The leadership saga rolls on, from Fairfax:
Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull directly confronted Prime Minister Tony Abbott in a crunch meeting about the government’s woes before Wednesday’s cabinet meeting.
…The Communications Minister, however, pressed the Prime Minister on how the government would extricate itself from its current leadership woes.
…Mr Turnbull is said to have been “underwhelmed” by Mr Abbott’s reply.
And the AFR:
Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s supporters believe he must sacrifice his controversial chief of staff, Peta Credlin, or risk losing his leadership to Malcolm Turnbull, possibly as early as next week.
Amid fears that more breakaway MPs are planning to go public over the weekend to try to generate momentum for a spill, those wanting more time for Mr Abbott say he must dump Ms Credlin, the long-time head of his office.
…“If Abbott offers up Peta Credlin, he will buy himself some very, very valuable time,” the MP said. “She has wielded enormous power in his name to his detriment. It’s a very, very important circuit breaker and it will halt the momentum. Organised or disorganised, this is gaining momentum.”
Cutting Credlin will only make the party appear like the plaything of Rupert Murdoch. It may buy time but it will also come at a longer term price. And from The Australian:
NATIONALS MPs will demand a written guarantee from Malcolm Turnbull that he will not pursue an emissions trading scheme, gay marriage or backtrack on asylum-seeker policy if he topples Tony Abbott to become prime minister.
No markets, no wogs and no poofters. Go ‘Straya!
Is it time to pull a Kevin Rudd, Malcom, and before him, a Paul Keating? I’m tempted to write that it is.
Malcolm, you have to do it to save your party, to save the country and to save yourself, I could cry! And go on: I know Parliament House. It’s a snake pit. No normal human being could possibly enjoy working there. You’re not there because it’s fun. You’re rich and could be living it up in the Bahamas. You’re there because you know you can improve the nation that has given you so much. You’re there to lead.
That’s why the rest of them hate you. You’re not a political hack that’s kissed-arse all his life to climb the greasy pole. You’re not a Machiavellian hollow man with nothing more to give than an immodest flap of the lips or a stab in the back. You’re the real thing, Malcolm, a true liberal, with the background of success to show it.
Don’t fear this hatred, Malcolm. It is your greatest ally. Your party – nominally called a “Liberal” party – has been occupied by a clique of philistine apparatchiks of the right that wouldn’t know real liberalism if John Locke punched them in the face. They are a cancer eating away at the great liberal traditions of reason, individual endeavour, markets and freedom. Their social conservatism is extreme. Their economic policies are a broken mix of populism and surreptitious rentier graft. Their communication is so abysmal because there is nothing to actually to say; if they spoke from the heart they’d be exposed as pseudo-fascistic echo chambers lost in a philosophical fog.
The party needs you to rescue it from these unAustralian troglodytes and drag it back to centre where it can resuscitate Australia’s modern journey of successful liberal capitalism. Declare your hand, Malcolm. Bring on the spill. You can’t lose.
But of course you will very likely lose the first round, perhaps badly. They’ll despise you for the challenge, which is all to the good. Go to the back bench and stoke their fury, ramp it to apoplexy with a constant and widely broadcast alternative policy platform for the Party. Take your trusted lieutenants with you and set up a counter-cancer to eat away and destroy the current makeup of the Party.
The Fairfax press will love it, amplify it, worship it. The Murdoch press will fight but will have no choice to endorse you in the end. Rupert’s investment must be protected and is he really going to back Labor?
Abbott and his cohort of brown shirts will explode. They’re psychologically weak, cocooned in a simplistic carapace of rhetoric around “strong leadership” and “tough choices”. What holds them together is a kind of primitive master and apprentice ethos that permeates the conservative doctrine. Once the paternalism of the Party breaks they’ll fall about like drunken monkeys.
Gird your loins, Malcolm, this will hurt the economy. But that too is necessary. If we leave the management of the country in the hands of these Tea Party mini-me’s we’re all going down the gurgler. Just as bad, they’ll put Labor’s Kingslayer into power, another hollow man, the hollow prince in fact, the courtier most singularly responsible for the disintegration of the Australian political economy, crowned king, with little hope of leading Australia though the coming minefield given his union past. That’s just swapping one set of interests for another.
As the economy tanks and Abbott’s opinion polls collapse, the party will have no choice but to elect you. You can then succeed where Kevin Rudd failed. You can reform the party, cut out the atavistic tumor, and replace it with a new team of young talent. Even draw from across the isle, appoint special ministers of state to rescue the country from the drift.
In the end, Malcolm, you must do this for yourself. If you don’t tear these wrong-headed bastards from the Party then your time in politics will have counted for nothing. Don’t make the mistake of Peter Costello in thinking you can inherit power. He would have been PM had he had the balls to follow the above course in 2006. He failed because he wasn’t a real leader. He didn’t have the courage to pursue his vision to the end and make himself vulnerable for those few months it would have taken to depose a fatigued and failing John Howard.
I am tempted to write the above but won’t. I really wonder if Malcolm has it in him. He is surely a silvertail not a political scrapper. It is also very dubious that the electorate would respond well to more regicide, as much as they hate Tony’s storm troopers. He’s clearly chastened and scrambling himself to undo his extremity. And if Tony were thrown out, can anyone see him going quietly into that good night, sliding into an obscure seminary somewhere? No, he’ll spring his own backbench revenge.
Perhaps it is enough or better even that Malcolm wait until after the Coalition is wiped out at the next election, and its current delusions with it, before mounting a campaign of reform.
But jeez, it’s going to be a very long wait.
