Yet another reason why the Warringah electorate should forcibly retire Tony Abbott at the 2019 federal election

It is an open secret that sacked former prime minister and Liberal MP for Warringah Tony Abbott would not be averse to taking over leadership of the Liberal Party again if it finds itself on the Opposition benches after the May 2019 federal election.

However, it is well to remember that his judgement is flawed and his influence, if it exists at all, is rarely positive.

Take his interaction with Ukraine.......

RT.com, 22 March 2016:

Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has joined the list of ex-politicians invited by President Petro Poroshenko to advise him on how to rule Ukraine as a member of the so-called ‘international advisory council'.

Abbott unexpectedly popped up in the Ukrainian capital on Monday.

Comprised mostly of foreigners, the Kiev-based council was officially established last December. Previously called the International Advisory Council on Reforms, it aims to “facilitate the implementation of reforms in Ukraine on the basis of the best international experience.”

While still in office, the ex-PM had the third-lowest career-low approval rating of 24%, according to a February 2015 Newspoll. After losing Liberal leadership challenge back home last September and becoming vacant for political endeavors, Abbott was quickly invited to visit Ukraine.

Abbott and Poroshenko certainly have one thing in common – their dislike of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The former Australian leader said he would “shirtfront” the Russian head of state on the sidelines of 2014 G20 summit over the MH17 tragedy.

According to Poroshenko, Abbott was one of the most popular foreign politicians in Ukraine back in 2014. Abbott even joked about it saying that the “shirt-front must have translated well.” However, Abbott’s threat never materialized and Putin ended up cuddling a koala at the conference.

ABC News, 23 March 2016:

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has stepped up his support for Ukraine, joining a meeting of international figures headed by the country's president, Petro Poroshenko.

Mr Abbott has travelled to Kiev as part of a Ukrainian-led "international advisory council", which includes the former prime ministers of Slovakia and Lithuania.

"It is an honour to be in Kiev, Ukraine as a member of President Poroshenko's International Advisory Council," Mr Abbott said in a Facebook post.

"Also great to see the development of Kiev since I was last here 30 years ago."

The aim of the council is to "help build a strong and prosperous Ukraine", according to a statement on the Ukrainian President's website.

"Each of you were an author of economic or democratic miracle in your countries. You are true friends of Ukraine," the statement said.

"That's why I would like to unite our efforts in order to achieve the results and bring positive things to Ukraine.

"I am sure that this Council will help us outlive the period of dramatic events and Ukraine will become stronger."

The following years......

Times of Israel, 14 October 2017:

An activist against fascism who sued a Ukrainian municipality for naming a street for a Nazi SS officer has come under a campaign of intimidation, he said.

Mikhail Voroniak, a Red Army veteran, in summer sued the western municipality of Kalush near Lviv for deciding to name a street for Dmytro Paliiv, a commander of the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, also known as the 1st Galician.

Voroniak told the Russian news site Primechaniya that he has come under a “aggressive pressures and threats of murder” since he sued. A local court last month dismissed his motion against the honor to Paliiv but Voroniak appealed to the Lviv Administrative Court of Appeals, which was scheduled to review the appeal last week.....

The Guardian, 2 March 2018:

Neo-Nazi groups involved in the fighting in Ukraine are actively seeking to recruit British far-right activists, a leading anti-fascist watchdog has warned.

At least two Britons are thought to have travelled to the war-torn eastern European country in recent months after encouragement by people linked to the Azov battalion, a notorious Ukrainian fascist militia, according to Hope Not Hate.

The warning comes only four days after the outgoing head of UK counter-terrorism policing, Mark Rowley, revealed that four far-right terror plots had been foiled in 2017 and extreme right groups were seeking to build international networks.

According to Hope Not Hate, a group named the Misanthropic Division, which is linked to the Azov battalion, is working with representatives of UK-based far-right groups, including the proscribed terror organisation National Action and a London-based Polish ultra-nationalist group, to recruit activists to travel to Ukraine.

Reuters, 20 March 2018:

As Ukraine’s struggle against Russia and its proxies continues, Kiev must also contend with a growing problem behind the front lines: far-right vigilantes who are willing to use intimidation and even violence to advance their agendas, and who often do so with the tacit approval of law enforcement agencies….

