Is that a greenhouse in your pocket?

So, the Liberal Party.

There seem to be an awful lot of the commentariat making noises about how confused they are, how the Liberal party is fracturing itself, how it's the wets versus the drys, how it's power brokers doing their best to remove Turnbull because they hate Turnbull. I think that they're all wrong.

The Liberal party is in opposition. The opposition's role is to "oppose". They need to present an alternative government to the people, the key word there being "alternative".

For the past two years or so the Liberal Party hasn't actually stood up for anything. Nelson and Turnbull (both massive disappointments as far as I'm concerned) have been to busy agreeing with the ALP to come up with any realistic or useable policies. Agreeing with the government or nitpicking on minor but populist policies is no way to get elected.

To many people keep on insisting the lessons of the last election were that Howard lost because of work choices and climate change. Bullshit!

Voters wanted a change from Howard. Rudd offered that change, in a Howard-Lite package. Sure, people were worried by the scare campaign about work choices. Sure, lots of people were worried about climate change (not so many now). But basically, everything was going well and people wanted more of the same, just not from Howard. I sincerely believe that Costello would have had a real dip if he had led the Liberals to the last election, not because he was necessarily better, but because he was different while still providing more of the same.

So will the Liberals lose 20 seats in a climate change election? I doubt it. A few weeks ago the Liberals were looking at losing 12 to 20 seats in an election anyway. And worrying obsessively about polls and votes can cripple you so much that you do nothing and fail from inaction.

The current goings-on in the Liberal Party are not about Turnbull, at least not directly. They are about people in the party finally growing a backbone, standing up and saying that a policy direction is crap and that something needs to be done. If Turnbull could stand up and announce that the whole ETS is crap, that he is going to fight it because it's crap (which he should have done a long time ago) than none of this would have happened.

Those people standing up have realised that you have to STAND for something. Not being Labour is not enough. The Liberal Party is never going to win an election by moving to the left of centre. That territory is already owned by Labor and in a time where maybe 10 percent of voters of genuine swing voters, Labor voters are not going to vote Liberal, no matter how many trees you save, no matter how sorry you are and no matter how many stupid and incomprehensibly complicated emissions trading schemes you enact.

This is definitely an issue worth fighting over, but if it hadn't been this it would have been something else.

That's why the commentariat are wrong, it is about the policy, not about Turnbull specifically.

Edit

So the votes are in and Tony Abbot won, 42 votes to 41. Joe Hockey totally shot himself in the foot, how on earth could the Liberals countenance getting a new leader and then seeing this legislation that caused all the problems get passed? People know where Tony Abbot stands, that's a good basis for rebuilding the party.

Link to article here.

Edit 2

Another point of view. Basicallyit's saying that Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were all controversial and unlikeable in their own ways. You don't need to be a populist or universally popular to be the Prime Minister. Potentially means Abbot is a real threat as opposition leader, because he actually stands for something.