‘As the results continued to get worse for the Turnbull government, Ms Credlin refused to join Bolt in calling for Mr Turnbull’s resignation, but said she would have backed Mr Abbott to win more seats.
“I would have backed him in this time round. Because he knows how to campaign, he resonates in those regional seats, he resonates in western Sydney, and in the places where Labor has made ground tonight,” she said.
“But you’ll never know because he’s not in the race.
“One thing that can be said is no one can blame this result on Tony Abbott, who played I think a very fair, a very dignified team game,” Ms Credlin said.’Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2016/australian-federal-election-2016-andrew-bolt-urges-malcolm-turnbull-to-quit-20160702-gpx6tl.html#ixzz4DIxLNmEB
“I can report that based on the advice I have from the party officials we can have every confidence that we will form a Coalition majority government in the next parliament,” announced Mr Turnbull in his election night speech. I guess it can be still called an election night speech even though, technically, it occured the next morning. Mr Turnbull had been coaxed out of hiding by assurances that he’d actually won the election and that his car wouldn’t turn into a pumpkin just because it was after midnight.
Of course, many of his colleagues have turned back into rats and mice, while Andrew Bolt and Peta Credlin were taking the chance to sink the slipper into Turnbull.
So, in spite of needing to win nine of the eleven doubtful seats, Turnbull has “every confidence” that the Liberals will form a Coalition majority government.
Now, winning that many of the doubtful seats isn’t impossible but it’s hard when Labor is leading in six of them. Still I guess that the party officials would be better placed than I am to make a judgement about how postal votes will go. Although with Australia Post’s recent record of delivery, one hopes that they were sent priority post or they may not make the deadline.
Whatever, it’s hard to work out who’s the more delusional. Malcolm, for having confidence (not hope, confidence) that he’ll be able to form a majority government or Peta Credlin for suggesting that Tony Abbott would have won more seats. As it’s impossible to disprove hypotheticals, I guess Ms Credlin can speculate as much as she likes and nobody can say that she’s wrong. Just as I can suggest that Australia would be better off if I were appointed absolute ruler and all parliamentary debate would take the form of interpretive dance, which, as I’d make all the decisions anyway, would at least be more entertaining than listening to people speak. Why have any debate when I’m just going to make the decisions? Good point and I don’t have an answer, but you can ask Turnbull to justify that one, as it seems very similar to his position on the same sex marriage plebiscite.
As it was so late at night, I suspect most of you didn’t wait up to hear what Malcolm had to say. I waited, but gave up and eventually listened to it this morning and for those of you who haven’t caught Malcolm’s speech, I’d have to say that it was the sort of incredible display which has made him such a popular figure in the Liberal ranks.
Malcolm was very gracious and said:”We need to have in this country and we will have now, an economic vision, a leadership that explains the great challenges and opportunities that we face. [That] describes the way in which we can handle those challenges, seize those opportunities and does so in a manner that the Australian people understand so that we are seeking to persuade rather than seeking to lecture”. Unfortunately, that was last year when he was taking over from Tony Abbott.
Last night, however, he was more concerned about the “lies” told by the Labor Party and the millions they had to spend because of the unions, and the idea that Labor saw the answer as “more debt” and “more taxes”, whereas the Liberals have the values “of freedom, of business, of enterprise and entrepreneurship” which like Baby Bear’s porridge is apparently just right for our times. I don’t remember Labor campaigning on a policy of more taxes; I thought that they were just against cutting company tax, but maybe I missed something because Malcolm is so against lying that he wouldn’t lie, I’m sure. I mean, when he told us on Friday that the freeze on the Medicare levy wouldn’t mean that we’d pay more to go to the doctor, he was telling the absolute truth and it was those doctors announcing a fee rise who were doing the lying.
Anyway, perhaps one of the biggest ironies of the election was the Assistant Minister for Innovation losing his seat. Mm, is “ironies” the right word? Whatever, as Innovation is so important to this government, losing Wyatt Roy must rob the Coalition of one of their most impressive performers. I haven’t heard much about him, and compared to the rest of the incompetents in the government, that impresses me.
