We had a panel composed of two ABC journalists (Annabel Crabb and someone from ABC radio) and Bruce Baird, former Liberal MP. (At least people have heard of Baird, and he has some sort of public credentials, unlike some of the “formers” who appear on The Drum, formerly faceless staffers who appear to be doing a fair bit of self-promotion).

This was one of the least overtly political panels. It’s not unusual to have an ABC journo. Two is. Maybe it’s hard to round up ex-pollies and staffers this week. Perhaps Paul Howes is keeping a low profile for once.

Another edition this week featured the IPA’s Tim Wilson, some NSW state political writer from somewhere or other, and the ABC Religion and Ethics Editor, Scott Stephens, who like the Editor of the online Drum itself, Jonathan Green, is actually good value. Unlike pretty much everyone else who appears on the show, they’re intelligent people capable of articulating a reasoned position outside the possible range of media/partisan talking points.

Anyway, it was interesting to hear all three panelists today echo the Qantas management line on offshoring and job cuts. Hook, line and sinker. No critical examination. No, whatever business says must be true. Intone “globalisation” a few times, and nod sagely.

That gets us closer to the actual bias in the journosphere – the liberal bourgeoisie reflecting itself back. The mantra “Productivity Commission” can always be recited instead of thought. Sure, they’re socially liberal, but it’s insane to call these folks left wing. They *are* the inner city dwelling latte sippers of legend, well paid, socially ‘tolerant’, and probably fitting best politically into the more milquetoast faction of the now departed Democrats. “Left neo-liberals” perhaps, but that would be a stretch.

And that was without the almost compulsory representative of the IPA to recite neo-liberal nostrums.

It might be a bit much to ask for reflection, thought and searching reflexivity when you have to switch your attention to the next talking point after about 3 or 4 minutes, but there you have it. And let’s not forget that most journos, with some exceptions among specialist writers, are experts in nothing; except perhaps in being journos. So it’s unclear to me why they have anything to say on business strategy, the changing shape of the airlines industry, industrial relations, or the way managements selectively use numbers to show a ‘cost’.

This is why so much self-serving business propaganda, advocacy research and modelling slips straight through to the keeper, I suspect. Oh, look, Access Economics says, ‘x’. Of course, they’re always right, no matter who’s paying the bills, whereas actual public institutions like Treasury must be politically biased. Or something. Didn’t Ken Henry like wombats?

I was prompted to ponder all this by some interesting attempts on a thread at John Quiggin’s to resolve the apparent conundrum between the right-wing-isation of the ABC and the constant attacks by people like Janet Albrechtsen on its purported left wing bias.

There’s actually no real conundrum.

Balance functions as a pincer movement. Albrechtsen and the other enforcers rely on the way the ABC has been trained, Pavlov’s Dog style, to be hyper-sensitive about the *numbers* of alleged lefties. Her latest column really is just a way to bounce more Brendan O’Neill onto a radio show or an online portal or a panel discussion. As so much of what passes for right wing opinion in Australia is demented, or rather cranky, or incapable of making an argument without a non sequitur or a Godwin, the IPA provides a never ending supply of presentable and well media trained spokespeople. It helps to be in Sydney too.

Then, because of the numerical understanding of ‘balance’, we can exclude anyone who might be a tad original, and not take one side of the so-called left/right equation. And if you live in the eternal present, by definition what you say is actually conservative. We also get the look of shock on presenter Steve Cannane’s face when Peter Reith condemned ABC News 24 for broadcasting the deluded and offensive ravings at some fringe anti-gay protest in Canberra. ZOMG! Where is the balance!

And so it goes…

If the premise is that Twitter, Facebook and other social media enable politicians to enter into dialogue directly with voters, then, as he says, that’s unlikely. I’d add to the reasons Farnsworth enumerates that those Tweeps who discuss Australian politics are a micro-public, not “the public”. That is to say, as for instance the #ausvotes crowd became more of a community, barriers to entry also arise, and I’d observe that Twitter’s social ecology particularly lends itself to hierarchisation. In any case, we’re talking about a very very small proportion of the electorate, and probably, a much more partisan population than the citizenry as a whole. I’m not sure whether anyone has attempted to gauge just how many people joined in election related talk on Twitter, but I expect that might be one of the outcomes of an interesting research project my former colleagues at QUT, Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, are conducting under an ARC grant (research results are regularly updated and discussed at Mapping Online Publics).

