Newspoll, the inaccurate one, showed Labor on 46 in New South Wales. Redistributing Green preferences and Independents and Christian Democrats as they were in 2011 and not as they are now, leaning more Labor’s way, and ringing only landlines though no-one under thirty has one, and cravenly obeying Murdoch’s fumed commands on Skype, Newspoll reduced an election-winning 49 to 46, and did so before the Debate, in which Baird said there was ‘no Plan B’ for finding the money the Upper House won’t give him, and their permission to sell the poles and wires. The accurate poll Morgan showed Labor 0.6 percent away from winning only four hours before.
No apology for the headline ‘WE NEED YOU, TONY!’ appeared in the Daily Telegraph. There occurred instead in The Australian an editorial demanding Abbott stay on. ‘He can change for the better,’ it explained (you can’t make this stuff up), though ‘his personal flaws are at the centre of the present dysfunction.’ The ‘aggressive, tight, commando-style approach’ that worked well in Opposition was now at the heart of the Government’s ‘crumbling’, it went on, ‘and if he cannot fathom the true nature of his problem, he is doomed.’ Time was running out for him, it concluded, and ‘gestures just won’t cut it.’ He must sever himself from Credlin, sack Hockey, make Turnbull Treasurer, give up ‘three word slogans’, have a ‘mature debate on economic reform’, and ‘make a better fist of basic politics.’ If he does all that, he can stay on forever, and be Prime Minister in 2031.
You can’t make this stuff up. PVO (the Choirboy) advised in detail Malcolm Turnbull, his enemy, on what he must now do: give up gay marriage, embrace the Monarchy, develop the North, befriend his assassin Andrew Robb, make S&M Treasurer, keep Julie Bishop though she ratted on him last time as Deputy, make Craig Laundy Chief Whip, and put the accused embezzling bribe-taker $inodino$ in charge of policy. Turnbull must listen to this fine man, the Choirboy blithered, and accompany him, if need be, to gaol and share his cell.
You can’t make this stuff up.
S&M called ‘political bed-wetting’ his allies’ efforts to make him Treasurer, and a Daily Telegraph editorial bade them leave ‘the bickering and backstabbing to Labor’; then, in what I suppose was a farewell bicker and backstab, swore Triggs was ‘partisan’ and she must ‘walk the plank’. Please, please, don’t let Bambi lose, it gloomily, soulfully added. Don’t shoot Bambi. Please.
Jokowi said Abbott had lied about their conversation, and he he was not ‘carefully considering’ a pardon for the drug dealers. Abbott went to the cricket in Auckland and watched Australia being ignominiously beaten by New Zealand. Abbott’s Confessor Pell, a Liberal voter, was upbraided by the Pope for ‘extravagance’. Abbott hinted he might drop the GP co-payment altogether, and planned with Keys a war with a foe that might crucify and behead a good few Diggers, and mightily lose any battle they fought without a million US grunts at their back.
Baird said Abbott would be ‘welcome’ in his campaign, though internal Federal ructions were ‘never helpful’.
Abbott lost 120 votes an hour through Saturday, and Baird in osmotic sympathy lost 80 of them also, Antony Green calculated. ‘Labor has no Plan A,’ Bambi bleated; though ‘not privatising anything’ might count as one, some said, and restoring TAFE, and health funding, and universities. Like Abbott he did not realise the Liberals’ adventure was ending, and, like the UAP and the Democrats, was already pretty much in history’s dustbin with its feet sticking up, and would never be seen again, like Nooman’s LNP, and the Katter Party.
And PVO (the Choirboy) who a year ago said the Australian map would be soon ‘all blue’ was looking now at a red Queensland, a red New South Wales, a red Victoria and a red South Australia and considering the hourly shrinking limits of his future. He might serve, perhaps, more fruitfully hereinafter, as a disc jockey in Broome. Or a born-again junior cleric in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the faith he came from.
Time slowed down, and the nation went into a stretched long moment of suspense, as it did in the last three overs of the cricket in Auckland, and for once the sluggardly epithet ‘slow-motion train wreck’ seemed appropriate.
And the questions multiplied. What would Joe Hockey, backbencher, do? What would Bronwyn Bishop, backbencher, do? With what unctious, lavish, dim-witted kindnesses would Morrison, Treasurer, strive to woo the Senate? How would Julie Bishop like her demotion to Minister for Women, and the mutinous, ropeable Turnbullite Wyatt Roy his sudden ascension to Foreign Affairs? Would Bronwyn get her own show on Skynews, alongside Hinch? Would Abbott upgrade himself, at the last moment, while resigning, to the House of Lords?
Or would he call a Double Dissolution, and like Samson bring down the whole shebang on his own head?
What would become of us all?
And so it went.
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