Could (deposed Australian conservative Prime Minister) Tony Abbott make a comeback?

Courier-Mail (Brisbane, Australia) ^ | 4th October 2015 | Rowan Dead

[naturalman1975]

COULD Tony Abbott make a comeback? The Abbott-haters and the feral army of Twitter addicts who are so delighting in his downfall will pour their usual bile-laden scorn on such a suggestion, but they clearly don’t know their history.

Political precedent tells us that Abbott returning to the leadership of the Liberal Party is not only possible, but worth punting a few bob on.

Forget Abbott’s current unpopularity, because the public soon will. John Howard was publicly derided after he lost the 1987 election to the charismatic Bob Hawke, so much so that the Bulletin magazine, the trendy political rag of the day, ran a cover headline over a picture of Howard proclaiming: “Why on earth does this man bother?” Fast-forward a couple of decades and Howard had become one of our nation’s longest-serving and most popular prime ministers while the Bulletin had disappeared.

.....

If – or rather when – the Turnbull “All things to all people” experiment fails, there will be a great deal of finger pointing, acrimony and confusion within the party. For a sugar hit in the polls, the Liberals will have sacrificed many of their key conservative values.....

If Labor were to win convincingly in four or seven years’ time, the Liberal Party post-Turnbull will be a shambles in desperate need of someone capable of reuniting the liberal and conservative strands of the party. One thing is for sure: it won’t be Julie Bishop, Arthur Sinodinos or Wyatt Roy they turn to. However, sitting patiently, on the backbenches ...

[naturalman1975]

This article has appeared under a number of different headlines over the last few days - I've taken the most descriptive of what it is actually about.

Personally, I think this article is over-optimistic - and I'm also hoping the wheels don't come off the Turnbull wagon in the way it assumes it will, because even a Turnbull Liberal government is far better than any Labor government would be - but it does make some interesting points.

[Boomer]

For AU’s sake; I hope Abbott does make a comeback.

Look at what happened here under liberal rule. Liberalism only sounds good on paper and sound bites. In practice it’s a dismal failure. Always has been.