fractalign wrote on Jun 23
rd, 2014 at 1:05pm:
I am just wondering when Abbott will be forced to stand down and if he will go willingly or put up a fight. I would love to see a Leader ship scuffle like Gillard Rudd. The only thing keeping him in as PM at the moment is his blind ignorance of how much the Australian people dispise him and the mob mentality of his own party.
Don't for one minute think that the likes of Malcom Turnbull and Julie Bishop are not concerned that his belligerence is not trashing the Coalition Brand and that they could indeed do a better job.
I give him another year before the party comes to its senses and asks him to step aside. If he refuses I give the party another year before it faces electoral defeat and we are lumped with a shambolic Labor party again.
Even so I bet the Australian people are looking back on Gillard and Rudd with tearful nostalgia and wishing they had not voted this party in. I knew that this would be the result of a Coalition government, I also knew that had Labor been retained the country would be facing bankruptcy by now.
Either way damned if you do damned if you don't.
It does not matter which one is in power they are both equally incompetent when it comes to running the nation.
I think a 12 year old girl guides group could do a better job !
We've had media speculation about Abbott's leadership already, but IMO this is premature. It would take several months of sustained bad opinion polling before the backbenchers of the Liberal party started getting restless. Gillard weathered bad polling for more than two years and survived one spill before being defeated at another. It's reasonable to guess that Abbott will also hang on for some time if the polls remain bad for the Liberals.
The real dilemmas for the Liberals are:
(1) Do they change leader at all? They lambasted Labor for changing their leader twice in six years. For the Liberals to do the same at the drop of a few bad polls smacks of hypocrisy.
(2) If a change is on the cards, do they move on Abbott sooner or later? Changing sooner would give a new leader more time to become established, a later change would give Abbott more time to repair his standing with the electorate.
(3) Will Abbott step down willingly or must he be pushed?
My guess - they won't make any move this year, hoping for better polls. I think they are pinning their hopes on the Royal Commission into union corruption in the hopes that they can find something to pin on Shorten - while also quietly hoping that ICAC doesn't reveal other matters of corruption that can be linked to Abbott or other senior Liberals.