Humble pie is always better eaten warm, a truism which had she followed more religiously might have saved Bronwyn Bishop from the serious predicament in which she now finds herself. On Thursday, Mrs Bishop belatedly apologised for billing taxpayers for a $5200 helicopter flight taken last year to attend a Liberal Party fundraiser, and for travel costs incurred in attending the weddings of two fellow Liberal MPs in 2006 and 2007. Rather than being accepted as an admission of fault and a statement of regret and conciliation to the electorate, Mrs Bishop's apology has been interpreted as a attempt to shore up her position as House of Representatives Speaker made all the more egregious for its transparency.
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The odds on Mrs Bishop remaining in the job appear slender. Many of her colleagues have distanced themselves from the veteran MP (or have complained that she has become a distraction to Coalition attempts to keep Opposition Leader Bill Shorten under political pressure). The Labor Party is claiming her apology is "too little, too late", and she faces a no-confidence motion from crossbenchers Clive Palmer and Andrew Wilkie when Parliament resumes. Most incriminating of all, voters appear to have pegged Mrs Bishop as a serial abuser of parliamentary entitlements, arrogant, and an unreasonably biased speaker.
Mrs Bishop is fortunate in that she appears to retain Tony Abbott's support. The Prime Minister's loyalty is famously enduring, as evidenced by his refusal to bow to demands within his own party to fire his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Mr Abbott's reluctance to abandon Mrs Bishop might be even more pronounced given he once referred to himself as John Howard and Mrs Bishop's ideological love child. Yet, the Prime Minister would be aware (or should be) that blind and unstinting loyalty to Ms Credlin nearly brought his leadership undone.
The concern from backbenchers then was that Ms Credlin's influence and power within the Prime Minister's office was disproportionately large, and that this led to top-down decision-making and difficulties in access. And the concern from within Coalition ranks now is that Mr Abbott will stand condemned as a hypocrite for having, on the one hand, lectured the Australian public about need to end the age of entitlement while defending the behaviour of someone to whom entitlement has long been considered something of a divine right.
Mr Abbott may believe the public's disgust at politicians' venal behaviour will blow over, but there is no prospect that his political opponents will let the matter slide. Indeed, the near certainty of disruption when Parliament resumes on August 9 prompted Senator Arthur Sinodinos to recommend on Wednesday that Mrs Bishop consider the "best interest of the Liberal Party, the government, and the Parliament". Mrs Bishop's obfuscation and her initial failure to admit a wrong may have been committed suggest that's unlikely. Senior ministers have distanced themselves from Mrs Bishop, underlining the fact that her position is more or less untenable. Unless Mr Abbott does the same, this matter will continue to distract attention from more important matters.