The second point to make here is that because Twitter is the media’s favourite social medium – as Farnsworth says because of its utility in driving link traffic, but also because it aids in “branding” journos and the media organisations that employ them – we can observe some of the same network effects in operation as those which restrict the discussion of politics to a small circle. Insofar as it’s more porous, than, say, letters to the editor, it still tends to centre around particular nodes – the regular #qanda commentary, #qt when parliament is in session, and comments about and to particular journos who have a high profile on Twitter (@annabelcrabb being a good example). In a textually restricted medium, moving oneself closer to the key nodes (through retweets, gaining more followers, or a mention by a leading Tweep) is often a matter of making a 140 character joke or witticism, or acting as a catalyst for conversations which start to involve a significant number of others. What’s going on is very interesting indeed sociologically, but it’s not either deliberative debate nor, I strongly suspect, particularly influential.

Incidentally, one of the other claims about social media – its ability to aggregate distributed knowledge and to disseminate it quickly, is also I think proved largely false. As Farnsworth rightly observes, the only gain in information during the Gillard/Rudd leadership contest was probably knowing the result about a minute or so before everyone else, and a lot of what was purveyed turned out to be wrong. Twitter probably best lends itself to these sorts of fast developing events, but in terms of citizen journalism, a political event is something very different from, say, a natural disaster, as people aren’t reporting on what they see or know directly, but speculating on snippets of information – and manipulated snippets – from the core inside actors.

It was interesting to watch, just now on ABC News 24, the press conference which followed the PM’s education policy announcements. I was somewhat heartened to see that all the questions focused on education policy, rather than on the usual “narrative” stuff. It was something of a rejoinder to Annabel Crabb’s claim that it was unduly difficult for journos to brief themselves sufficiently on policy, something I thought was far fetched, given that any intelligent listener who’s been following public debate can usually think up some salient lines of questioning (if they’re not too busy tweeting and texting).

Earlier, in the campaign, a post by GrogsGamut on the performance of the media stimulated an interchange between journos and bloggers on Twitter, something Mark wrote about here, and which journo James Massola reflected on in a piece published on Saturday.

There was less interchange on Twitter on Saturday, after a number of very forceful critiques were published in the blogosphere and alternative media of the appalling “body language”/Latham press conference in Brisbane (see Pavlov’s Cat’s guest post here, which entirely occluded any discussion of important announcements on seniors’ income support.

Some journos reacted defensively, but silence was largely the result.

I wonder, though, if the critique refracted by Twitter had some influence on the press pack improving its game today, and according to Bernard Keane, yesterday.

Update: Margaret Simons on the media’s coverage of policy.

The ABC’s Annabel Crabb published a long, informative, entertaining piece at The Drum the other day, characteristically witty and meaty, in defence of journalists and their current behaviour and reportage on the campaign trail.

Much of what she is says is fair enough. But nothing she says can possibly excuse what I’ve just heard on the radio.

I got into the car and turned on the radio and there was Julia Gillard in Queensland, mid-speech, announcing the Government’s seniors policy, after what I imagine was a somewhat stressful morning meeting Kevin Rudd for the first time since she became Prime Minister. The seniors stuff sounded pretty good, mainly the improvements to the pension situation but also several other things. Jenny Macklin followed up. And then it was time for questions.

I listened for a total of just over half an hour, apart from the four and a half minutes it took me to duck into Dan Murphy on the way home, and I heard one, and only one, question, right at the end, about the policy announcement. Every single other question, asked mostly in an aggressive, smartarse, gotcha tone of voice by what sounded like a bunch of extremely young journalists (with the exception of — wait for it — Mark Latham, who was “working as a guest reporter for a commercial network”; is there no scrap of venomous f*ckwittery of which the man is not capable?) was about her meeting with Kevin Rudd, except for the ones about the presence of Mark Latham.