A January 28 demonstration, in Kiev, by 600 members of the so-called “National Militia,” a newly-formed ultranationalist group that vows “to use force to establish order,” illustrates this threat. While the group’s Kiev launch was peaceful, National Militia members in balaclavas stormed a city council meeting in the central Ukrainian town of Cherkasy the following day, skirmishing with deputies and forcing them to pass a new budget. 

Many of the National Militia's members come from the Azov movement, one of the 30-odd privately-funded “volunteer battalions” that, in the early days of the war, helped the regular army to defend Ukrainian territory against Russia's separatist proxies. 

Although Azov uses Nazi-era symbolism and recruits neo-Nazis into its ranks, a recent article in Foreign Affairs downplayed any risks the group might pose, pointing out that, like other volunteer militias, Azov has been “reined in” through its integration into Ukraine’s armed forces. While it’s true that private militias no longer rule the battlefront, it’s the home front that Kiev needs to worry about now.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea four years ago first exposed the decrepit condition of Ukraine’s armed forces, right-wing militias such as Azov and Right Sector stepped into the breach, fending off the Russian-backed separatists while Ukraine’s regular military regrouped. Though, as a result, many Ukrainians continue to regard the militias with gratitude and admiration, the more extreme among these groups promote an intolerant and illiberal ideology that will endanger Ukraine in the long term. Since the Crimean crisis, the militias have been formally integrated into Ukraine’s armed forces, but some have resisted full integration: Azov, for example, runs its own children’s training camp, and the careers section instructs recruits who wish to transfer to Azov from a regular military unit.

A set of postage stamps named "Master Sergeants of SS Galician Rifle Division" was printed for the 75th anniversary of the division which took place in April 2018.

#Ukraine post office celebrates Waffen SS nazis.pic.twitter.com/p0HkS2dSZn

— Alex Bukovsky (@BungeeWedgie) January 5, 2019

Tony Abbott looks further afield for conservative politicians to destroy

Having had a hand in destroying or diminishing the careers of so many conservative politicians in Australia, sacked former prime minister and current Liberal MP for Warringah, Tony Abbott, has been forced to turn his gaze overseas......

The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 October 2018:

London: Tony Abbott secretly met with Boris Johnson two weeks before writing an incendiary article savaging Theresa May's beleaguered Brexit plan, it can be revealed.

The British Prime Minister faces daily leadership speculation and a growing rebellion by Brexiteer MPs and the party's grassroots who fear she will not make a clean enough break from Brussels.

In his piece for The Spectator magazine this week, Mr Abbott accused Mrs May of toying with "surrender" unless she is prepared to go through with crashing Britain out of the European Union with no deal, a scenario remainers believe would have catastrophic consequences and even strident leavers concede could cause the ports to "seize up." Mr Johnson, the former British foreign secretary who is widely considered to be planning a tilt for Mrs May's job, has used the same word to describe her approach to Brexit.

Mr Abbott's meeting with Mr Johnson, kept secret by both parties until now, has been exposed by a Labour MP whom Tony Abbott confided in, not realising he was a Labour and not a Tory MP.

Stephen Doughty told The Sun-Herald he was in Oxford on October 4 when he bumped into Mr Abbott in the street. The former prime minister told him he had just had some "good meetings" with "your man Boris", not realising Mr Doughty is a strong remainer and campaigning for a second referendum…..

“Boris Johnson meets Tony Abbott who two weeks later writes a piece urging Britain to pursue a catastrophic No Deal? As they’d say in Porpoise Spit - ‘What a coincidence!’” Mr Doughty said, referring to the cult film Muriel’s Wedding.

Mr Doughty said he was surprised that both Mr Johnson and Mr Abbott would keep their meeting secret and questioned what the pair discussed “not least given the ongoing attempts by Boris to oust Theresa May and take over as PM and the Brexit negotiations himself.”

"Perhaps he was also giving him some tips on how to oust a prime minister?"

“It seems to me that there are some very strange linkages between Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson and others pursuing a hard Brexit agenda," he said.

