Nobody won!

My preference on pure policy to take over as PM remains Tony Abbott, but my reservations do exist and are not small. His greatest weakness when PM and leader was an inability to take a hard line with others. Sentimentality in the role of a leader is not an asset but a fatal debility. This, on the day after the election, irritates me endlessly: Turnbull ‘gave it everything’. Abbott doesn’t have to say what I say, that Malcolm is a far-left incompetent and if we are going to have a hung Parliament he should be the one to be hung first. On the other hand, Abbott doesn’t have to say this either:

Tony Abbott has urged his Coalition colleagues to “take stock” and reflect on what’s occurred over the past several months, calling on them to “carefully, calmly consider what’s best” going forward, Jared Owens writes.

“(Malcolm Turnbull) gave it everything and good on him for giving it everything,” Mr Abbott said. “I guess there are a lot of people who have got a lot to reflect upon as a result of what’s happened over the last little while.

“Rather than rush out and pontificate on a whole lot of different subjects, I think we need to carefully, calmly consider what’s best. All I think we can do today is take stock, to think, to reflect, rather than just come out with snap judgments.”

Asked about the impact of his own removal as leader last September, Mr Abbott told reporters: “I’m just not going to go back and dwell on events of nine months or so back.

“The important thing is good people who tried hard, who did what they thought was the best for our country … are no longer in the parliament and it’s sad for them and it’s sad for the rest of them that remain.”

I suppose if you are running to be leader again, you don’t want to alienate anyone, specially fools who are fireproofed in their individual seats to such an extent that they could withstand this latest disaster. Nevertheless, Abbott is only worth putting in as leader if he has truly learned the necessity of a high degree of ruthlessness in the pursuit of the ends he wants pursued. Machiavelli was seen as immoral for saying in print nothing more than what has been perennially standard practice for anyone who has succeeded in politics. Instead of saying that others were doing what they thought best and they should be congratulated for trying to achieve their ends, more to the point would be something like, these people are so far off the planet that it is hard to believe they actually thought this was the way forward.

Do those political morons who led the coup really believe that the result we have actually had is better than the one we would have had if Tony had still been leader? And listening to the campaign speech delivered six hours after the polls had closed made me appreciate just what a guilty mind Malcolm obviously now has. Other than the brute fact of his steel-plated ego protector, he would have fallen on his sword tonight, instead of telling us what a genius he’d been in destroying a party structure and policy position that had been carefully crafted over those many years of opposition and then in the first year and a half of government. He has also created a Senate eminently workable for a Labor Government but one in which the Coalition will be hard pressed to get a single issue of substance legislated.

The good news is that even with Malcolm leading the party, there is enough sanity left in the country to have kept Labor out. And it does seem possible that we have ended up with exactly the outcome I had hoped for. I wrote a post a week or so back on You don’t have to wait three years and an election cycle (or two). There I suggested:

The strategy has to be to get the Libs over the line and then see Malcolm turfed out before the year comes to an end. Whatever he may think, the Turnbull agenda is comprehensively dead.

The death of Turnbull’s agenda is even more apparent now than it was a week ago. But if the Libs do get over the line – which is more likely than not but by no means certain – he must go. He won’t want to because he never sees the slightest fault in himself in anything he does, but that’s the reality. I don’t know how it should be arranged but arranged it must be. The Party that drank the Turnbull Kool Aid must now find renewal which will not happen until Malcolm is finally gone.

On the one hand in the final Fairfax-IPSOS poll we find Dead heat on election eve as final poll points to cliffhanger in The Australian Online, the lead story is Turnbull Rebukes Abbott on Boats.

Malcolm Turnbull has rebuked Tony Abbott’s call to hammer Labor on national security and asylum-seekers, staking his re-election on his intimate understanding of the economy.

The Prime Minister, blitzing the morning television shows, dismissed Mr Abbott’s suggestion this week that the Coalition should have exploited its traditional strengths of defence, security and immigration.

“The big issue in this election, Sam – and I’ve been all around the country for eight weeks, as you know… is the economy,” he told Seven’s Samantha Armytage.

Mr Turnbull said that, unlike Mr Shorten who had spent his career in politics and the labour movement, he understood as a businessman “what makes the economy hum”.

It’s unbelievable how politically inept Malcolm is. He is the worst political leader of any major party in Australian history. Even if he thought it, the last thing he should be doing on the day before is attacking members of his own party. All will be revealed tomorrow.