Well Well, even the Oz is slowly turning on Abbott

[Freddy]

When Oz Columnist, and COALition fluffer, Nikki Sava starts turning on her Master, how long can it be before #libspill happens ?

www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/that-quacking-is-abbott-sitting-duck/story-fnahw9xv-1226502628208

That quacking is Abbott, sitting duck

by: Niki Savva
From: The Australian
October 25, 2012 12:00AM

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THAT quacking sound you can hear in the distance is Tony Abbott. The Opposition Leader is slowly but surely turning into a sitting duck, a stationary target for government and media pot shots.

The other bird sound you can make out, whenever Abbott says or does something silly, is the crow's cry that Graham Kennedy mimicked years ago on television and that got him into so much trouble. Textspeak boils it down to three letters, WTF.


Its pay-walled, so you might have to do some google trampolining, but it does appear as if the canary is slowly asphyxiating.

[zombie]

You would have to be a bird brain to think Abbott would make a good leader....

[pim]

Freddy and Zombie (I'll have to get used to calling you that. I wish you'd stayed as "Tonto") I wouldn't be so quick to write Tony Abbott off, any more that one should be careful about writing Julia Gillard off. I know I've been guilty of the latter but it has got better - instead of losing in a landslide Julia looks right now as if she'd lose, but save the furniture. Who knows what's going to happen? If Craig Thompson gets charged then yes he'll be entitled to sit & vote in Parliament because the court proceedings will drag on until after the 2013 elections, but politically the issue will remain a leaky dripping tap for the Government with the Liberals plugging their "tainted vote" narrative. Yes I know there's an answer to that - several answers in fact - but who cares? The "tainted vote" narrative is the one that has purchase and any commentary-in-reply by Labor only serves to keep the "tainted vote" narrative alive.

Polls come and go and I agree that the "preferred PM" poll has favoured Gillard of late - and that's a good thing. But my take on it is that it isn't about whether or not people "love" Julia Gillard. Let me tell you: they don't! Julia will always - always!! - have a question mark over her legitimacy because of the way she came to the prime ministership, plus the "Juliar" thing. The way to exorcise "Juliar" is to win the next election, but the coup against Rudd will go on haunting her. It's what she has in commoin with Malcolm Fraser who was haunted by the "Dismissal" Coup of 1975 for all of his prime ministership. It won't go away for Julia until she leaves politics.

Basically it comes down to a brutal fact that Australians are pissed off about, and it's this: Australians are obliged to choose between two people that they don't like - Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott - when they'd much prefer the choice to be between Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. Personally I think the Australian people find that to be a shit sandwich and they don't like it.

So the choice for preferred PM is not "whom do you like more?" but "whom do you dislike less?"

Tony Abbott knows he's not popular. He's not stupid. He may be a sexist boofhead (and that's an Achilles Heel for him which he will be in denial about at his peril) but he's not stupid. He knows that in order to win he doesn't have to make himself popular, all he has to do is to keep on making Julia Gillard the issue and keep up the Liberal narrative about Labor Government chaos and incompetence. And the news today on all sorts of policy areas is pretty consistent with that narrative.

[Freddy]

I don't disagree that PMJG is viewed with some suspicion out there in punterland, but I also think that the longer Tony is the oppo leader than the increasing likelihood that there will be a strong element of a "referendum on Tony" in the next election. Put simply, the Punters dislike Abbott far more than they "distrust" Prime Minister Gillard.
I will go close to writing of Abbott, very close, as I have stated before, Abbott's an idiot, and the punters don't vote in idiots. Just ask Mark Latham. He is the best analogy we can use to compare Tony to.
But then, as political bloggers such as Andrew Elder keep reminding, Tony Abbott will never become PM.
The next election will see the opposition being led by Turnbull. It's not a matter of if, but when.

[pim]

I have to go, Freddy, so can't pursue this further for now. Australians were never in love with John Howard but they voted for him again and again because of his devastating ability to wedge Labor and to make Labor the issue. So far Tony Abbott has been a lot more successful in making Julia Gillard the issue than Julia Gillard has been in making Tony Abbott the issue - the last couple of months notwithstanding.

I'm not taking anything away from the progress that Gillard has made, and I don't underestimate the damage that the "misogyny" issue is doing to Abbott. It isn't a trivial thing. Do people in this country really want a sexist boofhead as PM to be dealing with major international figures with the stature of Aung Saung Suu Kyi? But Gillard's progress has to be seen in the context of the abysmally low level that she's started from. She has a helluva lot of leeway to make up and we need a lot more than the runs on the board that we've seen over the past couple of months!!

And I really have to go!!

[zombie]

Change happens Pim...your new nic suits you, like being Dutch in character...

I think Johnnie Howard had a statesman like quality that people respected, albeit a tad fuddy duddy, and I cannot recall him denigrating people as Abbott's is prone to do.

Rudd was a statesman as well and he brought Labors vision forward in a uplifting way, something Gillard could not achieve though she is gaining respect for her tenacity, still her mantra "we are moving forward...getting the job done" without actually describing what we are moving forward to isn't creating a vision amongst the populace as to where we are going, no one quite knows what she stands for.

People are understandably dissatisfied with Labors performance under Gillard, good ideas but seem to fall over, though she is gaining respect if not for Abbott as leader they would flock to the conservatives in droves.