Coming almost 10 months after the Labor Party was swept to power on a promise to tear up the WorkChoices laws, the Workplace Relations Minister’s speech fleshing out the details of the Rudd Government’s replacement industrial relations regime was met with anger from unions, particularly over the revised unfair-dismissal rules.

Unlike his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull has a real prospect of leading the party back into office. The decision to call a party meeting at short notice for a leadership vote, which backfired spectacularly for Brendan Nelson, typified the misjudgements that characterised his brief tenure in the top job.

Malcolm Turnbull’s ascent is the culmination of his own will to power and the historic weakness of the Liberal Party after its 2007 election defeat. This is the real Liberal leadership transition. It completes the purging from the election debacle. This is a historic vote because Turnbull, provided he lasts, will fashion a different Liberal Party.

Insisting he was not pushed, Senator Eliision said he had received assurances from new Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull as recently as this morning that he could continue in his current portfolio. But he said the demands posed by constant travel across the country and having a young family had prompted him to consider retirement.

After making his mark as a backbencher challenging then treasurer Peter Costello to slash income taxes, new Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull wants to streamline the system and pre-empt the Rudd Government’s own inquiry into tax and welfare review, which is being led by Treasury secretary Ken Henry.

For whatever reasons, Brendan Nelson’s poll figures are dismal, his impact nowhere to be seen, and under his leadership, the Opposition is going backwards. Senior Liberals need to learn from history and not make the same mistake they made with Howard in 2006: someone needs to tell him that it is time to go.

For political fringe-dwellers like the Greens, there was no threat to Australia’s national security to warrant the 2005 anti-terrorism laws. The legislation was, they said, all a ruse to hide the government’s real agenda, ramming the new industrial relations laws through parliament during that first week in November 2005.

It was one of the main topics of Australia’s national conversation for almost half the post-Cold War era: would John Howard hand the prime ministership to Peter Costello? Or would Costello challenge him for it? From September 1999, when Costello said he had only “another budget or two in me”, to November 2007, when the Liberals lost power, the Howard-Costello leadership tension was a staple of political discussion.

The situation in June 2006 is not unlike that which has played out during the past few weeks. The guessing game of whether Peter Costello would stay in politics or go, whether he would be a leadership candidate or whether he was simply preparing to launch his book, ‘The Costello Memoirs’, and resign, kept sucking oxygen from Brendan Nelson’s leadership. Even after a contracted interview yesterday, there was uncertainty about Mr. Costello’s intentions.

Both Costello and Hanson were third party figures who hijacked the national conversation early in the life of a new government. Costello did it by saying nothing; Hanson did it by saying things that had never been said before by federal politicians. Both became self-fulfilling sagas at around the same point in the cycle - after the new government had delivered its first budget.