Tony Abbott leadership under threat, ministers talk resignation (Australian leadership crisis)

TONY Abbott’s leadership is once again under threat, with a group of Cabinet ministers discussing who should be delegated to seek the Prime Minister’s resignation.

And supporters of Mr Abbott said they now believed Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull would be able to muster the numbers if he stood for the top job.

Another torrid week in Canberra — which saw the Government smashed in Question Time over whether it had offered an inducement to Human Rights Commission president Gillian Triggs — sparked another furious round of talks last night between backbenchers and ministers about the PM’s hold on the job.

MPs were working the phones late into the night trying to work out if Mr Abbott’s leadership should survive until after the May Budget. Several backbenchers told the Herald Sun they would not move another spill motion, and it was up to the ministers to take action.

It is still not clear if the frontbenchers are prepared to do that, but the Herald Sun is aware of conversations between ministers about who would potentially form the small group who would go to Mr Abbott to seek his resignation.

The Prime Minister is in Queensland and is to fly out this morning for New Zealand, where he will hold talks with Kiwi PM John Key and attend the Australia-New Zealand Leadership Forum.

One MP said the Question Time debacle and the continued “distraction" of questions about Mr Abbott’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, had infuriated Liberals who had been prepared to give the PM time to recover after the attempted spill nearly three weeks ago.

And so it continues...

The media is constantly undermining the Prime Minister - even large parts of the conservative media. I am honestly finding it difficult to understand why.

The Gillian Trigg's affair referred to in the article is a prime example. Gillian Trigg is the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, and she recently presided over an incredibly politically biased inquiry that seems to have been deliberately designed to blame the current government for 'human rights violations' that were committed by the previous Labor government, and which the current government has largely fixed. (the issue is children being held in mandatory immigration detention - when Labor came to office in 2007, there were no children in detention, because the Howard government had stopped new arrivals and had gradually got all the children out of detention. Labor reversed the successful policies of the Liberal/National government and has a result of that the number of children (and others) in detention began to climb to a peak of just under 2000 by mid 2013. Gillian Trigg's decided this was a problem - by her own admission - in December 2012, but decided not to hold an inquiry because she didn't want it to impact the election campaign (logically the only reason that would matter to her would seem to be protecting the Labor government). Instead, she only held her inquiry after the new government took office - and has released a report blaming them for the problem - even though under the current government, the number of children in detention has already been reduced from nearly 2000 at the peak, to less than 200 with the aim of getting that number to 0 as soon as possible. But the media is really, in large part, pushing her report, and claiming it's the government that has a problem.

Does Abbott have any friends in the cabinet? I understand that the concept of “friends” in a parliamentary system where every MP is a political entrepreneur, and cabinet positions are the result of political horse-trading among factions, is a slippery one, but surely some have been hoisted into power at the behest of Abbott and a few trusted associates.

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