Libs are lucky – what if Labor had a popular leader?

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten. Picture: Kym Smith

In parts of Queensland, Bill Shorten is more unpopular than Julia Gillard ever was at her rock-bottom lowest. Even in Victoria, Shorten’s home state where he looks set to rip apart the Liberals’ heartland, his ­approval rating among voters in certain seats runs net negative in the high 20s.

According to the private polling, Shorten is, and has been for some time, a drag on Labor’s ticket. Imagine how high Labor’s primary vote would be if it had a popular leader. Although there is no guarantee someone more agreeable would have been able to do what he has done, the Coalition could be facing annihilation as ­opposed to your run-of-the-mill catastrophe.

It’s possible Shorten’s unpopularity, based on doubts about his sincerity, might stem from the fact that on each of his 1976 days as ­Opposition Leader he had been prosecuting class warfare, pitting Australians against one another, only to complain in one breath on Tuesday there was too much “us and them” stuff in Australian life, then in the next attack fat-cat ­employers and the big end of town.

Not that it seems to matter a fig. As one deeply disillusioned Liberal said the other day, people are prepared to vote for someone they don’t like, even if that someone offers policies they suspect will do them harm, because the Coalition, which has been tearing itself to pieces, completely lost the plot last August.

At first blush, what Malcolm Turnbull said in London about Liberals removing him because they were more worried he would win the election than lose the election sounded mad.

What he should have said, and what some of us had been writing for some time, was that those who ran the vicious guerilla/gorilla campaign against him for three years did not care if they destroyed the government so long as they ­destroyed Turnbull.

They succeeded in killing Turnbull, and the downward spiral since, particularly in the past week, shows the extent of the collateral damage. Mission accomplished, they have now moved to what was always planned as the next stage: the reinstallation of Tony Abbott as opposition leader so he can terminate another government. Let’s face it, he does have a particular talent for wrecking governments. Including, it must be said, his own.

Brilliant. Go right ahead, make Abbott leader again, providing he hangs on to his seat, and let’s see if anybody believes anything he says about anything. Ever.

Abbott promised the night ­before the 2013 election that there would be no budget cuts, and there were — across the board. He had one woman in his cabinet, ran a dysfunctional office, ruined his own government, then set about wrecking Turnbull’s even though he promised he wouldn’t. Under threat in his seat of Warringah, he boasted that if it wasn’t for him same-sex marriage would not have been legalised. That was after he did everything he possibly could to thwart it, including ­abstaining in parliament after 75 per cent of his electorate voted for it.

As prime minister, he signed up to the Paris Agreement, committing Australia to emission reduct­ion targets of 26-28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030, claimed after he lost the leadership he had done so because he had been duped by bureaucrats, then turned Paris into a symbol of everything that was wrong with power prices and Turnbull, insisted Australia had to get out of Paris and threatened to cross the floor and vote against him. Before he became leader, he said climate change was “crap”; then, after that, described efforts to address it as “a crock”.

Killing Turnbull was Abbott’s objective all along, despite efforts by columnists and broadcasters to dress up his undermining as the considered interventions of a thoughtful former prime minister offering different policy prescriptions. If people didn’t know it ­before, maybe because they spent the past three-plus years on Pluto, it was obvious during Friday’s ­debate on Sky when Abbott ­declared Paris, as springtime in Europe approaches, is fine after all.

If Abbott had taken this approach in August, Turnbull might have negotiated the national ­energy guarantee and perhaps ­Abbott would be better placed to fight off a challenge from independent Zali Steggall in Warringah, where Liberal voters sound ready to treat him as he treated Turnbull — that is, be rid of him regardless of the damage they might inflict on the government and the party.

Imperfect as it was, the NEG was the party’s last best hope of ending the climate wars. The government would not be in the strife it is now in the shadow of the election, with its irreconcilable differences publicly paraded.

The government’s parlous position has only added to the latest round of internecine warfare. Call us crazy but it is possible all these things — a threatened smashing at the election, the removal of a ­leader and the absence of an ­energy cum climate change policy, which Turnbull had been trying to nail down — are part of the same vicious circle. This battle was set to erupt in the last sitting week of February. Nationals had wanted the so-called big-stick legislation that would force energy companies to divest, which had been shelved, to be brought on for debate in parliament. They didn’t care if it was voted down — just as they lost the vote on the medivac bill — because they reckon it would have given them a point of differentiation with Labor in their seats. Their planned rebellion was aborted because the Ipsos poll wrongly indicated a recovery was under way. They didn’t want to be accused of wrecking Morrison’s momentum.

Scott Morrison was also wrong not to have the legislation voted on that week. Nationals could have argued to their constituents they fought to get it through, while Victorians and others could have claimed credit for getting it knocked off. A fig leaf for each side. Not ideal but it might have spared Michael McCormack some grief from Barnaby Joyce and a clutch of backbenchers, which in turn has made the government’s position more precarious.

More than one Liberal MP said last week it would have been better if Morrison had called the election in February because the longer it goes, the worse it can get. It’s hard to argue with that.