Abbott Booted Out Of Borroloola

IndigenousX, 27 September 2018:

Tony Abbott, the Special Envoy that nobody asked for and nobody wants, appears to have been unceremoniously booted from a school meeting in Borroloola NT, on his first trip to remote communities in his new role.

The community was angered by Abbott’s hypocrisy, cutting millions from community based services while he was the ‘Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs’, and his vision for assimilation through education and punitive policies linking attendance rates to welfare payments.

Parents, Elders and school council members challenged Abbott over his comments that Aboriginal children should not only speak English first, but ‘think’ in English too, and attempts to force failed ‘direct instruction’ policies on the school.

Gadrian Hoosan, a parent and school council member told Abbott he ‘was not welcome in the community since intervention policies ripped out community funding leaving residents worse off, while denying much needed new housing and basic services.’

‘He looked like he couldn’t wait to get out of there when we all started bailing up on him. He picked the wrong community to try and bully. We have a strong school here and strong families. He’ll be having nightmares tonight. We told him we don’t want him as our envoy.”

Jack Green, an Elder and bilingual education advocate from Borroloola said,

“Tony Abbott says he wants Aboriginal culture and language out of our schools but we know these things are what keep our kids and our communities strong and healthy. Abbott doesn’t represent our community or Aboriginal people – he’s not our envoy!

As Elders and educators we know what is best for our children. Its time he stepped back, stood down and let us speak for ourselves.”

This is the latest criticism of PM Scott Morrison’s bewildering and insulting decision to make Tony Abbott a ‘Special Envoy to the PM on Indigenous Affairs’ rather than explore options to promote Indigenous self-determination, enter into a Treaty/Makarrata, push for an Indigenous voice to parliament, or instigate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Meme of the Week

via Twitter

Abbott on immigration

One of Australia's most notorious subsidised migrants now wants to close the door on others....

Big business reps are wrong about very high immigration numbers. High immigration adds to housing demand which boosts price. And it adds to labour supply which dampens wages. Big business is talking self interest here; not the national interest.

— Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) January 24, 2018

Post Same-Sex Marriage "Yes" Victory: I want everyone to have the right to discriminate against the LGBTI community

Tony Abbott on Facebook, 15 November 2017:

I always said this was an issue where the Australian people wanted their say and today’s result demonstrates that seeking their views was the right thing to do.

I congratulate the “yes” campaign on their achievement.

The people have spoken and, of course, the parliament should respect the result.

I also thank the 4.7 million Australians who supported marriage between a man and a woman.

Both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader have pledged their support for freedom of religion.

I look forward to a parliamentary process that improves on the Dean Smith bill to implement same sex marriage with freedom of conscience for all, not just the churches.

So far, this process has been a credit to us as a nation and now needs to be completed in a way that keeps us the best country in the world.

Abbott's love affair with US 'hate group'

“Alliance Defending Freedom seeks to recover the robust Christendomic theology of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th centuries. This is catholic, universal orthodoxy and it is desperately crucial for cultural renewal. Christians must strive to build glorious cultural cathedrals, rather than shanty tin sheds.” — Blackstone Legal Fellowship website, 2014

In January 2016 sacked former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott addressed a far-right Christian ‘hate group' in New York USA during the parliamentary break, on the subject of family values and marriage.

On 23 October this year the Courier Mail reported:

backbencher and staunch “no” advocate, Tony Abbott has made the decision to return to the US at the end of the month and once again address the Christian right-wing organisation, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

Defined by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLA) in the US as an anti-LGBTI hate group, the ADF not only supports the recriminalisation of homosexuality — in the US and overseas — but according to the SPLC website, it has also “defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has linked homosexuality to paedophilia and claims that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity.”

Abbott states he’s “honoured” to be invited to speak to this group again…..

While his first trip to the US to speak to the ADF last year drew raised brows and concerns, this second trip is obviously timed to ensure Abbott will not only have whatever ammunition he needs to water down any consequent legislation arising out of a conscience vote on SSM, but also demonstrate his zealotry towards another cause that, post being PM and regardless of his party’s position, he’s made his own.

This second time around Abbott once again turned to family values and marriage, with the addition of the same-sex marriage postal survey currently underway.

