News thread

Tony Abbott's reign has been dogged the entire duration with own goals and constant gaffs, some bigger than others, all ultimately destabilizing him over time.  

To give people an idea of what Abbott was like from a policy perspective, this is the man who tried in his first budget to put a reform through requiring every single patient seeing a GP to pay a levy of seven dollars on top of any and all expenses.  This and many other measures like it saw the Senate, where the balance of power is held by independents right now, knock back the entire first budget.

His first year was from then on trying to pass the budget bit by bit, things like the GP co-payment scheme were ultimately thrown in the trash (where they belong).  

His second budget saw him go in to full placation mode, passing a budget much like what would be seen from an election budget.  Plenty of cash and injections and tax breaks and relatively little to ruffle feathers.  

This was a terrible move, as he literally campaigned and won an election on a "budget emergency", fooling the public in to believing we were going to dive off a cliff and in a decade reach Greece levels of debt.  Obviously a pack of absolute bull turd, but the public mostly bought it up and threw the "fiscally irresponsible" Labour government out.  Then he passed a budget that would see the deficit increase and not even begin to steer it back to surplus.  

The "budget emergency" lay in tatters, a flimsy excuse that only existed when the government wanted it to.  

Meanwhile in February soon after he gave Prince Philip an Australian Knighthood the public backlash saw a revolt from the back bench, and a motion for a leadership spill put to the party room.  This motion was defeated, but the score showed there was severe discontent and division in the party.

That leads us to today.  Abbott has managed to regain traction on several occasions since then, then proceeded to score own goals that nullified those successes.  For every moment like the intake of 12'000 extra immigrants from Syria he kicked an own goal with his antics like blocking marriage equality (or laughing at an immigration minister cracking a funny about poor countries going underwater because of climate change).  


It was expected that next weekends canning by-election which is expected to swing heavily against the Libs would see some sort of leadership issue come to ahead again.  Instead Malcom Turnbull, the man Abbott himself took leadership of the party back in opposition from (winning by a single vote I might add) in a moment of poetic justice threw his cards on the table and called a leadership spill.  In a speech that was one of the most blunt "front stabbing" you'll ever see in politics.  No sugar in the speech, just that Abbott is a terrible leader and if they want to stop Labour Leader Bill Shorten from winning next election he's their man.