Negative land: How conservative politics destroyed Australia's 44th Parliament

The election of the Liberal–National Party in 2013 was meant to put an end to division within Australian politics, after three years of painstaking internal leadership warfare in the Labor Party.

But nobody told Tony Abbott. He assumed, quite wrongly, the electorate voted him in to pursue his conservative ideological projects, rather than restore stability to the political system.

We start in the week before the 2013 election and travel through the bizarre nature of Tony Abbott’s prime minis...