Offering up gems such as these: 

“Romantic love alone can’t always sustain the life-long commitment and the shared sacrifice for the common good that’s at the heart of marriage. We will all lose, in the brave new world of same sex marriage, if commitment is watered down; and if fewer people marry, fewer couples have children, fewer relationships last, and fewer children have stable homes” 

and 

“Campaigns for same sex marriage and the like are a consequence of our civilizational self-doubt and the collapse of cultural self-confidence. The decline of belief has meant a reluctance to assert principles and a fear of giving offence. We find it hard to say “no” to gays who want to marry; just as we’re finding it hard to say “no” to Muslims who want several wives. We’re reluctant to let Christian parents take their children out of sex education classes; but once the local imam gets involved, I suspect, our cultural diffidence and our double standards might start to run the other way. Here in America, organisations like the Alliance Defending Freedom are a sign that Western civilisation still has its friends. The organisation in Australia, as yet largely informal, as yet basically ad hoc, as yet nameless, that has sprung into being to defend marriage shows that, in my country too, there remain embers of respect for our traditions.”

Horse's Rear of the Year

Anthony John ‘Tony’ Abbott

Liberal Member for Warringah & sacked former Australian Prime Minister

On the subject of the 2017 Same Sex Marriage national voluntary survey

Tony Abbott will never stop until he has destroyed Australia

“the shame and humiliation of losing high office drives him on, with the thinnest of rationalisations for his actions” [Judith Brett]

La Trobe University Emeritus Professor Judith Brett writing in The Monthly, August 2017:

Once again Tony Abbott has wrecked the chances of Australia achieving a bipartisan policy on emissions reduction. When, at the end of 2009, he successfully challenged Malcolm Turnbull for leadership of the Liberal Party, the catalyst was Turnbull’s co-operation with the Rudd government over the introduction of an emissions trading scheme. Winning by one vote, Abbott immediately announced a secret ballot on whether the party should support the Labor government’s legislation. The result, 54 against to 29 for, spelled the end of the Opposition’s co-operation with the government on its Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. When the scheme reappeared in 2011 as a price on carbon under Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her climate change minister, Greg Combet, Abbott made this “great big new tax on everything” the centrepiece of his campaign against the government. And when he won the election in 2013 he repealed the legislation.

To be sure, others have also contributed to the long-running disaster of Australia’s climate policies: the Greens under Bob Brown, who, in a fit of self-indulgent high-mindedness, refused to support Labor’s legislation in the Senate; Kevin Rudd, who walked away from the “great moral challenge of our generation” when the going got tough; and Julia Gillard, with her culpable naivety in promising that there would be no carbon tax in a government she led, and then agreeing that the scheme her government introduced could be called a tax. But it has been Abbott’s continuing belligerent prosecution of what shadow environment minister Mark Butler calls in his new book the Climate Wars that has turned going slow on emissions reduction into a Liberal cause. It is Abbott who has given focus and a voice to the motley collection of climate sceptics in the Coalition party room and kept alive the delusion that coal has a viable long-term future. For even if it were not the case that burning coal is contributing to global warming, the rapid development of renewables and their plummeting price would be numbering its days. If one can make energy from the sun, wind and tides, why would anyone bother digging up and transporting coal?

And he is at it again. For a brief moment early in June, the Independent Review into the Future Security of the National Electricity Market, chaired by Australian Chief Scientist Dr Alan Finkel, held out the hope that Australian politics might reach a bipartisan consensus on a scheme to both reduce emissions and increase energy supply, by providing the certainty the private sector needs to invest in new energy generation. Fearing Abbott and his troops, Prime Minister Turnbull had already ruled out an emissions intensity scheme, despite its widespread industry support. Finkel knew he couldn’t consider it, even if it were a better option than the clean energy target he eventually recommended. The clean energy target seemed like clever politics. As it was “technology neutral” it did not explicitly rule out coal. Labor promised to work with the government to hammer out a deal it could live with when it returned to government. Business welcomed the possibility, finally, of a bipartisan agreement that would provide the certainty needed for new investment in energy generation. The Business Council of Australia, the Australian Industry Group, the Energy Users Association of Australia and energy retailers Origin, AGL and Energy Australia were all on board, and argued that the clean energy target would lower prices for consumers.

