Card-carrying Abbott loyalist, Maurice Newman, has continued his white anting campaign against Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull today in The Australian:
Since last September and with each passing day, the parliamentary Liberal Party’s folly in dismissing its sitting prime minister is on display.
That 54 insiders voted for a leader who, apart from his own seat, had never won a popular election was always naive and risky. It reveals how blind ambition and an amateurish reading of opinion polls can ignore first-hand experience and memories of years in opposition.
It is likely the election outcome is a tangible validation of the gap between the party’s understanding of the electorate and what most voters really think. Had Malcolm Turnbull’s predecessor not built such a substantial buffer, his party would now be in opposition. And for those who argue Tony Abbott would have fared worse, we know that he was an effective, indefatigable campaigner and that many conservative voters abandoned the party emotionally and financially precisely because he was dumped…
The treachery and misjudgment behind the leadership coup, compounded by the disastrous election outcome, have left the party wounded, distrustful and culturally divided. Its direction remains confused and ad hoc…
When the 54 members of the parliamentary Liberal Party decided to dump Abbott in favour of Turnbull, they let a genie out of the bottle that won’t go back.
Has Newman been living under a rock?
When Tony Abbott was dumped he was trailing Labor by 14 points. Turnbull reversed that to a 10 point gain. He subsequently lost half of it owing to a shocking display of chaotic policy deliberation, in part owing to the failure of the uber-conservatives (aka “loon pond”) to embrace reform. Nevertheless, the evidence is clearly that Turnbull still prevented a Coalition electoral drubbing:
It is precisely Turnbull’s placation of the loon pond that is destroying his Prime Ministership. In just nine months we witnessed a leader largely devoid of policy, while performing a U-turn and going against many of the things that he had previously stood for (e.g. climate policy, reforming property tax concessions, etc). In the meantime, Labor took the policy lead on multiple fronts, bolstering its economic credentials.
Make no mistake, I am no fan of Malcolm Turnbull. He is a huge disappointment and I view him as little more than Abbott-lite in flashier suit.
But let’s not kid ourselves that the Coalition’s electoral woes are because they dumped Tony Abbott. He was electoral poison, as is the loony right’s agenda. Low and middle income-earners simply won’t vote for the Coalition in sufficient numbers if they suspect the party doesn’t represent their interests.
There is only one option if Malcolm Turnbull wishes to lead a successful Government: cut the loony right off before they poison the policy well completely. They are the ones standing in the way of fair minded reform that carefully balances efficiency and equity.
