You suggest both sides are the same when you say winning is less important than acting symbolically on principle. Principles give you a coalition government. A flagrantly corrupt, shamefully incompetent government, one that will not just do nothing to stop America from owning us but actively seek that out, one that undermines the unions and willfully cheers on extinction, one that's just recently come out with the policy of scrapping net zero.

You may suggest the Greens, but the Greens would 100% lose 9/10 elections if Labor disappeared tomorrow. And the Greens are the actual horrible people. They blocked the HAAF not to save people from homelessness, but from housing stress, because they wanted to pick up renters as a voting block. I remember Adam Bandt visibly seething in rage at having parliamentary rules explained to him, because he is a narcissist who wants everyone to know that he's a good and infallible person because he acts on his principles.

Acting on principles is the easy thing to do, but it's also dereliction of duty as prime minister, because it gets you the job title of "former prime minister". Whitlam and Rudd acted on principle, they lasted one term and were proceeded by a decade of Liberals. We cannot afford another decade of Liberals.