It’s a laugh a minute today:
Victorian Liberal Party President Michael Kroger has downplayed a push to urge Tony Abbott to leave parliament and take up a post as High Commissioner to the UK.
Queensland Coalition MP Michelle Landry, who warned ahead of last year’s election that the “wishy-washy” Turnbull government was putting her marginal Rockhampton seat at risk, has called for Mr Abbott to take the job and move on.
…Referring to growing speculation about a cabinet reshuffle in September, which could see Attorney General George Brandis moved out of cabinet and offered the High Commissioner role, Mr Kroger said there appeared to be a queue for the job, but he didn’t think there was “any chance” of Mr Abbott taking it.
Mr Kroger said he was optimistic about Newspoll given the government could easily have been at 46 or 45 “given the dislocation of the last couple of weeks”.
…“By Christmas I’d be very surprised if that’s not 48.5, 49, even 50-50, because the government has had extraordinary legislative achievements, and the job now for the government is to sell those achievements to individual voters, and that’s probably what we haven’t been doing well enough.”
…Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said his colleagues should be focused not on polls, but on good government. “This is a government that’s working.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann says that if he was Bill Shorten, he’d be concerned that Labor hadn’t made “any progress” in the polls over the last fortnight.
“Given the fortnight that we’ve had if I was Bill Shorten I’d actually be quite concerned that he didn’t make any progress,” he told ABC radio.
The only thing that’s real there is the queue to get a sinecure before it’s too late.
A more realistic appraisal is available at Domainfax:
Single figures. That’s the strength of Malcolm Turnbull’s fast-dwindling lead now over Bill Shorten as preferred prime minister.
…If Coalition marginal seat MPs were beef cows, they’d be smelling the abattoirs about now.
