My shameful confession is that I'm afraid I think that Northbourne Avenue has been vastly improved by the removal of the trees that were in the way of the coming tracks of the visionary light rail enterprise. The avenue seems transformed for the better. Suddenly, travelling along it, there are sweeping vistas to be seen. Suddenly the facades of so many characterfulavenue-lining buildings are visible at last.

What has been for so long a tree cluttered, shadowy laneway of an avenue, now has the sunlit width and spaciousness of a true boulevarde. It has some of the spacious, sweeping qualities of awesome Anzac Parade.

Perhaps we will lose something, a kind of potential boulevardey majesty of place, when the removed trees are replaced by new ones. Are there any movers and shakers of the city who, behind their dark suits, harbour the same secret thought in their bosoms? What if the 1200 trees waiting to be planted along the completed rail line could be deployed elsewhere? Surely they could be used instead to upholster those far-flung new suburbs withstrange-sounding names, new suburbs that seem so bleak and naked until they are upholstered with street trees.

And while I am being perverse I own up that I have never found former PM Tony Abbott as intriguing as he is now. The awful man was an awful PM but now he has a tragic, theatrical something about him.

By contrast with me some political journalists-commentators are bored by him and are dismissive of him.

Prominent Canberra chorister and nationally distinguished political journalist Laura Tingle seems especially hard on him. In a recent ABC Radio National Late Night Live discussion with dear Philip Adams she talked of the former PM's latest spasms of anti-Turnbull snipings.She called Abbott "a complete pain and a disruption [who is] just going on and on with increasingly ludicrous things". She spoke of the decomposingex-statesman impatiently, in the exasperated tone in which you and I might speak of the garden pests (those pesky earwigs!) that spoil the look of our dahlias. For Tingle and commentators who are so deadly earnest about politics (none of them more earnest than emeritus bore Paul Kelly) Abbott is now just an irrelevant, dahlia-spoiling earwig in the garden of politics.

And for them he is not only an earwig but yesterday's earwig. Earnest political journalists, imagining that current affairs are everything, have little time for yesterdays.

Perversely, and contrary to Laura and the newsmongers (what a great name that could be for a band!) I have never found Tony Abbott as fascinating as he is now. Laura and the newsmongers imagine that all Australians are interested in politics in the same, deadly earnest way that they are. But we're not. If we think of politics at all it is as an entertainment.

And perhaps it is the opera lover and the Shakespeare enthusiast in me that finds today's tragic, tortured, haunted ex-PM (haunted and haunting, too,for his role in Australian public life is now rather like that of Hamlet's father's tormented, battlements-roaming misery-guts of a ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet) so fascinating. It is so very Shakespearean that Abbott has fallen so quickly (a little like Shakespeare's King Lear) from giddy heights of power and pomp to being just a kind of pain in the bum of the party that once crowned him as its king.

We've not had a tragic Australian figure tragic enough to be thought deserving of an opera since 1988. Then the Australian Opera commissioned the opera Voss based on Patrick White's novel of the same name about the tragic, swallowed-up-by-the-wilderness explorer Ludwig Leichhardt. But now that this ex-PM is irretrievably lost in the wilderness and is behaving so tragically,so vengefully, so malignantly he is shaping up nicely. He is becoming a grand, folkloric object for Australians to one day write heartbreaking plays and soul-wrenching operas about. Bring it on.