We all know how this ends and Australians are failing to see the joke
More than 100,000 Australians are homeless. Drought is wringing the life out of the land and those trying to survive on it. Fires burn up and down the NSW coast. Housing and financial stress is at record levels across the land.
And what are the nation’s leaders and would-be leaders focussing their energies upon?
We have seen this play before. It is getting so old.
Malcolm Turnbull and his travails are not so much the exception as the norm now.
Australia hasn’t witnessed a prime minister serve a full term since John Howard lost his last election in 2007.
It is not elections that remove this nation’s leaders any more. It is a leader’s own soured colleagues.
They find their dubious powers in ideology and suspicion and personal hatred dressed up as disappointment and, often enough, delivered as blackmail.
Turnbull’s weakness now, is his failure to understand that if you give in to blackmail, in this case over the unfinished arguments about climate change and energy production, your persecutors will want more.
Turnbull knows how it finishes: he destroyed Tony Abbott as prime minister (though Abbott had done a lot of the groundwork himself), just as Abbott and his forces swept Turnbull from the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2009.
The Labor Party of Bill Shorten is, unsurprisingly, perfectly willing to sit by and watch the Liberal Party thrashing about, withholding any lifeline to Turnbull even if that assistance might have helped balance the nation’s obligations towards reducing carbon emissions while stabilising power prices.
Shorten, one of the major architects of his own party’s descent into leadership disposal - first Kevin Rudd, then Julia Gillard in favour of the resurrection of Rudd - knows how it plays out, too. Why wouldn’t he allow the government spiral into madness for Labor’s benefit?
While regular Australians - too many of them suffering their own forms of existential torment - look on with loathing at all the self-indulgent power plays on naked display in Canberra, a single long-term parliamentarian had the dry and knowing wit to expose the ancient nature of regicide.
Leader of the House and court jester Christopher Pyne chose Sunday to update his register of pecuniary interests.
Pyne, quite unnecessarily, declared he had received the gift of a ticket to Hamlet at the Adelaide Festival.
Hamlet is, of course, the Shakespearean tragedy about backstabbing, betrayal and a murderous plot to steal the throne.
You’d forgive ordinary Australians from failing to see the joke.
There is nothing but weariness in it all, now. It’s so, so old.