Not so, said Abbott, whose special contribution to the debate has been to reduce complicated, technical arguments to simple cut-through slogans with little connection to reality. The clean energy target is a tax on coal, he declared. Since the Finkel review was delivered, Abbott has upped his profile and his attacks on the government. Setting out his conservative manifesto to the Institute of Public Affairs at the end of June, he called for a moratorium on new wind farms, a freeze on the renewable energy target at its current level of 15% and the construction of another “big coal-fired power station”. Contrary to the evidence in the Finkel review and the assertions of the energy providers, Abbott claimed that the renewable energy target was causing people’s power bills to increase by making coal uneconomic, and that if private investors would not build a new coal-fired power station, then the government should step in and make good this market failure “as soon as possible”. Just why this last suggestion is either a liberal or a conservative one is hard to fathom. It sounds much more like an old-fashioned socialist argument for re-nationalisation of the power supply.

But consistency has never been Abbott’s strong point. His major preoccupation has always been product differentiation, drawing up the battlelines between the Liberal Party and its major enemy the Labor Party and winning the fight. From this perspective the main problem with the proposed clean energy target is that it is too similar to Labor’s policy. Abbott believed, he told Paul Kelly in early July, that energy policy was “the best hope for the government to win the next election”. Attacking the big fat carbon tax worked in 2013, so why wouldn’t it work again? Peta Credlin, whom Abbott described as the fiercest political warrior he had ever worked with, has since admitted on Sky News that Labor’s climate change policy was never a carbon tax, but that by pursuing “brutal retail politics” the Coalition made it one in the minds of the electorate, replacing fear for the future of the planet with a fight about the hip pocket.

Read the full article here.

www.tonyabbott.com.au, 11 October 2017

Anthony John "Tony' Abbott MP: "a study in male rage"

The Saturday Paper, 8-!4 July @017:

                                              

Periodically, a fact is so self-evident that to state it can make its obviousness seem startling. This, for example: There is no force in public life more destructive than Tony Abbott.

For almost a decade, since he first became opposition leader, Tony Abbott has held Australia to ransom. He has trashed four parliaments. None were better for his presence in them.

His solitary skill is damage. He has wrecked institutions, torn down careers. He has ridiculed the rule of law and coarsened the realm of debate. He has governed against minorities and indulged himself at the expense of duty.

In opposition, he was driven by entitlement, by a loon-eyed belief that he had been anointed to higher office. Here was a man whose mother believed he would be pope or prime minister. Ill discipline denied him the former and cost him the latter.

Having lost the leadership, Abbott is driven by revenge. He has no interest but himself. His anger is the anger of confusion. Abbott cannot reconcile that the world is not the way he imagined it to be, with him as prime minister and the country docile in its satisfaction. This confusion is greater than simple self-interest: it is driven by the fact Abbott never understood he was living in a contemporary society; he governed for a world that no longer existed, for a fantasy of the past. His leadership was always illusory. His default has always been treachery.

That one man could do so much damage is testament to his corrosive gift for harm. Here is the man who held back the country on climate action, who invented whole electoral edifices to deny marriage equality. Here is the man who weaponised a fear of refugees and later Muslims, who made citizenship a plaything, who fractured the community in the hope of leading its broken wreckage. Here is a man for whom truth is an abstract concept. The most honest thing to be said about him is that he has a working substitute for integrity.

A person of any dignity would resign the parliament. There is no room for him in it and he has nothing to offer if he stays. Each day he remains, he serves only as a lesson in the flaws of the human character. He is a study in male rage…….

Tony Abbott has never provided good government. He has spent almost a decade denying it. The only decent thing he has left to contribute is his resignation.

*Photograph of Tony Abbott found on Google Images

The only way Tony Abbott will leave the Australian Parliament is if the voters of Warringah kick him out

Apparently desperate to hang on to his seat, parliamentary salary and entitlements, as well as intent on regaining the prime ministerial position he now recalls he ‘left’ rather than was sacked from – far-right politician Anthony John “Tony” Abbott is renominating in the Warringah electorate as a candidate in the 2016 federal general election.

