That statement should have a degree of gravitas to it. It should be solemn and profound but the truth is, we get a new Prime Minister as often as we get a new winner of The Voice, or new footy premiers in Australia.

It seems like someone has installed Emergency Spill boxes around Parliament House, bearing the words “in case of poor polling results, break glass.”

For better or worse, Australia now has a Spill Syndrome. Where once political parties were loath to switch horses midstream, it is now de rigueur. And it’s not limited to one political brand. The Coalition hooted loudly that they’d never do that when Julia Gillard then Kevin Rudd were unceremoniously dumped from the top job, but it’s harder to point the finger now.

For better or worse… and there is very little evidence that there is much better about it… Australian politicians are now suffering from Spill Syndrome. Like junkies jonesing for their next hit, they watch the polls and if they dip badly enough for long enough, they press the button to switch leaders.

It’s become a learned behaviour, like a more peaceful and civilised version of the coup culture that developed in Fiji where if, they weren’t happy with election results or political decisions, they held a coup (as they did in 1987, 2000 and 2006).

At first it’s unthinkable, then it’s a matter of “well it’s not ideal, but we survived it last time and it seemed OK”, and then finally, it’s just how it’s done.

That made Fiji the pariah of the South Pacific for a while – and they didn’t have five changes of leadership in eight years like we have. Just what damage these repeated and rapid changes in leadership are doing to our reputation in the region, or around the world, is anyone’s guess.

In their defence, politicians are egged on by the 24 hour news cycle, trending social media, the many talking head political commentators who talk up political spills, and the ceaseless public polls. But it’s disingenuous to portray the politicians as pawns in the electoral machine. If politicians were so easily swayed by external pressure and public opinion, same sex marriage would be legal already.

And spills, despite the emotion that precede and follow them, are, at heart, very cold and pragmatic events.

When Shorten dumped Rudd for Gillard, it was because he no longer had confidence in Rudd and had grown tired of how he ran the show. But when he dumped Gillard for Rudd, it wasn’t the result of an epiphany on the road to Canberra, it was a pragmatic acceptance that polling indicated the Labor Party would lose less seats if Rudd was back at the helm for the next election.

There’s a large element of that with the Abbott spill. Many who switched to Turnbull did so based on an assessment of how poorly the Liberal Party is travelling, rather than a personal reaction to Tony Abbott.

Each spill (and as a point of comparison, we’ve had five prime ministers in Canberra in the time that there’s been two Doctor Whos in the Tardis) there are the usual howls of outrage from large sectors of the community, including some woefully uninformed members of the media, that we didn’t vote for this new prime minister.

But of course we never do and never have. In Australia, we vote for a local member and those local members get together and elect the prime minister. The recent Spill Syndrome hasn’t changed that. If anything it’s just exploited a loophole that has always existed. And breaking conventions – customs that aren’t actually law – isn’t exactly new to Australian politics.