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By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
The good grace with which Peter Dutton exited politics in 2025 explained much about why his colleagues had stayed true.
But that didn't make it wise. Still, here in that end, was Australian institutional democracy at its best. A swift election night validation.
Dutton's concession speech was generous without caveat: "It's an historic occasion for the Labor Party and we recognise that. I congratulated the Prime Minister and wished he and Jody and Nathan all the very best. And I said to the Prime Minister that his mum would be incredibly proud of his achievement tonight, and he should be very proud of what he's achieved. Thank you."
In person, there was a layering to Dutton that for some reason, he had spent three years convincing voters didn't exist. As I wrote on election night, if that more rounded Peter Dutton had shown up earlier, he might have retained his 2024 poll lead.
Instead, he played the tough guy, appearing to harden further during the leaders' debates. Voters disapproved. In droves.
Angus Taylor is on the same trajectory. Personally, he is likeable enough and quick to laugh. Publicly, he is tetchy and evasive, his attacks adolescently exaggerated.
Albeit for differing reasons, both men arrived at the Liberal leadership in a pre-determined state of agitation, desperate to project meanness.
Why though? Voters never warm to it. Is it the job? Does the party insist on these pyrrhic intermediate triumphs? After all, Sussan Ley started out being more constructive, but Taylor's faction was having none of it.
It is hardly strength. Perversely, working cooperatively with a government now and then takes considerably more courage. It can also be electorally advantageous.
The last opposition leader who did not rely on such uniform negativity is now a second-term prime minister. Indeed, Anthony Albanese preferred the title of Labor leader over opposition leader because he wanted to be seen as a proponent of ideas, not merely an opponent.
Albanese's opposition agreed with quite a few things. It lined up behind Jobkeeper and other decisions, too. It waved through Morrison's stage 3 tax cuts for the wealthy, after first trying to get the government to split the elements of the package. When that wasn't forthcoming, Labor supported the whole thing.
There was also immediate bipartisanship (at the expense of the rigour due) on Morrison's half-baked AUKUS plan.
Both had been wedges that Morrison hoped would expose Labor as soft on defence and against lower taxes.
Of course, we know what happened to the stage 3 tax cuts commitment, but the extra money for everyone else in Labor's re-drafting greased that particular backflip.
Inevitably, with his party languishing on a vote share of 20 per cent (or less) in multiple national polls, existential questions are being asked.
Plainly, Taylor's future is now less assured than before he assumed the leadership. Then, at least, his success was a theoretical possibility. Now that he is in the job, failure is a confronting and unavoidable reality. Installed to arrest the drift under Ley, he seems to have accelerated the decline.
Last week, a cast of senior Liberals were in public revolt after Taylor repeatedly cavilled when asked the simple question of whether he supported Australia's multiculturalism. This is the multiculturalism pioneered by Menzies and rendered official by Holt, Fraser, and other Liberal PMs since. It should be a Liberal badge of honour, a nation-building framework of laws and values and attitudes that has elevated this small population of 28 million to the rank of 12th largest economy in the world.
Why, then, was it so hard?
Measure his writhing sophistry and unquantifiable blather about Australian values, against the immediate clarity of Deputy Leader Jane Hume, Anne Ruston, Andrew McLachlan, Garth Hamilton and others. Hume slammed any attack on multiculturalism, as ridiculous.
Ted O'Brien said he'd seen a monoculture - he'd been to North Korea. Ouch.
The fact that the question even arises is a function of how the Liberals have licensed a descent into divisive culture wars rather than take on One Nation at the source of its popularity: Pauline Hanson and her 30-year history of racist division.
Her absurd multiculture v monoculture dichotomy was an obvious trap for the Liberals in this populist age and Taylor swallowed it hook, line and sinker.
So paranoid is Taylor about the Liberals' vulnerability on its right flank that is has now lost itself in a right-wing miasma.
Like Hamlet, young Angus, stricken with doubt, patrols his castle's nocturnal ramparts, keening for the lost verities of Howardism, and desperate to prevent the crown being taken from him.
Yet he overlooks something fundamental. The chasm between Labor and Liberal is a space the Australian voters have willingly navigated many times.
One Nation, by contrast, presents a material threat - both to him and to the nation. It proposes a radically harsher Australia. Petulant, authoritarian, rancorous and hardline. As leader, Taylor should have been the adult conservative first to identify this danger. Instead, it took Andrew Hastie to tell his colleagues "I will never bend the knee to One Nation".
What does that tell you?
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.