From Paul Kelly:
Facing a dangerous moment of conservative revolt, Malcolm Turnbull this week ripped off his “above the fray” mask and declared a new political war not just on Bill Shorten’s character but on Labor’s tactics to destroy his government’s policy and economic agenda during 2017.
The Prime Minister’s attack on Shorten on Wednesday afternoon was the most electric speech in parliament by a prime minister since Julia Gillard’s famous “misogyny” speech against Tony Abbott. It came when Turnbull was under pressure given poor polls, a defecting Cory Bernardi and a dispirited party. The message was unmistakable: Turnbull intends to become a political warrior.
It was a classic ‘‘insider” event, the main impact being on his own troops. The transformation on the Coalition benches was a mixture of drama, euphoria and relief. One Liberal quipped: “We don’t need to change prime ministers if we already have a new prime minister.” Turnbull boosted Liberal morale for the moment, but a moment matters nothing.
The issue is whether Turnbull’s speech signals a permanent change. His message to colleagues is that it does, that there is plenty more material on the Opposition Leader’s character. Turnbull’s pivot follows sullen unrest within the party about his reluctance to get more aggressive. Cabinet ministers were over the moon for the rest of the week. And Turnbull on Thursday went harder, branding Shorten a “fake” with “no integrity, no consistency” and without “a fair dinkum bone” in his body.
Have no doubt about the real significance of what has happened — Turnbull has decided that unless he destroys Shorten, Shorten will destroy him. It seems an accurate diagnosis.
Come on, Paul, step outside the press gallery once in a while. Last week’s Turnbull tantrum has changed nothing except perhaps making his predicament worse. Do-nothing is as usual focused on completely the wrong target in completely the wrong way. Aussies don’t want Screeching Malcolm any more than they want Do-nothing Malcolm. What they want is legitimacy and every time Turnbull changes his spots it only gets worse for him, via Peter Hartcher:
Bill had been whacking Malcolm for ages. Suddenly Malcolm grabbed the slapstick and whacked Bill. Really hard. Really fast. Really unexpectedly.
This exciting reversal thrilled the audience in the front row of the political contest, though most of the crowd was only dimly aware and largely uninterested, busy with life’s grittier exigencies.
The new Turnbull aggression is one element, a force multiplier, in his plan to try to retrieve his prime ministership.
The other elements? He has assembled a few of slapsticks to attack Shorten with. One is electricity prices…Another is childcare. He is proposing bigger and better federal rebates and also an extra two weeks of maternity leave paid by taxpayers…Third is Turnbull’s attack on the person of Bill Shorten. The Labor leader is not much liked by the people. Turnbull’s critique, like all successful political attacks, crystallises the reasons for the public’s dislike – that he’s insincere.
…But the crocodile lurks. It’s the outside force, the agent of popular retribution, coldly indifferent to the tribal rituals that animate the established parties, and it’s gathering its energy. In this Punch and Judy show, the crocodile is the rising populism that threatens to overtake Australian politics as it has elsewhere. Here, it wears the face of Pauline Hanson.
Quite right. Prime ministerial hysteria like last week, from a guy that used to promote renewable energy and now condemns it, only serves to underline the substance of One Nation values by comparison. By that I do not mean that One Nation policies have ballast, they do not, but that the party and its leadership believes in its own mad agenda and that is the primary source of its electoral power.
Screeching Malcolm can attack Backstabbing Bill all he likes but it’s ‘fair dinkum Pauline’ that’s killing him. It’s the same lesson that Bill Shorten learned when he saved his leadership with his substantial housing affordability agenda.
The Coalition has only one chance at the next election, Do-nothing Malcolm has to go and the party outflank One Nation with a bold agenda limiting immigration to put up against Labor’s trump card, the negative gearing reforms. It’s that or it’s a landslide.
Crikey still hasn’t caught on:
Abbott appears to be working off the theory that the Liberals will turn to him in desperation if he can pull the party’s primary vote down far enough. But if this is the plan, as conservative columnist Miranda Devine observedduring the break, this makes Tony Abbott more deluded than the zealots agitating for his return.
“Conservatives control the partyroom, and they have no appetite for change,” wrote Devine. “They do not want Abbott back. The people who want Abbott back in the Lodge are outside government, the delcons, or delusional conservatives who believe Abbott was a conservative hero who will be back on his throne soon.”
Noting that conservative MPs are under no illusions about who is to blame for the predicament the party finds itself in, Devine exposes Abbott’s campaign for the twisted fantasy that it is, brutally remarking: “In a head to head contest against Turnbull, Abbott cannot win. He does not have the support of his colleagues.”
Neither did Do-nothing Malcolm. Losing your job is a powerful motivator. WA Libs have worked it out, via AFR:
A federal cabinet minister has left open the spectre of preference deals with One Nation after the WA Liberals finalised an extraordinary deal with the burgeoning party to preference it ahead of its Coalition partner, the Nationals.
The move came as a weekend opinion poll showed Pauline Hanson’s party surging to a primary vote of 23 per cent in Queensland which would put it in contention to win 20 seats in the 93-seat Parliament and the balance of power.
The poll caused widespread panic within the LNP which sources say has been facing a wholesale defection of party branches to the smaller party.
Liberal Premier Colin Barnett on Sunday described as “sensible and pragmatic” a deal in which One Nation would get Liberal preferences ahead of the Nationals in country regional elections for the state upper house. In exchange One Nation would preference the Liberals in the lower house.
And they’ll share policy.
