The weekend's heckling of Malcolm Turnbull by the Liberal Party’s right showed only that he is a leader for the time in the way Tony Abbott never was.
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The first guffaws from the crowd at the party’s state council came after the standard claim of Liberal leaders that theirs is not a party beset by factionalism.
The claim is obviously untrue, except in comparison with the destructive formal factions in Labor.
The din increased when Turnbull doubled down on his argument. Yet while embarrassing him on camera, the crankiness of conservative Liberal Party members confirmed that if any should wear the dubious label of being “out of touch”, it is them.
The man now leading the country, the man they heckled, is far more likely to ensure a sustained Coalition government than Abbott ever was.
Elections are won in the fickle centre, and if Turnbull can re-cast the government from deeply unpopular band of reactionaries to an economically dry, socially permissive, reasonable administration, he will set the party up for three terms in government.
That Turnbull is the most popular Liberal among Labor voters should not give party members reason to mock him, but hope of re-election. With Bill Shorten leading Labor, Turnbull should take the next election in a canter.
Turnbull has restored cabinet government. He is being consultative. He is using ministers as they should be used: administrators of their domains and his chief advisers. Respected adults, in other words, not problems to be managed.
Should that approach last, Australians will credit the return of stable government after the brief disasters of the Rudd and Abbott eras.
But tests are coming, and they will be difficult. Abbott was not only a destructive opposition leader, but a destructive, do-little prime minister.
Mr Nope, Nope, Nope has left bombs in the prime minister’s office, even if he wouldn’t leave the diary.
Among the tests on which Turnbull is boxed in is same-sex marriage. The debate leading up to a plebiscite will be nasty.
Gay couples will be compared with paedophiles, bigoted bakers will seek to have a right to discriminate returned and enshrined in law.
Human rights should not have to be decided by a supposedly democratic poll, a grateful minority begging a powerful majority for benevolent tolerance.
But Turnbull is hamstrung by the legacy of Abbott’s deviousness, and an unnecessary national vote is coming.
Another test, an intractably awful one, is how to close down the detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island and liberate from indefinite detention asylum seekers who have committed no crime.
Cambodia failed. The Philippines is now mooted. Perhaps New Zealand would reprise its accommodation of a few refugees as Helen Clark did for John Howard in 2001.
But Australia has managed to offend its closest ally by increasing its deportation of offenders born in NZ but formed in Australia.
The Kiwis are in no mood to again help Australia out of a predicament of its own making.
How Turnbull handles tests like these will determine whether he becomes the transformational leader the country needs, or another who has his premiership stained by the legacy of the one he knocked off.