The latest IPSOS poll hit the political media yesterday like it had been fired out of a cannon. The two party preferred vote was an election crushing L/NP 46, ALP 54. Abbott’s net approval rating (-24) is the lowest of any Prime Minister in decades.
The story is not actually in the numbers themselves, the change since the last poll is within the margin of error and repeat the results of other recent polls. But it’s six months since Abbott’s last brush with death, when he asked for six months to turn things around.
It also comes after the government’s wasted winter break, where their hopes of slamming Shorten with the Royal Commission findings and reframing the public debate about tax reform were blown away by Abbott’s mishandling of the Bronwyn Bishop entitlements scandal and the marriage equality debate.
More than that, the Abbott government has never really found its way back after their disastrous first budget, which was perceived as ill-thought out, punitively harsh and incompatible with Australia’s expectations of the services governments offer.
Too much political thinking is about winning or holding government, rather than about what might be done once you’re there. If our current prime minster had spent more time thinking about how to govern before winning the next election he might have turned out to be as effective a prime minister as he was an opposition leader.
There’s a quote that could be believably attributed to just about anyone speaking about Tony Abbott over the last two years.
Ironically, it was actually Abbott himself who said it, back in 2010. And the Prime Minister he was referring to was Kevin Rudd.
The event was the Sydney Writers Festival and Abbott was there to talk about Battlelines:
What the book shows, I hope, is the capacity to learn and to grow, which is a necessary part of effective leadership.
Whether the book shows any such thing is debatable, but Abbott has proven time and time again that this “necessary part of effective leadership” is not something he has mastered. Aspiring to something so out of character, however, is the one thing that isn’t out of character in this statement.
I wrote about Abbott ongoing battle against himself in January of 2014:
Abbott’s entire public life has been a series of unresolved internal conflicts. The aspiring leader in search of a mentor, the conviction politician who’d “sell his arse” to win, the mad monk once described by John Howard as an “arch- pragmatist”, the political attack dog with strong family values, the physically awkward athlete, the inarticulate Rhodes Scholar, the student politics thug with a vocation for the priesthood, the journalist with a profound distrust of words. The only thing he’s ever sure about is that he’s never sure about any stance he takes.
While I’d like to lay claim to some remarkable level of prescience, I really can’t. Abbott’s strengths and weaknesses have always been clearly on display and no-one, including Abbott himself, ever truly believed his undoubted abilities would be enough to overcome the personal failings that should have barred him from leadership.
His dogged determination in the face of attack and the unyielding loyalty he has proven over and over again are qualities that make him the ideal man for a leader to have at his back, but they are detrimental to his ability to act as leader himself. He is far more accomplished at marching staunchly down the path of another’s devising than he is at beating a new path himself.
If the swing shown by the IPSOS poll are uniform, which is unlikely, the government would be facing a loss of some 30 to 40 seats at the next election. Almost all of them from the back bench. Few of those MPs would be willing to show the kind of loyalty Abbott himself has displayed, so spill speculation will be justifiably rife over the next few weeks.
The difficulty with a leadership spill will be, as it was six months ago, that there is no single person in the party who could garner enough support from the majority required to push Abbott out. Turnbull is the obvious answer, he’s polling well enough to carry the Coalition to a win and overweening arrogance has never been a barrier to political success.
But his relatively progressive views on climate change and marriage equality are anathema to the conservative right, and people like Abetz and Bernardi proved last time they would rather lose the next election than win under Turnbull. Scott Morrison and Julie Bishop, the only other real contenders, have far less support in the polls and not enough support in the party to overcome Abbott or Turnbull. This three-way tie, symbolic of the disunity in the Coalition, is the only thing keeping Abbott in place.
It’s also very possible that Turnbull is playing a long game. He might, given the current polls, be able to convince enough people in the party that they have to get rid of Abbott, but what’s he going to do with Abbott, Hockey and Abetz if he does win the leadership? Send them to the back bench? The three of them could make Rudd’s white-anting of Julia Gillard look adorably kittenish by comparison. And how would he deliver on the expectations hopeful progressive voters have of him without starting a riot on the conservative wing of the party?
Abbott is never going to regain a firm grip on the leadership, but this is not entirely due to his own failings. Howard’s broad church has become a chaotic rabble, and no single person is going to be able to herd all those cats.
And those of us who want the era of good government to actually start will have to continue to wait.