They are high-profile, intelligent, ambitious, thoughtful and popular. And now Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Garrett — parliament’s two superstar outsiders of their generation — are political dead meat.

Which leads us to ask: is there a place at the top of Australian politics left for anyone who isn’t prepared to be a conformist, poll-driven, cookie cut-out clone?

In his always-entertaining Financial Review column yesterday, Mark Latham, no one’s cookie cut-out, put it this way:

“The only people who survive in modern politics are the bland party bureaucrats, the one-dimensional drones whose personality gene was excised at birth. They function by three rules, bound as tightly as bonsai: take no risks, never stray ‘off-message’ and never show any spark of life.”

Sadly, Latham is probably right. It’s now almost a prerequisite that the people who succeed as political leaders are automatons. Maybe, just maybe, Tony Abbott can break that mould.

Otherwise, as Turnbull and Garrett have discovered recently, it’s off to the Reject Shop.