Wah wah wah shrouded in secrecy (actually, said Gillard, there was a TV camera and sound gear in the room) wah gotcha wah wah why didn’t you make eye contact (actually, said Gillard, just because you didn’t see something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen) wah wah gotcha blah are there really two leaders wah wah wah knifed blah blah assassinated wah wah doesn’t Mark Latham upset you blah not helping wah wah aren’t YOU having a hard time wah wah gotcha blah Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd Kevin Rudd.

Gillard answered every single one of these aggressive, repetitive inanities with humour, patience and grace.

As someone with an 83-year old father and an older sister recently turned 60, I would have quite liked to hear some questions about the seniors policy. I didn’t think it was too much to ask. Perhaps the baby journalists thought Julia had spoken about it so clearly and in such detail that there were no questions left unanswered. But it seems more likely that they didn’t hear a word she said and were filling in time tweeting and texting till her mouth stopped moving and they could start yelling But we need to talk about Kevin!

Can anyone tell me what this appalling crap is all about? Has journalism become a matter of goading someone until they lose their temper or burst into tears? Exactly when did loss of control or bodily containment become the stuff that “news” is made of? Did any of them even realise that there were policy announcements being made? Is this the kind of scrum that produces the kind of rubbish we’re getting in the papers and on  the news? Do journalists really think that public life is a soap opera in which the only thing that matters is emotion, personalities and gossip? How much of this is being driven by the Rupert Murdochs of the world? Can you really blame the obviously extreme youth and inexperience of some of these journalists when Kerry O’Brien is doing more or less the same thing every night on The 7.30 Report? Now that journalism is something you need a university degree for, what on earth are they spending those four years teaching them? And is the Australian public really only getting the media it deserves?

Whatever the answers to these questions may be, I am bloody glad I’m not a journalist. I would be hanging my head in shame, mortification and sorrow at the untrained flea circus this once noble profession has become.

Update: [by Mark] Via Mobius Ecko in comments, here’s a link to the transcript of the press conference in question, posted by Bernard Keane at The Stump.

Over the weekend, I read Annabel Crabb’s Rise of the Ruddbot.

It’s fascinating to take a trip back to a time when a Liberal leadership team of Tony Abbott and Julie Bishop seemed fanciful. Just as much as it’s weird to go back and read right wing columnists opining in the 2007 election campaign that if we voted for Kevin07, we’d really get Julia Gillard as PM some time in the parliament’s term.

Funny business, politics.

Reading Crabb’s account of Malcolm Turnbull’s fighting press conference as his leadership crumbled, I was struck by how so many of us citizens (and so many Liberals) thought we’d be seeing his warnings that the party he led risked becoming a “right wing fringe outfit” endlessly portrayed in Labor ads. Up until very recently, the default ALP advertising gambit would have been to feature vision of successive Liberal leaders and wannabes and has-beens all trashing each other gleefully.

But we’re not seeing those ads, and for an obvious reason.

In an era of short memories, the retooling of the Ruddbot as KRuddMP has enabled the Liberals to claim that their party represents experience and safety (although Bronwyn Bishop, Kevin Andrews and Philip Ruddock, notable Howard era returnees, don’t seem to feature in their campaign).

There’s more than one irony in the way both parties are trying to position themselves on the right side of the fear/security dichotomy in this campaign.

Cross-posted at the ABC’s Campaign Diary blog.

Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.

I was thinking about this again yesterday, prompted partly by the renewed criticism of the right wing balancing act on the ABC, and partly by a snippet from a Crikey reader (more of that later). Annabel Crabb also popped up to discuss her practice as a ‘political sketch writer’ [deconstructed here by Andrew Elder].

This is what an anonymous writer in Crikey‘s tips and rumours section had to say yesterday:

Notwithstanding the important role played by ex-Crikey editor Jonathan Green, the ABC’s new journos’ play pen The Drum is a lacklustre affair, which seems to be based on the assumption that anyone who can talk can write and vice versa, thus newspaper writers have become broadcasters and broadcasters are writing columns and opinion pieces. Is this the new journalism?

