It is sometimes said that the last stage of grief is acceptance. According to people familiar with recent focus group research for one of the major political parties, Australians have begun to manage their disappointment with Malcolm Turnbull. Towards the end of 2017 and in early 2018 voters cut their losses with being angry with the Prime Minister for not being the person they thought he was. It had been a journey, but people had reached the acceptance threshold, declining to waste energy with an eternal ‘why’. They had also noticed a positive uptick in the economy.

This new voter equanimity was disrupted at the start of 2018, when Barnaby Joyce’s private life exploded in the public domain. The grim spectacle that followed—Joyce refusing to quit as Nationals leader and deputy prime minister, a thin-lipped Turnbull trying to blast him out, Joyce digging in and returning fire, pleading for privacy while inviting journalists in to record the circus—disturbed the tranquillity. Anger resurfaced. But the anger dissipated when the bad headlines did. By March, the creeping Zen had returned.