When Malcolm Turnbull told the New South Wales Liberal Conference that the party was not run by factions, there was mirth, derision and incredulity: the delegates knew bloody well that it is, and for their prime minister to deny it was, perhaps, his idea of a joke. But Tony Abbott, within the audience, was not laughing; after all, it was his faction that had been splintered and defeated. A breakaway group within the conservative majority in the federal party room on whom he had relied for so long had been forced by the necessity of sheer survival to overcome ideology.

Source: Factions and fictions | The Monthly