Malcolm Turnbull must explain himself (on the Australian Prime Minister's leadership woes)

TONY Abbott was again written off — but yesterday this hugely underestimated leader survived once more to fight on.

First impressions: the Prime Minister has finally got the wake-up he ignored all last year. And his stalker, Malcolm Turnbull, should explain why he helped cause the Government so much pointless damage.

Abbott yesterday won the support of 61 of 101 Liberal MPs to defeat a motion to put his job up for a vote, with one other MP writing “pass” on his ballot.

That is much fewer than Abbott needed to feel safe. He is on his last chance, and without big changes will be gone within a few months.

But the result was also better than even his closest supporters predicted, and which many commentators happily expected.

In fact, Labor leader Bill Shorten made a fool of himself in Parliament hours later by with a speech damning the Government’s instability and attacking ... Turnbull. Shorten seemed to have called it wrong, too, and couldn’t be arsed trying to adjust.

And that’s actually a danger for Abbott. Many commentators who predicted his fall will now try make their predictions come true, wanting to hail every step Abbott takes as a stumble and every gain as a last gasp.

For instance, minutes after Abbott’s win, the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy suggested the PM could resign by the end of the day anyway, realising it was over. Abbott didn’t.

Hmm. Cassidy then suggested Turnbull could strike again within the week or even a day. He won’t.

Malcolm Turnbull is the man seen as most likely to replace Tony Abbott as Leader of the Liberal Party, and therefore as Prime Minister, if the Liberal Party decides to change leaders. Whereas Abbott is from the conservative side of the party, Turnbull is a centrist moderate - politically he could just as easily be on the right side the Labor party, as on the left side of the Liberal Party. The primary reason he's in the Liberal Party seems to be because he's rich, which means he isn't a big fan of Labor well distribution ideas. He'd be better than having Labor in office, but only because it would still mean genuine conservatives having some say within the government, not because he's one himself.

The left wing media likes him largely because he's closer to their views than almost anybody else in the Liberal Party.

A lot of Liberal Party people think that Turnbull would have a better chance of leading the party to victory at the next election. I have my doubts about that. While he is more popular than Tony Abbott, I think a lot of voters who prefer Turnbull to Abbott prefer Shorten (the leader of the Labor Party) to Turnbull. There is also the risk that the Coalition with the National Party (which is the cornerstone of conservativism in Australia - the major conservative parties have typically been in coalition since 1923, and are generally treated as a block) would be at risk, as Turnbull is generally a supporter of 'climate change legislation' and the Nationals might well leave the Coalition unless he agreed to shelve any ideas he had on that score. I'm inclined to think he would to preserve the Coalition, but it isn't certain. At the moment, the Liberals could govern without the Nationals - but in a close election, the Nationals are crucial - and once the Nationals are spurned, would they come back?

I’ll post again, an analysis I wrote the other day as to why I believe he’s unpopular.

It is mostly undeserved - but there have been some genuine errors. Undeserved - large sections of the media blaming the Abbott government for things that were caused by the previous Labor government. Examples - (1) Labor reopened the detention centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to deal with the influx of asylum seekers their policies had created. They didn’t upgrade the facilities to deal with the numbers of people they were sending there. Now there are major problems at the centre, and the media is screaming that the Abbott government hasn’t fixed them. (2) Under Labor, Australian intelligence services bugged the phone of the President of Indonesia. Leaving aside the fact that this is really just a normal intelligence operation, the media found this out prior to the last election and deliberately sat on the story to avoid embarassing the Labor government. It only came out after Labor had lost the election, when it could damage the new governments diplomacy with Indonesia - and many people were left with the false impression that the spying had occurred after the election rather than before it. (3) Labor (and the Greens) won’t pass the budget through the Senate and because of that, Australia’s economic position is deteriorating. We can fix the budget if we can’t pass the budget. But rather than blaming Labor and the Greens for blocking the budget, the media would prefer to blame the government. (4) The media is treating promises for funding from 2018 onwards that Labor never intended to deliver as if they were genuine promises, and so are describing Abbott as having cut funding to education and health based on those empty promises, even though the budget for both is actually increasing.

Genuine issues - (1) A spur of the moment statement the night before the election has created a sound bite that can be used to attack the Prime Minister for breaking an election promise. The issue is actually more complicated than that - technically no promise was broken - but the sound bite should never have happened. (2) The Prime Minister is a lousy salesman. He hasn’t explained why certain things are necessary (for example, why they need to reform health funding), he’s simply tried to push ahead with the changes without explaining them. As he can’t get them through the Senate, it means wasting political capital for nothing. (3) On some issues (in particular one relating to freedom of speech/freedom of the press), Abbott has moved to the centre and alienated the conservative base. He probably had to abandon the plan as he would have never got it through the Senate, but some of us would have preferred him to try that fight, even if he lost it, rather than simply give up in the apparent hope of gaining some support from the centre and the left, that he was never likely to get in the current climate. (4) He sometimes acts without consulting his Cabinet as much as he should - he’s the leader and he’s allowed to act unilaterally, but some things he’s done has taken his Cabinet by surprise - even if all he does is tell them “This is what I am going to do, and I won’t be argued with,” it would have been better than doing it without even telling them. (5) This last one happened at the start of last week, and is partly an illustration of some of the other problems. He announced that Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh had been given a Knighthood of the Order of Australia. Very minor, totally symbolic, but it sent the left wing media into an absolute frenzy of irrational hatred and they’ve turned it into a huge story - and even many conservative columnists can’t understand why he spent political capital on something that mattered so little at a time when people are looking for reasons to attack him.

Finally - his single biggest success - stopping the flow of asylum seekers to Australia - is one a lot of Australians are uncomfortable with, even though they wanted it to happen. It makes it hard to use it as an electoral plus. Nobody wants the asylum seekers here - but at the same time, nobody wants to be seen as cruel or unkind to desperate people. The Australian public want a government to do what this one has done - but they don’t want to feel personally responsible for it.

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