Annabel Crabb, who earned something of a reputation as a perky sketch writer for Fairfax, is now making regular appearances on ABC local radio shows to update listeners on “what’s going on in Canberra”. Clearly nobody thought to give her a few tips on how to be a broadcaster, so her Q&As with such luminaries as Steve Cannane and Richard Glover have been peppered with elongated “ums” and “ahs” and other irritating hesitations to the point where she sounds as dull as the ever-grey Michelle Grattan on Radio National Breakfast show.

It’s sad, but one wonders why those who dreamed up The Drum really thought that ABC online users would want to read the writings of “top” broadcasters such as Tony Eastley, Leigh Sales, Jonathan Holmes, Mark Colvin (probably one of the few who can write) et al. It’s a sort of media junkies’ dump bin that assumes we all want to read what these people have to say — and most of that is about “the future of journalism” — although it seems to be a generation of has-beens trying to prove they are with it.

Time for a generational change, but the ABC has not invested much in training young talent in the arts of writing or broadcasting, so the online venture will remain frumpish and dull. The only place where the real money is going is to is the cutesy Kids TV channel expensively promoted as a funky lolly show with sparky young teeny presenters doing that jump-and-grin thing that was all the go when the Dave Clark Five were trying to oust the Beatles.

There was a time when the ABC was ahead, but as each new CEO takes over, they behave as if talking up the future and associating the brand with “new technology” as if the ABC really understood it.

Whether or not you agree with this critique (and I just post, not endorse, unless noted otherwise), there are a couple of real issues here.

I was also thinking about Chris Uhlmann’s dire performance as the summer host of the 7 30 report. I tend to think of Uhlmann as a bit of a shill for the News Limited commentariat line du jour, and as one of those journos who believes that it’s appropriate to adopt a post of ‘above the fray’ irony and cynicism. His predecessor as the 7 30 Report’s political editor, Michael Brissenden, was much the same. But, whether you agree with that or not, I think it’s reasonably uncontroversial to say that as someone trained in the craft of a radio reporter, he doesn’t really do tv interviewing very well. So, while it’s highly fashionable at all levels in ABC news and current affairs to suggest that journos have to be able to cross various media, I don’t think it’s as easily said or done.

Secondly, we can circle back to the point about journalist as celebrity that Simons made. While various ABC types might have more followers on Twitter than the average Joelle or Joe, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the most authoritative analysts around.

There are some real questions for the ABC to ponder, I’d suggest, which need a much deeper, well, analysis, than Mark Scott’s techno-cheersquad provides.

I’m not going to repeat anything she’s written because it’s unnecessary, rather I want to talk about another thing I’ve noticed through all the exciting #spillage of the last week, and that’s the role of women in the events themselves. We’re really starting to see the effects of decades of pushing to get women accepted into all areas of public life, while at the same time we’re still seeing the effects of keeping them marginalised for so long.

This week, after Penny Wong negotiated a deal with the Liberal party on the ETS, we’ve had Sophie Mirabella’s exit from the front bench alongside Tony Abbott, triggering a mass walkout of further Liberal frontbenchers. We’ve had “loyal girl” Julie Bishop, who has managed to survive three leadership spills and keep her job. We’ve had the brave and principled senators Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, who walked the walk when other Liberal Senators toed the party line. While all this unfolded, Kevin Rudd was overseas, leaving Julia Gillard to run the country, while the new opposition leader promises to stop flirting with her. And over in NSW, the ALP caucus voted to make Kristina Keneally their first female premier.

Meanwhile, Annabel Crabb made her ABC debut, becoming one of the go-to journos for smart, insightful political analysis, along with Samantha Maiden and Laura Tingle providing great information and analysis of events as they unfolded. And in another mini-spill, Sophie Black took the reigns and became editor of Crikey.

I’ve forgotten plenty of women, no doubt. I hope I have actually. It shouldn’t be possible to list all of the women involved in events this big.

So… to the Problems. Mirabella and Bishop are criticised for selling Australian women out in supporting Abbott. Keneally can be seen in the long tradition of Labor only making women their leaders when things have gone entirely to shit, further reinforcing the pressure for women to be nurturers, healers and uniters. Meanwhile Bishop is again criticised for playing a uniting role, lining up behind the three leaders democratically chosen by her party. I won’t go on, there are plenty of words to be found about how women are fucking up, some fair, some not.

