Via The Australian:
The first attempts are being made to discount Malcolm Turnbull’s own benchmark of leadership failure — 30 losing Newspoll surveys in a row.
There is disaffected grumbling from those within the Liberal Party trying to lower the threshold for leadership removal by claiming it will be fewer than 30 and pointing to the even longer period since the Coalition was in front — 16 surveys ago on the weekend of the election last year.
There is also the beginning of a professional gaslighting campaign from the ALP determined to use figures and records — including some of their own failed leaders — to suggest Turnbull’s foolish benchmark is not as high as he suggested. Labor can point to leaders, including Turnbull as opposition leader, who lost their leadership or were removed long before the magic mark of 30 losing Newspolls.
The danger for the Prime Minister is that there seems to be no quick fix to the polls — not even an astute budget could lift Coalition support — and the only solution is hard, daily graft on basic issues and values over an extended period while time ticks away and panic grows.
There is NO fix coming. The Coalition will never win government again, NEVER, so long as Pauline Hanson sits on a 10% primary vote. That’s all there is to it.
The answer to Coalition woes is not to replace leaders. Nor is not to swing policy back towards Andrew Bolt. Nor is it to listen to rent-seeking Catholics:
The powerful Catholic education sector has officially declared a loss of confidence in the Turnbull government on the eve of a crucial Coalition partyroom meeting that could decide the fate of the schools funding package.
In an eleventh-hour meeting last night before a cabinet meeting to sign off on amendments to the bill, the senior executive of the Catholic Education Commission told Education Minister Simon Birmingham that the government would “wear this like an albatross around its neck until the day of the next election”.
A source inside the meeting, which was brokered by rebel Liberal senator Chris Back who has threatened to cross the floor to block the package, told The Australian that Senator Birmingham was told: “In the 50 years we have been dealing with governments, we have never had a government not engage with us on major changes to policy.”
Indeed, that will only take its polling back to where it was under Tony Abbott.
The answer, the ONLY ANSWER, is to destroy One Nation without losing the centre. Given ON is a single issue party whose popularity is based entirely around resisting immigration, the answer for the Coalition is screamingly obvious.
Cut immigration hard. It will wipe out ON, trigger an immense sigh of relief across the east coast cities, take enormous pressure off wages and house prices and render Labor’s negative gearing reforms outright dangerous to housing wealth.
It is the only policy shift that has within it the power to recast the domestic agenda.
Frankly, if the Coalition can’t see this, or can but won’t do it, it only proves that its MP’s commitment to mass immigration to benefit certain business cronies, and commitment to themselves for a post-politics sinecure in the same businesses, has overwhelmed any care it has for itself.
And that is fatal.
