TONY Abbott’s rule is over. It is effectively dead and what we are witnessing are the death throes. If it’s not formally killed off by backbenchers next week, or soon after, and work is proceeding to make it happen, then the voters will do the job for them at the election.
No government today, given the fickleness and impatience of voters, can survive a civil war of the kind we have seen during the past few weeks unless it is brilliant and, despite a few notable exceptions, with some important achievements, the Abbott government falls well short of that.
Numbers are being counted. Malcolm Turnbull is said to be close. Supporters are refining their pitch, and to succeed Turnbull will have to make sure he lives up to it: there will be no emissions trading scheme unless the rest of the world moves; he will be more consultative; there will be no revenge.
However, good performers will be rewarded, the poor ones will go and he will govern from the centre. The last is important because of the antipathy from the Nationals and the Right to Turnbull.
Julie Bishop is fighting to remain deputy — a sensible position on her part — and Scott Morrison will almost certainly become treasurer. Joe Hockey can survive only if Abbott does.
Abbott is cage fighting, desperate to buy time, threatening blood and guts if attempts are made to remove him, but his arguments as well as those of his public defenders, who act out of duty or self-interest, sound hollow.
If Abbott tries to do to his successor what Kevin Rudd did to his, then he will leave the same sorry legacy.
More likely, he will be dead man repenting, rather than dead man stalking.
Abbott says he was elected to end the chaos; Christopher Pyne says it was to provide serious government with a serious leader. Here’s the problem: Abbott institutionalised chaos, then rendered himself ridiculous.
No serious leader publicly calls his MPs sexist because they dared criticise his chief of staff whom they reckoned was trying to bully, intimidate or ostracise them and their staff; no serious leader repeatedly ignores their existence while indulging in policy frolics that he then has to reverse; no serious leader humiliates them by awarding a knighthood to a prince; no serious leader outsources his job or cedes his power to an unelected staff member, then spits in the eye of those who try to tell him it is wrong and will be his undoing; no serious leader would tolerate senior staff briefing against colleagues, as happened with Arthur Sinodinos and others.
Finally, no serious leader tells his MPs they have no right to remove him because that right belongs to the people, slipping seamlessly from champion of all things Westminster to directly elected republican president, provocatively waving a red rag under the noses of his backbenchers, ensuring that if he remains — a big IF — the next election will be a referendum on him, not his achievements.
As one NSW Liberal MP put it: “You have to remember we have not been living with this for 18 months but for five years.”
There has been a complete breakdown of trust inside the government, from top to bottom, which makes for a highly volatile situation.
Old enmities have surfaced but after it’s over, if there is to be any hope of recovery, they will have to be buried.
Complaints by Abbott’s supporters that Bishop was not effusive enough in her support of him transformed into a leak to Sky News that Abbott had asked her on Sunday for an assurance that she would not challenge, which she refused to give.
Abbott got out early to climb the high moral ground, dismissing it as so much insider gossip, while his cabinet ministers piled on, overlooking his shabby treatment of her, including that when Bishop last year conveyed to him the concerns of backbenchers over the operations of his office — particularly the behaviour of his chief of staff — he told her she was where she was only because of what Peta Credlin had done. That was insult on top of injury because Bishop had been forced from day one of government to fight off attempts by Credlin to dislodge her respected long-serving chief of staff, Murray Hansen.
Bishop finally declared she would not challenge after cabinet ministers made it clear her position would be untenable if she did not make such a declaration. Bishop told her supporters some time ago she has no desire to be Lady Macbeth II, but if and when Abbott goes down, she does not want to go down with him.
This has been an organic insurrection, triggered by Abbott’s own actions. When MPs are besieged by branch members, electorate officials and long-time supporters, as many of them were over the summer to tell them they had to sack Abbott, they take it seriously.
If they wait to see whether the May budget fizzles or sizzles, time to repair electoral stocks and for the new team to prove itself begins to run out. Also they run the risk of another electoral debacle, this time in NSW.
Sure Mike Baird is popular, but he is up against a much sharper opposition leader now. Plus, Labor has refined its campaign techniques in two massive by-elections, across Victoria and Queensland, which superglued state Liberals to Abbott.
Labor did the same in the weekend by-election in the South Australian state seat of Davenport that saw a sizeable swing to the decaying Labor government after every piece of its campaign material featured Abbott.
Removing a serving prime minister is no easy thing, no matter if it’s in the first term or after several. There are psychological as well as physical barriers, with the difficulties compounded by competing loyalties, the need to organise, the need for courage, the knowledge the wounds will run deep, probably for years, the fear of retribution. But Liberals have been driven to it because the situation is so bad.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/time-running-out-for-damaged-pm/story-fnahw9xv-1227208245189
