19 August

As a kid it never made sense what adults saw in politics. But I see it now. Many hate politics, but it’s an amazingly rich teacher about life. Take the current fight between Turnbull and Abbott. We’re all so used to living and working in environments where that couldn’t happen, where a boss or parent would step in and force a resolution. Politics teaches us that life ultimately isn’t like that, you always - always - have to persuade people to do as you do, you can never force them. Turnbull is powerless to force Abbott to do anything, he has to persuade his colleagues to stick with him. In our lives we do sometimes see glimpses of this. The teenager who walks out of home, the families who split up with irreconcilable differences, the workplaces that become dysfunctional. What I think politics teaches us is that *this* is the baseline, not the other way around. The whole world works by persuasion, not by force. What looks like force is persuasion that has failed, but even then force doesn’t fix it. The default is disagreement, not agreement, anybody who believes the reverse is freeloading off the work of the people who generate agreement.