Among political insiders, I detect some relief that the two-party-preferred Newspoll gap between the Turnbull government and the Shorten opposition has narrowed and as a consequence a sense that some normalcy may be returning to federal politics.

Unlike much of the Liberal party base, insiders quite like the current government because it doesn’t challenge centre-left orthodoxies in the way the Howard government did, and the way the Abbott government did to an even greater extent.