Abbott’s last plea: Don’t destroy the party I love (Australia's former conservative Prime Minister)

Daily Telegraph (Sydney) ^ | 18th September 2015 | Piers Akerman

[naturalman1975]

FROM the loneliness of political exile, Tony Abbott is urging conservative members of the Liberal Party not to walk away from the party he led into government two years ago.

Aware of the tsunami of anger created by his ousting among party stalwarts, the former prime minister is telling friends that the Liberal Party will always be a better organisation with good people working within it than against it from the outside.

.....

It is noteworthy that it took Malcolm Turnbull and his accomplice Julie Bishop two years to achieve what Labor could not do — remove Tony Abbott from the prime ministership in his first term — but the new prime minister has not only not proposed a single major policy change so far, he has given the Nationals a far greater remit than they enjoyed under Abbott.

.....

Turnbull has also disappointed his greatest cross-party support base, the kumbaya crowd, with his pledge to keep both the current plan to hold a plebiscite on homosexual marriage after the next election and to take the agreed carbon reduction targets to the Paris conference later this year.

.....

Not only was (Abbott) the most formidable Opposition leader, the record shows that he achieved more for the nation in his short time as prime minister than most manage in a full term or longer.

Abbott’s record runs to more than seven pages and 70 major feats ranging from the delivery of the free trade agreements with Japan, South Korea and China, the stopping of deaths at sea and ending the illegal boat arrivals, increasing female workforce participation to the highest level in more than 30 years and the creation of more than 335,000 new jobs, through to the introduction of a cheaper more efficient carbon reduction strategy.

[OldNewYork]

There’s always the Nationals.

[naturalman1975]

There’s always the Nationals.

Not really. Because of the Coalition agreement, the Liberals and Nationals don't generally run candidates in the same electorates. I couldn't vote for a National Party MP if I wanted to, because there's none on my ticket.

There are a couple of smaller conservative parties around, and in some places, voting for them might be viable, but in most cases, your preferences are going to flow to either Labor or Liberal anyway - so while I might expect larger first preference votes for those parties in the next election, I think most people voting for them will still wind up helping to elect a Liberal/National government. And I hope they do. I'd very angry at what has happened this past week, but in the end a Turnbull lead Liberal/National government with some conservatives in the Cabinet is better than a Labor government with some socialists in the Cabinet.