Are the Coalition ministers playing a game?

[mantra]

An interesting opinion - are the ministers counting down the days until Abbott is replaced? The thought is depressing either way. Will we get someone worse than Abbott - perhaps Julie Bishop or Scott Morrison? The right faction isn't enamoured with Turnbull, so although he's generally popular with the electorate - he's not so popular with the party.

The way ministers are now contradicting their Prime Minister indicates a more short term strategy for his removal. Can they really go on playing this game all the way through to July? Barrie Cassidy writes.

When the Prime Minister allowed his frustrations with the Human Rights Commission to career out of control this week, he got three ticks from his backbench ... tick, tick, tick.

Some of them, in conversations with journalists, started counting down his leadership, and suddenly they were musing about a pre-budget timetable.

The fact is that ever since the spill motion, Tony Abbott has made it too easy for his detractors: those on his own team as well as those in opposition.

That Abbott missed an opportunity to soberly and meticulously use the commission's report to embarrass Labor has been well documented on this site. By going in so hard against the commission president Gillian Triggs, he ended up embarrassing his own party.

Malcolm Turnbull then stepped into "the sensible centre" with a calm and reassuring message that the children in detention should not be forgotten in all of this. The Foreign Minister, Julie Bishop, ran a similar line on ABC's AM, saying that the stoush "certainly is a distraction from the issue at hand, which is the report on children in detention".

And when the Prime Minister followed the lead of the right-wing shock jocks and chastised Muslim leaders for not doing enough to condemn terrorists - indeed, questioning their sincerity even when they do - the Foreign Minister again delivered a different message.

She told AM that the Government was working very closely with the mosques around the country:

The contradictions with their leader are rolling off the ministers' tongues. These contributions don't have the feel to them of a six-month strategy. They seem more short-term than that.

Can they really go on playing this game all the way through to July? Can the Government really indulge Abbott and allow him to stumble on through yet another budget?

What if - as many of them expect will happen - they move against him soon afterwards? Wouldn't that simply be a vote of no confidence in a second budget, with just one left before the next election?


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-02-27/c ... ds/6266868

[lisa jones]

Of course these ministers are playing a game.

POLITICS IS A GAME.

[IQS.RLOW]

I think you will find its Barry Cassidy playing with himself.

He was ridiculed for predicting that after the spill motion was defeated that Abbott went straight to his office because he was writing his resignation speech and when that didnt eventuate, he then predicted another spill motion would be raised within 24 hours.

He embarrassed himself so much that he is physically unable to extract his head from his arse and has decided that he will just keep upping the ante even if he does end up squeezing his dick so hard his brains pop out the end of it.

[lisa jones]

I think you will find its Barry Cassidy playing with himself.

He was ridiculed for predicting that after the spill motion was defeated that Abbott went straight to his office because he was writing his resignation speech and when that didnt eventuate, he then predicted another spill motion would be raised within 24 hours.

He embarrassed himself so much that he is physically unable to extract his head from his arse and has decided that he will just keep upping the ante even if he does end up squeezing his dick so hard his brains pop out the end of it.

Hilarious stuff