The former staff of famously knifed Australian prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard say they can't believe the Liberals are walking down the same torturous leadership path as Labor did.
Under Australia's past decade of tumultuous leadership changes, a prime minister has not served a full term since 2007.
Sitting prime minister Rudd was dumped by the Labor party and replaced by Gillard in a shock coup in mid-2010. Three years later, he returned as prime minister when the party did the exact same thing to Gillard. Labor was turfed out at the 2013 federal election and has since made it tougher to change leaders.
Now, the Liberal party – which dumped sitting PM Tony Abbott in 2015 – is circling current PM Malcolm Turnbull in a chaotic leadership spill that has consumed the week.
Sean Kelly worked as a press secretary for Rudd through the 2010 spill, and then worked for Gillard through a leadership challenge in 2012, which she survived.
"I can’t believe that Labor did it once. I couldn’t believe it when Labor did it twice. I couldn’t believe it when the Libs did it a first time and now I can’t believe the Libs are doing it a second time," he told BuzzFeed News.
"It is sustained insanity over almost a decade now. It is almost a sustained lack of courage to persist with a prime minister from one election to the next."
In a press conference on Thursday where he defiantly called on his challengers to name themselves in a petition before a vote was taken, Malcolm Turnbull said the rapid appetite for change had been described as a "form of madness".
Kelly believes it is the increasing pressure on cash-strapped media organisations to produce "cheap content" that has created the leadership merry-go-round.
"There are two forms: opinion and breaking news. It's not investigative news, it’s attention to often the most trivial of political mistakes. If you combine constant vitriolic opinion with a focus on the tiniest of mistakes, you're going to see the popularity of government sink faster and more dramatically than it ever has before."
But it's not all the media's fault — politicians have failed to recognise and react to these changes, Kelly said.
"Unfortunately MPs have continued to treat opinion polls as though we’re living in the Howard years [1996-2007]. That time has gone. The time of reasoned debate and government retaining popularity for a sustained length of time is behind us."
Andrew Porter worked as a junior press secretary for Rudd through the 2010 spill, worked for Gillard for a period, and then moved to the office of Gillard supporter Stephen Smith, where he saw the second spill back to Rudd in 2013.
He also can't believe the Liberals are doing this.
"My constant line for years has been that the lesson to learn from our time in government is certainly not to repeat this," he said. "They did it with Abbott, they’ve done it spectacularly here. It’s extraordinarily wasteful. These things are about personalities and they’re about numbers. I can’t believe it, but here we are.
"People know full well that the party that benefits from a change, leadership instability in the Coalition, is Labor. And yet they persist in doing this anyway. It’s quite strange."
The Liberals' current effort is "unusually chaotic", Porter added.
"With our sorts of challenges, they were very well telegraphed in the case of months and weeks, if not years in the case of Kevin going after Julia. You wonder how organised, how calculated this all is."
As for what it's like to work in the prime minister's office on a spill day, Kelly said spills are the domain of politicians and only a small number of senior staff would be directly involved. Most staff in the prime minister's office would be "sitting around wondering what will happen next".
"As to the small number, the few people at the top of the prime minister’s office would have not got much sleep the last couple of days, because they are racking their brains about anything that can be done to pull things back," he said.
Kelly said Labor people outside parliament house had expressed to him "a combination of wonder, certainly some degree of schadenfreude, but also sadness".
"Firstly on the level that it is sad to watch the country chew up so much time with this rubbish. Secondly, whatever you think of particular individual's policies, there are human stories inside this. If you have been inside a PM’s office and watched a PM be torn down, it is saddening to watch it happen again."
Porter described working on a spill day like this:
"You come in in the morning, on the day of. And you know what’s going to happen. You try and focus on your job as best you can. Most other people outside of the press office would down tools, there’s not a lot of policy work going on when your boss is about to be knifed. But the parts of the office coordinating the government still function.
"You focus on what you can, but you have people coming in in a mournful mood, very sombre. Lots of people are bringing in cakes, farewells, last hurrahs. It’s like any other mass sacking. It’s people who don’t have the chance to write books afterwards or have their friends in the media write op-eds about how they were hard done by that day."