So Malcolm Turnbull had another bad week. Not particularly bad by his standards. Just normal bad. Where things go wrong, and the apparently determined efforts of people within the government to make sure that they literally could not go any wronger — even though maximum wrongness had been achieved — didn’t quite come to fruition.

The 30th Newspoll arrived, with a flurry of thinkpieces about why Turnbull was so terrible and the usual limelight deprivation antics of the Three As (one saving grace — we never have to be exposed to the image of Eric Abetz in lycra, and for that a grateful nation thanks him). But then things went awry.

Each unhappy government is unhappy in its own way, of course, but it’s hard not to find echoes of previous governments in Malcolm Turnbull. The obvious comparison is Julia Gillard, obviously because of the circumstances of how they came to the leadership, a narrow election win and the predecessor hanging around like a particularly pungent odour.

You also get the sense that, post-politics, Turnbull will behave the grace displayed by Gillard signally absent from Abbott and Rudd. But it’s also because both Turnbull and Gillard produced quality economic outcomes and got little credit for them — although Wayne Swan had far more difficult challenges than Scott Morrison faces. Turnbull also had Gillard’s rotten luck. She could never catch a break, and nor can Turnbull. As with Gillard, the tiniest things got beaten up into scandals. Today, The Daily Telegraph has run an asinine story attacking Turnbull for having funds in an investment fund that engages in short-selling, because that’s somehow hoping that Australian companies will fail. 

But it’s forgotten that one of Tony Abbott’s problems was that, however poor he was as PM, his ministers contributed much to that government’s own problems. Ditto Turnbull. It’s astonishing that Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton and Josh Frydenberg were all manoeuvred by interviewers into saying they had ambitions for the leadership. However carefully caveated and contextualised, any talk about the leadership is problematic for a government seen by voters as self-obsessed. The appropriate answer to any question about future ambitions is that Malcolm Turnbull leads the party and will lead it to victory at the next election, full stop, end of story.

Dutton has being laying out his wares to the party base for some time now, of course, offering his own version of “Australia For The White Man” which appears to go down well in Liberal branch meetings and — the hope is — with disaffected One Nation voters. But he was otherwise at pains this week to claim there was no difference between himself and the Prime Minister on a trivial scandalette manufactured by News Corp about whether the government had considered cutting immigration.

The only interesting aspect of that entire mini-episode was Tony Abbott (inevitably) weighing in to claim he’d wanted to cut immigration but had somehow been stymied by the pushback from Immigration bureaucrats. Apparently Abbott spent his entire prime ministership powerless to influence policy, standing by helplessly as his government did all manner of things he now finds objectionable.

Then there was Barnaby Joyce, who confirmed what many suspected when he resigned from the Nationals leadership but refused to leave parliament — that he was determined to inflict damage on Turnbull. Turnbull had until Christmas, Joyce — famous for saying Liberals shouldn’t comment about the Nationals leadership and vice versa — declared this week.

Admittedly, that’s a bit longer than some unidentified Liberals were giving Turnbull with their “unless the budget improves things, he’s out” line. This was the thing about Gillard, too — she was constantly being given “crucial tests” and implacable deadlines to turn things around, and as each test and each deadline disappeared in the rearview mirror, another test, another deadline would be suggested by frustrated critics. 

Next month the government will unveil personal income tax cuts and, perhaps, a return to surplus a year earlier than forecast, telling voters they would enjoy the rewards of the government’s good management. Likely, Labor will immediately trump the tax cuts. There’ll be no budget bounce for the government, and Turnbull’s critics will start talking of more deadlines, of crucial tests. There’s not much more the Prime Minister can do, because so much of this is outside his control.