---

THE HONOURABLE TONY ABBOTT MP

FEDERAL MEMBER FOR WARRINGAH 

RENOMINATION FOR WARRINGAH

January 24, 2016

After leaving the prime ministership, I said that I would spend some time talking to family, trusted colleagues and local Liberals about my future. I have been heartened by the support and encouragement I’ve received to continue to serve the country as a member of parliament. 

Therefore, I am renominating to represent the people of Warringah for another term as their Liberal MP.

I am proud of my work to establish the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust that has done so much to improve the amenity of former military land on North Head, Middle Head and Georges Heights. Should I be renominated and elected, I am looking forward to working with Premier Mike Baird to ensure that the Warringah Peninsula gets better transport links to the rest of Sydney.

It has been a great honour to serve the people of Warringah for 22 years and I hope to retain their trust and confidence.

---

Though I am not sure that the NSW Division of the Liberal Party of Australia or the voters of Warringah are quite as enthusiastic as Abbott about his candidature.

Cartoon by Cathy Wilcox at http://cathywilcox.com.au/

The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 December 2015:

Former prime minister Tony Abbott should quit Parliament at the next election to make way for new talent according to a majority of electors within his own safe Liberal seat of Warringah.

With Liberal MPs and supporters reading the signs of growing disunity within the Turnbull government as Mr Abbott and other malcontents continue to speak out, exclusive ReachTel polling conducted for the Australian Institute, has found most voters in the 65 per cent Liberal electorate believe the ex-PM's time has passed....

The New Daily, 21 January 2016:

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s habit of undermining the Turnbull government means he should quit politics before the next election, former Liberal Party insiders say.

Since being dethroned in September last year, speculation has been rife that Mr Abbott wants the country’s top job back.

Reports emerged this week that he had decided to contest the 2016 Election.

However, despite a distinguished record in federal politics and a formidable run of election wins in Warringah, Mr Abbott is being urged to quit because staying would hurt the Liberal Party.

Former Liberal Party leader John Hewson told The New Daily that Mr Abbott would be harmful to the party if he kept behaving like he had since losing the leadership challenge to Malcolm Turnbull.

“If he used it [his position in parliament] as a platform to criticise the government I don’t think it is terribly helpful to them,” Mr Hewson said.

When asked if Mr Abbott had been destabilising the Turnbull government since being dumped as PM to get the job back, Mr Hewson said: “Well there has been some inspired comments by his colleagues and himself … More or less inspired.”

Political commentator and electoral voting analyst Peter Brent emphatically agreed.

“I think it would be better for the Coalition and the Liberal Party if he bowed out [before the 2016 election] because as long as he is around he is a focus of discontent,” Mr Brent told The New Daily.

“With him gone at least everything won’t be interpreted as part of a push to bring Abbott back [as the PM].

“Every time one of them says something it is seen through that prism [trying to get the PM job back]. It would be in the interests of the party if he went away.”

Former media advisor to John Howard in the 1990s and political columnist for The New Daily Paula Matthewson said his true intention was only to disrupt any government he wasn’t leader of.

“I think it has become fairly clear that his intentions are more than upholding the broad church that is the Liberal Party in making sure there is enough conservative voices in it,” Ms Matthewson said.

“The fact is that he nurses the hope of going back to the leadership.

“Really, his true intention is about destabilising and finally trying to remind people that he should be leader.

“On that basis I would say no, it is not good for him to stay.”….

UPDATE

The Australian, 25 January 2016:

Tony Abbott clearly maintains a “flicker of ambition” to resume the prime ministership and any cast-iron guarantees he gives to remain on the backbench are “worthless”, says Victorian Liberal president Michael Kroger…..

The Australian, 25 January 2016:

Tony Abbott’s decision to renominate for the seat of Warringah at the next election carries a twin message for Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberal Party: the former Prime Minister has considered his options and decided to remain in Parliament and conservative Liberals are reacting to what is seen to be a “scorched earth” policy of retribution.

