed by poor luck and few cheery options – that’s the good news.
The bad news is these internal calculations by colleagues can and do turn on the head of a pin, particularly if the bad poll trend persists well past the budget session and marginal seat holders do what they tend to do in proximity to an election – start to panic.
The next bit of bad news for the prime minister is the government’s habit of self- destruction seems so ingrained it’s hard to see them shifting.
Abbott has lost the goodwill of many of his colleagues and his serial provocations and the echo chamber willingly provided by a coterie of acolytes and a handful of media boosters is niche, but destructive, in the sense that it reinforces an impression of a government locked in a cycle of constant internal contention and rank self indulgence.
Given Australian voters have had more than a decade of governments in Canberra more obsessed with internals and ego-driven bouts of legacy wars than focused on the day job, that impression is highly corrosive. At some point, enough really does have to be enough.
The deliberately destructive behaviour also makes it difficult for the government to confront the real problem it faces, which is not pesky polls and their results but the serious vacancy of its policy agenda.

It presents regularly as a gang of rivals bound together with little more than talking points and gaffer tape

I watch this government very closely – 24/7, in fact – and if you asked me to explain what it stands for in three or four sentences I would really struggle.
I’m constantly struck by the lack of basic connection points between the contemporary Coalition’s preoccupations and the concerns faced by ordinary Australian voters. 
And because every internal policy conversation gets hijacked by malcontents, or plays out inexorably through a proxy war prism, it is difficult for the government to have the kinds of reflective and self-critical conversations it needs to undertake to have a hope of improving its offering.
A political movement needs to have a sense of esprit de corps and a sense of common purpose sufficient to give it the resilience to withstand robust internal argument – and the government shows absolutely no sign of possessing that basic underlying condition.
It presents regularly as a gang of rivals, faking collegiality, entirely unconvincingly, bound together with little more than talking points and gaffer tape.
So worse news than another bad opinion poll is the lack of obvious or easy solutions to the government’s current plight.
Unless it finds some ballast, some animating purpose, and an agenda that connects with the public, then I feel entirely safe in making this prediction: hard times have come and nothing will change.