Ok here's my take on the NBN debacle ...Tony Abbott was ideologically committed to trashing Labor's legacy, root and branch. He tasked his shadow cabinet members with crafting minimalist policies to replace Labor's, so he could claim to be covering the bases in areas the voters would want, but in ways that would support his neoliberal philosophy (small government, minimal-spend, big business, anti-science).

That’s the beginning point of policies like Turnbull’s NBN and Hunt’s ‘Direct Action’ climate policy. Having started from that ideological base, the Turnbull government has little choice but to defend these policies to the last man. I still remember Tony’s launch of the Coalition’s answer to Labor’s NBN. The day he credited Malcolm T with virtually inventing the internet. (Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.) I recall that Mal, standing beside Tony to announce the plan, looked as comfortable as a pork butcher in a synagogue. But this was the price he’d decided to pay to stay within reach of the crown in an Abbott cabinet. To this day, my gut feeling has remained that Mal has known all along that the bastardised NBN policy that bears his name is rubbish.

But what do you do when in the fulness of time you’ve seized the coveted crown, and now it’s your job to lead the team to the election with the policies your ousted predecessor believed in (which you didn’t and don’t)? Well you do the only thing that won’t make you look an unprincipled prat. You lie through your teeth to defend what you know to be indefensible nonsense, and hope like mad either that your rhetorical skills will carry the day, or that your opponents will look even less impressive.

Welcome to the coal and copper future.