It was a political rivalry so utterly self-destructive that one cabinet minister compared it to being “strapped to a suicide bomber”.
“The Turnbull-Abbott tussle was very torrid, not just for the Liberal Party internally, but for the government more generally for years and years and years,” says former Coalition minister Bridget McKenzie. “You knew something horrific and catastrophic was going to happen.”
In interviews for the ABC political docuseries Nemesis, dozens of former Coalition ministers and MPs have spoken of the toxic rivalry between Liberal giants Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull, and how their relentless internecine conflict crippled both men’s governments and helped destroy each other’s political careers.
I’ve often wondered how we’d have been as a country if Mr. Turnbull had been allowed by his own party to be the Prime Minister in truth. Turnbull could have been one of the great PMs. We wouldn’t have had Mr. Morrison, and a Turnbull government at the helm in 2020 would have lead us down a very different path as a nation.
I still don’t forgive that sleaze bag for selling out an entire country’s future just for a few minutes in the PMs chair.
Short of curing cancer there is no action he could have taken to make up for his assistance in destroying the NBN.