But the Good Things! We have a new female premier to add to the list, and she’s not from the left. Another step further towards providing enough variety that they are seen as Premiers first, not Women Premiers, as if that’s some kind of category. We have female Liberal MPs putting their electoral and preselection chances at risk in order to stand up for what they believe in, be it Mirabella and Adams or Troeth and Boyce. We have Julie Bishop playing a clever factional game, making it almost impossible for her to be dumped from her spot as deputy leader. We have Ms Crabb, who is seen as one of the most insightful political analysts working today, and hardly anyone is putting the word “woman” or “female” in there. And yet we have Miranda Devine being given a platform to be as mad and wrong as the maddest and wrongest op-edder The Australian has to offer. And while Dr Cat is right about the lack of genuine understanding about what, exactly, Abbott’s women problem really is, it’s now just a given that you cannot win elections by completely alienating women.

I can’t find the exact quote, but Amanda Vanstone once said that women won’t be equal until a woman as useless as the most useless male MP can be elected. While we’re still at a point where women being in the spotlight at all is remarkable, the incredible variety of women we’ve seen this week should give us hope that we’re slowly reaching that point where women will be judged for the work they do, and not the work they do As Women. And hopefully along the way, we’ll all come to understand that men like Tony Abbott don’t have a problem because they don’t get “women’s issues”. They have a problem because they don’t get that women are people, and they are more and more reluctant to put up with anyone believing they are anything less than that.

Diablo Cody nails it:

K, here’s a problem that is holding back feminism and you see it on the blogs. We all hold each other up to an incredibly high standard in a way that men do not. Let’s say a woman directs a movie that’s not very good—everybody piles up on her. It’s, like, “No! You’re representing us! It has to be perfect!” And that’s not how it works! Women should be allowed to make bad movies. Good movies. Porno movies. Terrible made-for-TV movies. Women just need to be out there directing as many movies as men do. We don’t all have to be the model woman—what we need is to be more visible. We really, really are tough on each other.

As long as there are ludicrous opinion pieces being written, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are being written by women, and as long as there are both political ideologues and factional warriors lacking in any sort of policy beliefs at all, I’m going to celebrate that some of them are women, too. Here’s to Crabb and Devine; to Gillard and Bishop; to Mirabella and Troeth.

Similarly, we’ve seen a classic case of the calling into being of a phantom public in all the emails and texts sent to Liberal MPs – polarised between categories (“denialists”, etc) which hardly have any resonance in most Australians’ vocabularies or lived experience. Yet it’s taken for reality, and it seemingly has had a real effect in that alternative universe that is the Liberal Parliamentary Party.

So what of the role of the media in all this?

With some exceptions, such as Laura Tingle on Lateline tonight (and, for that matter, Annabel Crabb the other night), the legacy media has intoned very predictable scripts (and as I’ve emphasised, forgotten an alternative one – “strong leader stands up to party dinosaurs and appeals over their heads to public” – which Malcolm Turnbull has been busily reinscribing).

Even in alternative media, such as Crikey, we’ve seen Bernard Keane (aside from his strange obsession with talking up virtues few others can see in Andrew Robb) swing from the standard “dead man walking” talk to “Turnbull is actually going to fight!”… why the latter was a surprise, I have no idea. I’d been suggesting some days earlier it was characteristic of his persona, and also politically rational. Yet the commentariat in their massed battalions seemed to anticipate his folding in the face of the Minchin putsch.

As Andrew Elder asked, could this be the week the journosphere failed?

Let’s not forget Turnbull may win on Tuesday.

What, then, of the frenzied expression of common press gallery wisdom?

Will the shorter Peter Van Onselen still be “Hockey can unify the party because he’s Minchin’s sock puppet”?

Perhaps the only “high level sources” they talk to are the ones who have an agenda. Like I said recently, it’s a bit like Imre Salusinszky having his fill of Chinese lunches at various eateries in and around Sussex Street and then retailing the latest goss on who’s going to overthrow Nathan Rees, only to find that Nathan Rees overthrew his detractors, and no journo saw it coming. Perhaps because something actually happened, as opposed to the endless non-event of leadership talk.

Sometimes politics doesn’t play to script.

