Barrie Cassidy’s experience as a political commentator comes to the fore in this concise overview of the 2010 election campaign and the extraordinary series of events that prompted it. Cassidy maintains that both Malcolm Turnbull and Kevin Rudd “had stolen their parties. In Turnbull’s case, it was because of a manic desire to get his own way, because of his refusal to compromise on climate change when the majority of his own party were deeply disturbed about the prospect of an ETS, and because he simply stopped listening to them. Rudd had done so through his authoritarian approach…” The ‘party thieves’, as Cassidy refers to ALP and Liberal hierarchies, then reclaimed their parties back, a process that “eventually pitted Julia Gillard against Tony Abbott in the country’s tightest-ever federal election’’.