Of all the conclusions to draw from the Abbott government's current predicament, perhaps the most erroneous would be that it is simply a  product of Tony Abbott's idiosyncrasies. Sure, it's hard to resist amid the cosmic weirdness of this Prince Philip saga. But there's a difference between a trigger and a cause. Knights and Dames - even ones as bizarre as Sir Phil - don't topple Prime Ministers. That sort of thing only matters when your government has torched every last bit of its political capital. That happened around budget time last year, but in truth, the story goes back even further. This process was set in motion before Abbott was even Prime Minister, and was visible from his very first day in office.

You tend not to see such things when you're guzzling victory champagne, but the 2013 election was an underwhelming one for the Coalition. The nation had just evicted an unelectable mess; a government whose supporters were disillusioned and whose opponents hated it viscerally. Yet, in an election where Labor and the Greens together lost nearly 8 per cent of the vote, the Coalition - the only major alternative - gained a mere 2 per cent.  A win, sure. But more of the Steven Bradbury variety. The country never truly voted for an Abbott government, so much as against the debacle they'd been enduring.

That matters because it makes the governing bit much harder. It means Abbott never had much capital to begin with. His clearest mandate was to be someone other than Rudd or Gillard. Once that was fulfilled, Abbott had nowhere to go: nothing to do with his power.

Consider the rules he laid out as non-negotiable tests of government legitimacy: no broken promises, no leadership changes, no new or increased taxes, no budgetary blowouts, and no policies (like, say, a carbon price) that would increase the punters' cost of living. Oh, and no cuts to anything somebody likes - health, education, public broadcasting, defence. We'll cut government spending (which is wasteful), but when asked we'll quarantine just about everything from those cuts. This is a mass of populist contradictions.

That made Abbott a devastating opposition leader. But as he destroyed Rudd and Gillard, he was also destroying himself. Abbott's rhetoric in opposition simply turned the budget into a time bomb. When your promises are contradictory, you very quickly find yourself having to break them. Lots of times. And when you pledge to fix the budget but start by abolishing the taxes that will help you get there, you have no choice but to go for cuts you shouldn't and frequently said you wouldn't.

Abbott would eventually be forced to commit every sin he had elevated to being cardinal. Now his allies are rounding on him, and look likely to oust him eventually. If so, he'll have driven his own party to commit the only grave sin left: to change its leader. And they would do this with no guarantee of reward. Whoever takes the job would draw instant comparisons to Gillard, and they would enter the role with nothing like the popularity Gillard had - briefly as it turned out.

Abbott's problems begin, then, with his impossible template for government. What he offered instead was a template for gut-driven rage. And hereabouts is the bigger concern: what if that's just the most effective approach? What if Abbott's opposition style worked, not just because it  played to his personal strengths, but because it was so perfectly suited to the age?

We're in an era of perpetual opposition, where everything from policies to celebrity sound bites no sooner appear than they are savaged in the most unreflective way. The anger is incoherent and fragmented. It comes from all directions and therefore follows no consistent vision or reason. In each moment there seems to be a majority against everything and for nothing. And that, in miniature, was Abbott's approach. He gleefully led the savaging, abandoning all consistency in the process. This week he was piercingly correct to describe social media as electronic graffiti.  What's unsaid is that it very much resembles the verbal graffiti of his opposition.

We're in some danger here. If things continue as they are, Bill Shorten  has every chance of becoming the most anonymous man ever to be elected prime minister. His opposition is nowhere near as destructive as Abbott's, but it can be similarly opportunistic. Take the tax cuts Labor introduced as compensation for the carbon tax. It deferred some of these on the basis that they should only become active when the carbon price reaches $25.40 a tonne, which it had failed to do. Now, with the carbon price gone, and this compensation clearly redundant, it is refusing to abolish the tax cuts that, according to its own policy, have no reason for being there. Labor is so into this opposition thing, it's now opposing itself. And it's costing the budget over $2 billion.

Meanwhile, Shorten outlines no policy when asked, and funnels every piece of news into an overarching narrative about Abbott's broken promises and war on Australia's financial battlers. Conventional wisdom suggests that at some stage Shorten will have to define himself and his policies. But the same was said of Abbott, and it was plainly wrong. Shorten must know that any policy clarity will pull focus, shed some level of support and open the door to his foe. If he decides to reveal a vision it will be a voluntary act, because the shortest path to the Lodge has no such scenery.

If not, we might swing wildly from one government without a mandate for much to another. And if we find ourselves in the same sort of territory as this year - and 2013, and 2012, and 2011, and 2010 - then we will surely have reached a point where even Prince Philip can't be blamed.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist and winner of the 2014 Walkley award for best columnist. He co-hosts Network Ten's The Project and lectures in politics at Monash University.