Turning to Twitter, as Worst of Perth commented here, it’s been very interesting indeed. For anyone assiduously following this thing, it really has been the best real time news source, and quite amusing and fun too. It’s very well suited to these sorts of fast moving events, and the degree of inaccuracy and rumour is precisely the same as what makes it into the press and the telly. Not least because a fair bit of it is Sky News as it happens…

Interesting also to me has been the fact that a lot of the journos in Canberra who’ve been of greatest value are ones whose bylines are not well known. Maybe they’re working a bit harder than the tv stars and ubiquitous commentators?

On the other hand, as I’ve already alluded to, seasoned, intelligent and insightful commentators such as Laura Tingle prepared to buck the herd, whose work in the Fin Review is only available to those who spend 3 bucks on the paper, and who gets less air time than the show ponies, have shown their worth – as on Lateline tonight.

But, let’s get all this in perspective.

It’s also significant that while #spill is now the most popular tag on Australian Twitter, the fifth is #xmedialab – which is a discussion about a cross media conference that is on in Sydney at the moment. This medium doesn’t have much of a reach, and it has less of a reach than blogs, and slower moving media generally. And that may be because a lot of people are simply not interested in the scoop of the second (83 new tweets since you started searching).

At the same time, the core audience of political junkies, if Twitter is any indication, haven’t been clicking through to MSM stories at all. As Stephen Feneley commented at #spill, journos tweeting is a double edged sword.

That’ll be related to a shift where those who are most engaged around issues are finding their own spaces to interact, often private – lots of the old core of the web is shrinking as people highly attuned to particular communities of interest resort to discussing their own take on stories on social media sites such as Facebook without even looking at actual media reports, preferring to rely on others’ quick summaries of links through social distribution. Whether or not this becomes a wider trend is, at this stage, moot, but something is underway. But it replicates ancient social and cultural patterns – talking about stuff you’ve heard, which is different from silent reading, or even a more organised and structured discussion of what is read. The first is Twitter writ large.

Both practices have their value, but the assumption that reading and reflection is superior has had its day, unless it’s a normative pronouncement as opposed to a description of social reality.

So there may be a role for slow and fast in this fast moving media world. But slow needs to catch up, and fast needs to slow down and be more reflective if it’s to compete with the best of slow.

But that needs to be understood, and the limits of the publics who are both being invoked and created through these discourses have to be recognised too.

I will say that it is a bit of a worry that a heap of stuff that needs to have been factored in, including but not limited to the actual policy shift involved in the CPRS amendments, what’s happening elsewhere in the world in the lead up to Copenhagen, the new dimensions of climate change, and even what the government has at stake, has completely dropped off the radar. At LP, we’ve tried our best to keep that stuff in focus. But it’s been slim pickings anywhere else, with only a few distinguished exceptions such as New Matilda.

Some lessons need to be drawn from all this which transcend the tired dichotomies of legacy and social media, and I hope they will be.

Ps: LP can be followed on Twitter here.

Elsewhere: Axel Bruns at Gatewatching.

Update: The Newspoll results analysed tonight certainly suggest a disjunction between press commentary and voters’ sentiments, and indeed, the view from the Canberra political class and Liberal voters in the cities.

The denialists want a couple of extra days to try to turn the numbers around. Nick Minchin’s concession in the days leading up to the showdown that the CPRS should be decoupled from the leadership question is not an act of loyalty to Turnbull, but a sign that he knows that while he is able to muster a fair number of crazy Senators to support his die in the ditch attitude, he cannot muster a majority of Liberals to overthrow his leader. Let’s not forget that the Nats, who are firmly in the denialist camp, have no vote for the Liberal leader. Hence also all the veiled threats about leaving the Coalition – it’s the only way they can exercise influence over the Liberal leadership.

Turnbull should follow through on what his numbers folks were up to before the meeting – “put the stick about”, in Francis Urquhart‘s memorable phrase, and focus attentions on the long delayed reshuffle. Casting Abbott and Robb overboard would be a plus, and any spill threat could be turned around to include Minchin’s gig as Senate Leader.

