One of the great dangers in politics – for both practising politicians and those, like me, who write about them – is in accepting the stories that everybody else is telling.

Last week, Liberal leadership hopeful Angus Taylor told The Australian Financial Review that his party needed to have “a more collaborative and collegiate environment, where we can have more robust debate despite differences of view”.

Illustration by Jozsef Benke.Credit:

It’s a good point. It is clear that the environment of the past three years did the Coalition no favours: changing it is crucial. And so it was odd to hear Taylor say, as well, “Dutts actually did do an extraordinary job holding the party room together”.

Perhaps this was simply the praise that sprang most easily to mind after the Coalition’s devastating defeat. Still, it was a little confusing. Was this unity, as Taylor’s other comments seemed to suggest, a cause of defeat or a landmark achievement?

Still, you can understand why it sprang easily to mind. For the past three years, Coalition unity has been repeatedly mentioned as an unequivocally good thing: a virtue, it seemed, in its own right. And not just by the Coalition: it was routinely described in much of the media as a signal achievement of Peter Dutton, an obviously good fact about his leadership to be praised.

And so it might have continued, had not the cost of that unity become horribly clear on election night: the consequence of policies like work-from-home........

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