Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull meet with milk farmers in Canberra. Picture: Ray Strange

AFTER concocting what Tony Abbott calls the poison of hyper-partisanship, the Coalition is now appealing to Labor to find an antidote.

It is pleading that party-political rough-house in Parliament is so 2010 and should not be repeated in 2016, in the cause of serving the national interest.

It’s a bit like a burglar whose own house has been broken into demanding police end the crime wave.

The problem is the national interest came second to Tony Abbott when he was opposition leader. Only now he is an ex-PM — and hopeful future PM — does he find fault in a strategy he previously boasted had put the Coalition into power.

Having applied maximum and ruthless effort to disrupt the minority government of Labor’s Julia Gillard, he now is asking for a clean run for the Coalition government of Malcolm Turnbull and its one-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

Labor will not repeat the Abbott Opposition strategy and will pull up short of not providing pairs — excluding one of its own MPs from votes to match an absent government MP — for illness, child birth and important official functions.

“Bill Shorten has said we are not going to behave like that. We will be an Opposition that is interested in the national interest,” Labor frontbencher Stephen Conroy told Sky News today.

But it is warning that if Mr Turnbull insists he runs a majority government, it will be treated like a majority government. The premise of the approach is that with a majority of just one seat, even business-as-usual will be hard for the government to manage.

Tony Abbott’s approach in opposition is having ramifications for Malcolm Turnbull today. Picture: AFP/Lukas CochSource:AFP

There are MPs still angry over the Abbott approach, and Malcolm Turnbull is one of them.

In August 2011, Mr Turnbull was prevented from attending the Sydney funeral of his close friend, the artist Margaret Olley, because Mr Abbott would not grant a pair to allow then arts minister, Labor’s Simon Crean, to attend.

The Opposition’s shadow arts minister, George Brandis, who barely knew Ms Olley, could go because he was in the Senate where the Coalition couldn’t force pairing limits.

Defence Industries Minister Christopher Pyne, who will manage government strategy in the House of Representatives, would remember the undignified scramble he, Mr Abbott and other Liberals performed to leave the chamber rather than vote alongside disgraced former Labor MP Craig Thomson.

There have been various confessions of regret since then.

Last October, former treasurer Joe Hockey used his farewell speech to Parliament to recant on his rejection of policies Labor had championed.

“Negative gearing should be skewed towards new housing so that there is an incentive to add to the housing stock, rather than an incentive to speculate on existing property,” he said.

“We should be wiser and more consistent on tax concessions to help pay for that, in particular tax concessions on superannuation should be carefully pared back.”

Stephen Conroy today said: “Joe Hockey campaigned the length and breadth of this country against building the National Broadband Network. Then in his final speech to Parliament he goes, ‘Thank God Labor started the National Broadband Network’.

Malcolm Turnbull has to deal with a razor-thin majority in the lower house. Picture: AAP Image/Mick TsikasSource:AAP

“You had an Opposition that had taken hyper-political-partisanship to an extreme. And now when they are in government they say, ‘Oh well, maybe we shouldn’t have been quite so tough’.”

But it is the Abbott U-turn that has been the most recent and most dramatic.

Last Friday, he made the extraordinary admission his Opposition should have backed the so-called Malaysian Solution for settling asylum seekers, even though he still doubts it would have worked.

He had thwarted it primarily to destabilise the Labor government, but now argues a mandate is paramount in his thinking.

He said that “letting it (the Malaysian Solution) stand would have been an acknowledgment of the government of the day’s mandate to do the best it could by its own lights to meet our nation’s challenges”.

“It would have been a step back from the hyper-partisanship that now poisons our national life,” he said.

Quick, where’s that antidote?