There is no future for the Liberal party in playing to a portion of its base which holds antideluvian attitudes on almost every issue in the book. They will not vote Labor in a pink fit, anyway. He has to reach out to the centre, and the best way to do so would be to take on the dinosaurs in his own party and establish firm control.

He might also wish to find a way to stop all the dissenters’ views being immediately recycled in The Australian. It’s quite possible for a leader who wins narrowly, but who can’t be overthrown (and the fact that Andrews is seen as a plausible candidate shows just how risible the right wing putsch is) to start acting like a leader, and become one.

Then, and only then, Kevin Rudd might have a fight on his hands.

Interesting times.

Update: George Brandis on Lateline added further confirmation to the vapid nature of most of the leadership spill talk, by mentioning that Tony Abbott had endorsed Turnbull’s leadership at the meeting, and – significantly – that Turnbull had called for people to indicate their desire for a spill at the end, and no one had. We also know that Liberal party rules don’t mean that a letter from two backbenchers seeking a meeting on the leadership necessarily has any consequences. Brandis also indicated that Turnbull had a large majority of Liberals behind him. As I pointed out, the Nats don’t get a vote on the leadership.

And as Annabel Crabb suggested, the Kevin Andrews candidacy hasn’t exactly sparked massive enthusiasm. Even Bolta’s ardour appears to have cooled as the night’s worn on. Van Onselen was back in default mode of “Liberal sources say, high level discussions behind the scenes…” – which is pretty much what he and his mates have been writing all year. If Turnbull wants to give the commentariat a few more thrills and spills, I suspect they’ll only come from a reshuffle.

Update: Bernard Keane:

Amid all the sound and fury last night, let’s not overlook that Malcolm Turnbull has achieved a truly remarkable feat: drag[ging] his party kicking and screaming to actually support the Government’s CPRS, in an amended form. It is an impressive achievement.

And forget about Wilson Tuckey and Dennis Jensen and the denialist bloc within the Liberal Party calling a spill against Turnbull on Thursday. If the spill motion gets up, Turnbull will likely have the numbers, and for that matter won’t even need them [if] Tony Abbott or Joe Hockey don’t stand. I mean, seriously – Kevin Andrews? A man whose ministerial career was marked by both incompetence and malice? He’d be lucky to get his own vote let alone anyone else’s.

Keane goes on to say that Turnbull’s leadership is terminal in any case. That seems to be the conventional Canberra wisdom. I’m not so sure it’s right. We’ll see.

I can’t say that I ever understood Keane’s praise of Robb. His stellar qualities are far from evident to me, and I think he only had the climate change gig in the first place because it was useful to co-opt a skeptic. His public presentation seems to me so somnolent as to render him quite awful as a political communicator.

Turnbull will no doubt he hoping that he will reap some benefit from what Keane calls an “impressive victory” in the polls. Indeed, in his press conference he pointedly referred to public opinion. Yet Keane, and the rest of the commentariat, are focused solely, it would seem, on the ins and outs of the Liberals’ byzantine internal politics. It’s odd that for a crew who normally talk so much about polls, when the chips are down, the nation shrinks to one room in Canberra (and a few back rooms). Turnbull is obviously appealling over the head of his own right wing to the public, and hoping for a dividend for dragging them kicking and screaming into acquiescence in his view (which, as I’ve emphasised, they really must do unless they’re prepared to topple him). But apparently the view from the Parliamentary press gallery is different. Certainly the claims about how his press conference would be received seem premised on a mistaken belief that his only audience was his fellow MPs and a bunch of journos.

If I were Turnbull, I’d be out there tomorrow taking my case directly to the public. Do a few radio and tv interviews. He’s bound to be more persuasive than Kevin Andrews or Andrew Robb, and he may well cut through all the intricacies and manoeuvrings the journos and commentators love to recount. He will certainly believe he now has a clear and saleable message to communicate. He also still has a more authoritative platform from which to speak – as the Opposition Leader – than a bunch of has beens and never has beens. The advantages of having won his fight, and of the position he occupies, shouldn’t be underestimated. That’s not to say he’ll automatically prevail, but I expect he’ll give it the now proverbial ‘red hot go’.

Update: The contest between Turnbull and Kevin Andrews for the Liberal leadership will be decided today. New thread here.