Bob Ellis: “Abbott Will Be Overthrown In The Next Nine Days”

Veteran writer and political commentator Bob Ellis might have just started something big: in a blog post published last night, he predicting the demise of Tony Abbott’s Prime Ministership, with a spill to occur within nine days.

It’s a bold claim, especially as Ellis’ sole evidence is some admittedly astute armchair psychological profiling. As supporting evidence, he cites Abbott’s strained question time performance yesterday: “Tony was very strange indeed, his face calm but his voice arching upwards huskily into polecat soprano”. Ellis also mentions the curiously low profile of several senior frontbenchers, and Tony Abbott’s one weird tic of repeating lies and baseless conjecture in the belief that he can single-handedly bend reality. “His backbenchers’ faces behind him, and the Ministers’ faces beside him, were melancholy-dire,” he continues. “He seemed mad, and it was clear [his frontbenchers] had given up on him, the worst policy-salesman in their history, and were making frantic plans in hugger-mugger to be rid of him.”

Ellis’ piece descends into baroque fever-dream territory after a while, but he’s already made his point by then.

The evidence identified by Ellis are mere ripples, but as Bernard Keane noted in regards to Julia Gillard’s ousting a year ago, such ripples tend to be amplified into tidal waves by a press corps with a taste for blood and scandal. Blood and scandal is good for circulation, but what’s better still is when the man in charge — usually a man — owes you a favour. Plenty in the Labor caucus didn’t want Rudd back, but they craved the favourable coverage that they knew he could garner. It was a coup by media: slow and messy, but ultimately deadly.

All of which is why we can perhaps expect a spill narrative to will itself into existence over the next week. Only yesterday evening, Liberal MP Dennis Jensen broke ranks to criticise his own government’s incoherent science policy, and there is a sense that the likes of Greg Hunt and Malcolm Turnbull are carefully calculating their proximity to Abbott.

Prior to the budget announcement, Abbott had already proven himself an anti-statesman of sorts, not so much a leader as a sheepdog with a bullwhip and an incomplete set of instructions. Given that his ‘Prime Minister of the Opposition’ shtick — epitomised by the cynical, punitive move to redirect funds from the Royal Commission into child sexual abuse to the Royal Commission into the Labor government’s home insulation scheme — had failed to have a significant effect on his standing, one wouldn’t have thought that even a budget as unpopular as this could damage Abbott. Bending reality is a lot harder when the numbers are right there on the page for all to see, though, and his King Lear-esque post-budget performance has exposed Abbott’s fixed-gear style as a weakness: the behaviour of an attack dog unable to gauge the public mood, and unwilling to give the soft sell.

Abbott’s belligerence and single-mindedness delivered him to power, but what seemed like an inspired escalation of his political modus operandi is starting to look more like a fatal miscalculation — provided , of course, that the mainstream media get their story straight.

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Image via ABC