Malcolm Turnbull is having a sliding doors moment. Looking ahead, two distinct scenarios could play out between now and the end of the year.
Scenario one is benign for the prime minister.
Operation fortuitous would see the high court uphold the legality of the marriage equality postal plebiscite and also find that a bunch of ministers were, in fact, validly elected to parliament despite being dual citizens.
Turnbull’s happy scenario plays out like this: a legally valid postal survey, followed by a yes vote, which can then be quickly and quietly legislated, and, while that’s all playing out, knuckle down and sort out the government’s unresolved energy policy by forging a productive path through the inevitable internal battle.
If all those green lights magically happen, Turnbull will be raising a brimming glass to himself by the time the spring ebbs into summer.
Sadly for the prime minister, there is also a less happy scenario.
Operation worst-case scenario would see the high court bin the plebiscite, triggering another damaging internal brawl over marriage equality.
The court would also find the government ministers ineligible, which, in Barnaby Joyce’s case, would mean the Coalition fighting a byelection in New England. (What was that lower house majority again? One seat?)
Persisting with worst-case scenario, the government could then fracture badly over energy policy and fail to fix a serious problem the country is crying out to have fixed.
Let’s describe that scenario as a world of pain, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Obviously there are more than two stark scenarios defining the remainder of the political year. Our various waves could break in different ways, some good and some bad.
But when you map out the various possibilities facing the government, when you take a moment to focus on how difficult and finely balanced things are, with some events almost entirely outside Turnbull’s control, you enter the prime minister’s universe and the collective consciousness of the government.
If you can cross that critical empathy barrier, all the postcards from the edge seem less random acts of pure crazy and more symptoms of the acute stress the government is metabolising.
Stress can make otherwise intelligent people act out in unexpected ways and the Coalition doesn’t have a monopoly on losing it in public.
The Labor man Craig Emerson once thought it was helpful to sing No Whyalla Wipeout to a Skyhooks backing track in a parliamentary courtyard at the height of the axe the carbon “tax” frenzy, and the normally sober and sensible Ralph Willis, the Keating government minister, had a brain snap and released a forged letter on the cusp of the 1996 election.
Politics is now, and has always been, the most human of endeavours, reflecting all the flaws and deficiencies of the human condition.
I mention this not as any kind of apologia for the government’s deficiencies, which are imperilling the whole operation, and are now very obvious to most people.
I just inject stress into the mix because it’s an underlying quality that is not always explicitly referenced in political conversation, and the current dysfunction in our political system is happening for a reason, not just because politicians wake up every day with a burning aspiration to fail in their endeavours.
While the poor quality of our politics leads us all frequently into despair, and that despair is entirely rational (in fact, mostly it’s the only reasonable response), it sometimes pays to pan out a little wider, because there are people inside the system who are trying to ignore the cray cray, and crack on and get things done.
Something quite remarkable happened this week when measured by contemporary standards – where if Australian politics was a rock band, it would be called Unhinged and Combative.
The Liberal party, the Labor party and the Greens – through their designated representatives on the joint standing committee on electoral matters – issued a joint statement saying they wanted to try to work constructively to reform the donations and disclosure regime.
Now before you all start yelling at me – yes, yes, I get it.
I know this doesn’t look in any shape or form remarkable – an agreement to look at something – particularly something as obviously urgent as reforms to our pathetic political donations and disclosure regime.
I know this is a modest and entirely overdue development. I know this should have been fixed years ago.
You are all exactly right.
But I’m also right. This is an event worth noting and, even, quietly, celebrating, because it tells us that behind all the unhinging, at least some people in politics still want the parliament to work.
At its best, the committee system inside the Australian parliament can be an incubator for consensus.
The joint committee on electoral matters convening a new inquiry tells you that Australia’s three main political parties are trying to pursue a grand bargain on electoral reform and to get it done in the current term of parliament.
Starting with the intention to do something by consensus doesn’t mean we’ll get an outcome that everyone can live with, or which ultimately serves the public interest.
The last attempt this group made to reach consensus on banning foreign donations foundered on a disagreement about whether the ban should also apply to third-party political activist groups, such as GetUp.
The treatment of nonpolitical political actors is going to be tough territory for this committee, notwithstanding the fact that everyone in politics knows Australia’s electoral regulations were written for a campaign world that no longer exists.
Political parties often have an eye to institutional advantage first and public interest second, which is part of the reason it is so hard to get anything substantial done in this territory.
In trying to overhaul the system, the longstanding concerns that political parties have had about protecting the privacy of their donors now extends to third-party activist groups, who also have philanthropists who would sometimes prefer to keep their philanthropy quiet.
The government has also salted its own plain by too obviously wanting to settle some scores from the last federal election, where the Coalition was massively outgunned on the ground by progressive activist groups.
The Coalition’s hostile disposition to robust civic activity has made people nervous, and justly so.
But all those complications notwithstanding, rather than shelve the effort as just too hard and too fraught, the committee is doubling down to try to get consensus.
That tells us that a group of people in politics are in the hunt to get something done.
It also tells us, through a measurable action, that at least some of our parliamentarians know that Australian voters are absolutely furious with them, and fed up with the nonsense, and with the pernicious culture of one rule for politicians and another rule for us.
The persistence tells us some politicians are still listening to the people who elected them.
It tells us that Australia politics has not yet fully entered the twilight zone.
