Many questions remain in the wash-up of the House of Cards style coup in which Malcolm ‘FU’ Turnbull plotted over many months to put himself in a winning position to topple Tony Abbott; a plot that weakened the conservative government at the very time when it was most in need of talented team players pulling together. The most obvious questions relate to the extent of the intrigue – who knew and said what and when – and no doubt the Machiavellian machinations will be exposed in the months and years ahead by our nation’s army of talented investigative journalists. Or maybe not. What is clear thus far is that the bulk of the media establishment have welcomed the coup with open arms, rolling meekly over and having their tummies tickled by the new regime in Canberra. Indeed, over the past three weeks certain supposedly ‘high brow’ media outlets’ political commentaries have read and looked more like puff pieces in Woman’s Day than warts ‘n all analysis. So perhaps we will have to wait long into the future until the inevitable retiring pollies’ self-serving autobiographies lift the lid on the extent of individual acts of betrayal. (‘Throughout the long winter of 2015, I tossed and turned in my sleeping and waking hours, as my conscience was torn in two – to whom did I owe my true loyalty? To Tony Abbott, with all his manifest failings, or to the greater good of the Australian people blah blah blah’ – copyright: pretty much everybody currently serving in the Turnbull cabinet.)

But the more important question, and one that is troubling many readers of this magazine, is who to vote for at the next election? Is there a vote that can both reward the Coalition for the successes of the past two years (and hopefully the year to come) yet punish those who so casually gave the finger to conservative values? Mr Abbott recognised this dilemma himself, in his extraordinary thirty minute interview with 2GB’s Ray Hadley. ‘I can appreciate that there are a lot of people out there who are dismayed by what happened,’ he said, ‘but …it would be even worse if we were to end up with a CFMEU-dominated government, which we could well at the next election if people do not stay in and even if they have to do it through gritted teeth, support the Coalition.’

Yet in some ways this misses the point. Where reality shows, football finals and the like are simply about the red team versus the blue team, politics should be more than sheer tribalism. It must be about values, ideas and policies. Support for the Coalition should not be unconditional, nor indeed should it rely upon the true but depressing fact that a Coalition government these days is always likely to be better than Labor’s alternative no matter who leads either party. Malcolm Turnbull must win the hearts and minds of conservatives as much as his precious small ‘l’ Liberals. If he believes he can hold power pandering to some mythical grouping of Q&A viewers and progressive Liberals he is in for a shock. Mainstream, conservative Australia is not particularly interested in what have always been Mr Turnbull’s preoccupations with climate change, same sex marriage, the republic, and schmoozing at international forums such as the UN. Rather, basic issues including scrapping penalty rates, getting tough on welfare, clamping down on union corruption, increasing job opportunities, keeping our borders secure and our immigration program manageable, and lowering income tax are what motivates the bulk of Australians. Those are the expectations they had of Mr Abbott – giving him the keys to the Lodge in a landslide victory.

If Mr Turnbull is smart he will focus his talents on completing the Abbott agenda – with deeds, not just words. For this he would be rewarded with genuine admiration and, importantly, conservatives’ loyalty. The price he must be prepared to pay, of course, is when the ‘love media’ and the Leftist twitter rabble he’s so fond of sitting on trams playing footsies with finally recognise that it is they whom Mr Turnbull has betrayed, not conservatives.

In the end, we would hope that the only people voting through gritted teeth for Mr Turnbull are the ‘luvvies’, not Liberals. Over to you, Malcolm.

Mad Monckton?

News that Greg Hunt intends holding a climate change symposium of some sort in the run up to the Paris conference should sound alarm bells. Will any dissenting voices, such as Ian Plimer or Bob Carter, be invited? Or will it strictly be a warmist-fest designed to obliterate Abbott’s caution and replace it with Turnbull’s impassioned ‘advocacy’? In which case, the fix is in and Lord Monckton’s crazy conspiracy theories start to look a lot less so.