'New Leadership' indeed. Take Warren Truss, for instance. He is not a man of charisma and probably doesn't claim to be. He is a modest worker in the National Party vineyard. His website shows him addressing Parliament watched by a flinty-looking John Howard and a characteristically sour-faced Peter Costello. Truss himself looks intent, dedicated and oblivious as he leans into the microphone.
The website lists his achievements as welcoming numerous, hefty federal government grants to his electorate of Wide Bay. Inexplicably, there is no mention of the event with which he will be forever associated: the strange voyage of the Cormo Express, the shipload of Australian sheep that no Middle Eastern port would accept.
Revealing his poetic side when the ship was turned away from Kuwait, Truss explained the sheep were beginning 'their long, lonely journey down the gulf'. As the responsible minister, he later repressed his lyricism and reverted to the argot of Canberra: 'We are still examining the options of unloading the sheep at an offshore island,' he explained to persistent journalists. And, in case they missed it, 'We haven't ruled an offshore island out of the equation.'
His genuine concern was such that no-one had the heart to point out the difficulty of finding an onshore island.
The saga of the sheep was Truss's defining hour, and it's a pity he has chosen to bury it beneath a history of handouts that the desperate and moribund Coalition was throwing at various electorates in its last days.
Undoubtedly it was the memory of his conduct during the Cormo Express affair, his alert appreciation of its symbolic aspects, and his eye for its drama that swayed his National Party colleagues towards him in their search for a new leader.
'We will say which sheep can return to our country,' they remembered him saying, 'and the circumstances under which they do so.' 'Ah, those were the days,' they said to each other, and elected him, choosing to ignore the fact that, unlike his predecessor, he could not be credibly photographed astride a horse.
As for the satiric possibilities inherent in his name, Truss rises above them with the aplomb that allowed him to ignore the morose expressions of John Howard and Peter Costello as he traced, for a rapt Parliament, the ovine tragedy unfolding in the romantic Middle East.
A truss may well be a support for a hernia, but