It’s a weird black enchantment to find oneself reading an immense tome of a book like Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir A Bigger Picture and to find first that it’s delightful in a way you would never have expected and then to discover that it’s not—that it tallies all too closely with the greater world, from the altitude of expectations raised about Malcolm and then the fall, the hopes lost. But before we get on to that exercise in allegory or analogy or what you will, shouldn’t we wonder about the accentuation of political memory and political biography but especially the former in the last however many years since—well, when? When Latham lost the election he was set to win? Or would we date it later with the rash of prime ministers since Rudd beat Howard in 2007, was replaced by Gillard, who almost lost to Abbott, and then Rudd replaced her, of course, and amid this Turnbull, as leader of the Opposition, had bitten the dust to Abbott.

But, in any case, after Rudd came back to dispose of Gillard in her turn, he was beaten by Abbott—crushingly, whatever the furniture saved—and then Abbott, the most devastating master of negativity since Malcolm Fraser as leader of the Opposition faced Gough Whitlam and effected the Dismissal. But then Abbott, in turn, after his extraordinary duumvirate with Peta Credlin, was replaced by Turnbull again and if Abbott was a Liberal prime minister for people who liked the old DLP, Turnbull looked for a bright, shining moment there like every Labor and Green voter’s dream of a Coalition leader (with all the mistrust among his colleagues that might engender). So much for the history that would seem to the nearest Martian like a bizarre cycle of mutability for one of the most stable democracies on Earth and that perception is not diminished by the coronavirus-engendered interregnum where Scott Morrison—less impressive, one might have thought, than any of his predecessors— has been governing not only with the pretty able-looking support of Josh Frydenberg but hand in glove with Victoria’s Labor Premier Daniel Andrews so that what we have, as I write in mid May, is an overtly Keynesian New Deal–style government of unity more left-wing in its emphasis on maintaining livelihoods in the face of defeating disease than anything we have seen since at least World War II, if not ever. With a suburban dadish Hillsonger at the helm and doing what is hard not to perceive as a pretty good job—the soft-shoe shuffle between gravity and tenderness a hell of a performance in what looks like a good cause.