Do we really need such sanctimonious lessons in political calculation from the very leaders of the anti-Abbott Australian? To start we have Chris Kenny with Tony Abbott loyalists need to accept Malcolm Turnbull. But really, how do you beat this for destroying your own argument:

In Abbott’s favour were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.

So what’s Turnbull got that beats all of that, specially since Turnbull would not have achieved a single one of these, not one. As for “time to move on”, I will move on when Turnbull shows me he’s not everything I now assume he is. Then there’s this from Paul Kelly across the front page of the Inquirer section: The dilemma of conservatism. Other than wanting stability, honesty, personal responsibility, a free market economy and the government out of our lives – you know, those conservative values – what exactly do others add to the mix that I am missing. Here’s Kelly:

Turnbull does not say this but his mission is to modernise the Liberal Party. He is a social progressive who champions same-sex marriage, serious action on climate change, a multicultural ­society, a repudiation of monarchical trappings and an economy, entrepreneurial and innovative, geared to aspiration.

What an empty set of junk-filled cliched nonsense. If this is what Kelly and Turnbull think of as the issues of our time, they are so out of their tree that it is hard to fathom exactly how their rose-tinted glasses may be removed. These are people living in a bubble while just over the hill the entire Western world is under siege.

And then The Oz goes after David Flint because they think of him as part of the elites of our society. From Cut & Paste:

If words have meaning, Professor David Flint AM would be regarded as the member of an “elite”. Educated in Sydney, London and Paris, he became a tenured professor in law. In 1997, the Howard government appointed Flint chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, one of the most influential positions in Australian public life. According to Who’s Who in Australia 2003, he is a member of Sydney’s Union Club. Yet Flint reckons he is not part of any elite, and he has just written a book, The Twilight of the Elites (Freedom Publishing), to prove his point. Following the American commentator Christopher Lasch, Flint maintains that “elite opinion is the opinion typical of the upper-middle-class liberal — that is, liberal in the American sense”. In short, elite opinion “tends to be left-wing on social and cultural issues”. How convenient, especially for a commentator who claims to disapprove of labelling.

Not even close. The elites of any society are a swarm of types like Malcolm who are the insiders, the kinds of people I think of as the Progressive Internationalists. People like David Flint often rise but they are never accepted. Richard Nixon would be your prime example, always an outsider to your Malcolm Turnbull types, in just the same way that Tony Abbott was. It is people like Turnbull, Kenny and Kelly who find, eventually, that they have to bring in some outsider to do their work for them. But as tone deaf to modern reality it is hard to imagine these people being more so than they are. In the meantime, we shall see if Turnbull and Morrison can do any better than Abbott and Hockey. Maybe they can, but they haven’t yet. And to say that whatever else, Malcolm will be better than Bill Shorten is only to admit that there was no argument at all in favour of the switch, since this argument works even better on behalf of Tony.