The first, coined as an election slogan by Bob Hawke after the Liberals dumped John Howard for Andrew Peacock ahead of the 1990 election, runs: "If you can't govern yourselves, you can't govern the country".

The second, which is as old as party politics itself, states "disunity is death".

While Mr Morrison surprised everybody by being the exception that proved the rule with his "miracle" 2019 election win, he will be hard pressed to repeat that based on current performance. His famous victory was due in almost equal measure to the ALP's campaigning and policy mistakes and its equally unfortunate track record on leadership.

And, while the government was also on the nose going into that election, the situation is now dire. Unlike this time last year, when the Coalition was riding high after having spared Australia from the worst of the pandemic, it is now in serious strife.

NSW, Victoria and the ACT have just come out of months-long lockdowns caused in large part by the government's lackadaisical approach to the vaccine roll out. Hundreds of lives and tens of thousands of livelihoods have been lost, "freedom" marches are a regular occurrence, some state borders are expected to remain closed well into the New Year and the once vaunted "national cabinet" has degenerated into a free-for-all brawl.

And, to make matters worse, the ALP's Anthony Albanese has managed to land more body blows in the last few weeks than in the last two years. The Labor party has maintained strong internal discipline since 2019 and, while Mr Albanese's "small target" strategy hasn't been inspiring, he has avoided frightening the punters by keeping his policy options open up until the 11^th hour.

All of these are very good reasons why the decisions by two low ranking Liberal senators with less than 1700 primary votes between them to hold government legislation to ransom during the last parliamentary sitting of the year makes absolutely no sense whatever.

What is even more absurd is the reason they are doing it. Senators Alex Antic and Gerard Rennick, two of the five rebels who crossed the floor to support One Nation's anti-vaccine mandate bill on Monday, are demanding Mr Morrison overturn state imposed vaccine mandates.

If he doesn't they won't support government legislation in the upper house. Maverick Nationals MP George Christiansen has threatened to do the same in the House of Representatives.

While this attempt to hold the government to ransom is not expected to directly impact high profile legislation such as the religious discrimination bill - which will likely be sent to a Senate committee for review - it does threaten voter identification legislation Mr Morrison is keen to have passed before the parliament rises.

What Messrs Christiansen, Antic and Rennick have overlooked - even though it is apparent to everybody else - is that what they are asking for is beyond the Prime Minister's gift. Mr Morrison's ability to repeal, or even influence, state legislation, especially in jurisdictions held by the ALP, is zero.

That said, Barnaby Joyce's dump on the errant pair for holding the government to ransom and sowing the seeds of disunity brought irony to fresh heights given he was doing the same a few weeks ago.

Given all of the above another time-worn adage that the Prime Minister might like to keep in mind this week is "with friends like these who needs enemies?"

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