Three weeks after seeing off a caucus push to put his leadership of the federal Liberals to a party room vote, Tony Abbott's future is again the subject of intense speculation, hearsay and gossip. On Friday, Mr Abbott's cabinet backers were reported as having acknowledged he no longer commanded majority support within the party room, and would not survive a new spill. With Parliament sitting next week, the likelihood that there will be a renewed push to put Mr Abbott's leadership to the sword seems distinct. It may come as soon as Monday or Tuesday. Only the wish to deny Labor sport in Parliament (and fears that Mr Abbott's probable successor, Malcolm Turnbull, will have difficulties uniting the party around him) will slow momentum for a spill. But the despair within the party about the Prime Minister's inability to resurrect his authority and improve the Coalition's electoral stocks is such that the change agents are unlikely to be held off for much longer.
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How Mr Abbott's grip on the leadership came to unravel so quickly will be enduring fodder for journalists, commentators and political scientists – the more so since his authority within the Liberal Party room and his standing with its core constituency was once absolute and commanding. From an unpromising start – he was elected leader in December 2009 by the slenderest of margins – Mr Abbott had achieved hero status among Liberals by August 2010 when the Coalition only narrowly lost the federal election. He vanquished Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd (for the second time) and led the Liberals to an election win in September 2013 with impatient eagerness, energy and a bold strategy of keeping things simple and using his bare knuckles for emphasis. There were, of course, concerns about what the longer-term consequences of this approach might be, but they were justified on the basis that Labor had "wrecked the joint" and had to be kicked out of office as quickly as possible.
But a fleetingly quick 18 months later, Mr Abbott's leadership is in meltdown. And if the pundits are correct and the party room moves for a more formal expression of its unhappiness next week or shortly thereafter, then Mr Abbott will have been prime minster for even less time than William McMahon. The hapless Mr McMahon (who has long been regarded as the archetypal Liberal loser) served as prime minister for 21 months before his government was tossed out of office in December 1972. Unlike Mr Abbott, however, Mr McMahon led a Coalition government which had been in power since 1949, and which by 1972 was widely perceived as out of touch. Moreover the Leader of the Opposition at that time was the dynamic and progressive Gough Whitlam.
The swift decline in Mr Abbott's political fortunes have been attributed to his apparent inability to grow into the job; that is to abandon the relentless campaigning style of opposition in favour of the more measured approach required of competent and stable government. First-term governments are frequently guilty of being slow learners. But the Prime Minister has distinguished himself by his capacity to repeatedly ignore warnings that his style, approach and technique were not working and needed adjustment. And when such complaints become loud enough to jolt Mr Abbott into promises of "change" late last year, he soon reverted to old habits. In just the past week, he has chosen expediency over proper cabinet process in relation to future submarine construction in South Australia, dismissed new complaints from within the party room (again) about his chief of staff, and unwisely bullied the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission. All seemingly appropriate, one commentator said, to a government "always thinking politics first, policy second".
It was Enoch Powell who said that "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affair". Tony Abbott largely has only himself to blame for his failure, and if it becomes clear the party wants him gone, he should consider resigning to save it the necessity of staging an embarrassing execution, and more crucially, to ensure his successor has as much clear air as possible.
