Strange Politics: Turnbull steers Australia into a wall

MALCOLM Turnbull is a victim of Epstein’s Law, a concept that says “If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we’ve solved it”.

Strange Politics: Malcolm Turnbull has become a victim of Epstein's Law. (Photo Digitally altered)

MALCOLM Turnbull is a victim of Epstein's Law, a concept that says "If you think the problem is bad now, just wait until we've solved it".

Take Sydney's appalling traffic congestion as a case study. It is the 1960s and the roads are backed up the wazoo, commuters are angrily head butting their steering wheels and something obviously needs to be done.

So the government steps in with a tonne of money and good intentions to build new, bigger and better roads.

Everything is great for a while. In fact, the roads are flowing so smoothly it would be a waste to use a smelly old bus when you could drive your own car to work.

Before you know it the new roads, once such graceful streams of free-flowing traffic, are more backed-up than a train station dunny. And steering wheels are being head butted at a higher and more furious rate than ever before.

Malcolm Turnbull has become a victim of his own success and an unfounded belief that Australians owed him something and would be willing to pay up.

The Liberal Party was broken under Tony Abbott; it was a limping, bloodied beast looking for a quiet corner to die.

Disregarding the whole Rudd-Gillard-Rudd farce, rarely has an Australian political party been so publicly gripped by internal strife as the Liberals under Captain Abbott.

An Abbott-led Coalition would have performed miserably at the polls, regardless of what Andrew Bolt and other latched-on commentators might argue.

But Malcolm Turnbull may have just pulled off an equally terrible performance.

He took an unworkable government, tried his best to turn things around - both for himself and his party - and ended up in a far worse position than if he had sat back and done nothing.

Had Abbott gone to the election, it would have been only a matter of time before Turnbull became Liberal Leader.

Now he has a hollow win within his grasp and a rapidly ending shelf life on his political career.

Australia is looking at years of senate trade-offs on weird policy until what may be an inevitable double dissolution rears its head again.

We will have at least three years of Pauline Hanson and her ilk peddling hatred and getting a very public forum to do so.

And there is really no one in the Liberal Party who currently looks capable of taking over the reins from Turnbull.

He has tried to excuse the dreadful election result on naive voters falling victim to Labor's Mediscare campaign, but that was cop-out.

Voters wanted a prime minister with the courage of his convictions.

They wanted the Malcolm Turnbull they had before the party's right yanked on his strings - back when he stood for what he actually believed in.

Above all, after six years of constantly changing prime ministers, they wanted stability.

Turnbull tried to use the Coalition's landslide majority to clear the road to getting reforms through parliament.

Now no one is head butting their steering wheel as madly as him. -ARM NEWSDESK