Abbott’s personal decision was tortured and complicated, he could have chosen “anything” within the power of the Turnbull government to deliver and had it. He could have pursued a lucrative conservative international speaking career and made money.

Instead he’s decided to turn it all down and seek to become the local MP for the Northern beaches electorate of Warringah where he started 20 odd years ago and promised to work with the popular Liberal leader - Mike Baird - for the local people.

As far as Abbott’s pysche goes that’s about it. All the talk of him going to an ambassadorial posting or government appointment is gone. He’s probably still not even sure himself but the decision has been made and the challenges arising from it are clear.

The biggest test Turnbull faces, as has been the case from the moment he and Julie Bishop knocked off Abbott, is how he handles the conservative side of the Liberal Party and the growing sense of disillusion and fracture in the Liberal and National parties which could become much more than just being about Abbott’s leadership…..

There were attempts to “flush out” Abbott about his intentions as part of the move against his supporters in NSW - that’s failed dismally and Turnbull now faces a bigger challenge than he did just two weeks ago before the moves against so many conservative MPs got out of hand and took on a Party-wide significance.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott exceeds himself in creating public mischief for political purposes

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has fronted television cameras at least five times since the Martin Place siege revealed itself to a shocked Australia.

On the 15  December 2014, the day the siege commenced:

http://youtu.be/_GySx8FT0TQ.

Then in a flurry on the second and final day:

Press Statement 16 December 2014 | Transcript

Flags at half-mast today 16 December 2014 | Media release

Joint Press Conference, Sydney 16 December 2014 | Transcript.

Followed by this the day after:

Martin Place siege - Joint Commonwealth -New South Wales review17 December 2014 | Media release.

Despite the fact that the motivation for the siege appeared to be unrelated to any specific jihadist group, Tony Abbott insisted on associating it with Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

In fact in one of these televised press conferences he managed to use his favourite term, death cult, four times in one short paragraph:

However, if one is a fear-mongering politician one cannot rest on one’s laurels, so on 17 December Abbott started to assert that the now deceased gunman had been given a gun licence:

Unfortunately for the prime minister this has since been refuted by at least one Fairfax journalist:

NSW Police have also refused to back his statement.

The Sydney Morning Herald 17 December 2014:

NSW police say there is no record that Martin Place siege gunman Man Haron Monis had a gun licence.

This is despite the Prime Minister Tony Abbott asserting in a press conference earlier that Monis, killed by police in a gun battle after a 16-hour siege, had been allowed to legally own weapons.

"The NSW Police Force has conducted checks with the NSW Firearms Registry and can confirm there is no record of the 50-year-old man having held a firearms licence," a statement issued this evening said.

UPDATE

On 18 December 2014 Sky News reported that:

Attorney-General George Brandis says the government has not found any link between the gunman in the Sydney siege and Islamic State….

early indications are that he wasn't actually a member or an affiliate of a terrorist organisation…

"NO Confidence" in Prime Minister Abbott: 774 citizens petition the Australian Parliament

Since 2008 anyone can prepare a petition, gather signatures, and have it presented to the House of Representatives by the Chair of the Standing Committee on Petitions or by another member of parliament. 

Once a petition has been presented to Parliament the Committee refers it on to the responsible minister who then has 90 days to respond.

A ministerial response to the petition below would be due by 18 January 2015.

House of Representatives Hansard 20 October 2014:

Dr JENSEN (Tangney) (10:01): On behalf of the Standing Committee on Petitions, and in accordance with standing order 207, I present the following petitions:.........

  Prime Minister 

To the Honourable Speaker and Members of the House of Representatives

we, the undersigned, believe we represent a widely enough held opinion within the Australian people to warrant a motion of NO CONFIDENCE in the current Prime Minister, The Honourable Tony Abbott, being tabled in Parliament, and being put to a vote in the House of Representatives.

The reason we are petitioning the House is that, so far (as at the 15 August 2014's version of this petition), and despite requests made directly to various Members, both in Government and in Opposition, to table such a motion, there has been abject failure - by any of the many Members who publicly proclaim TO have "No Confidence" in the Prime Minister - to take that first step which is necessary to initiate a remedy via the Reserve Powers of the Governor General; which include being able to dismiss a prime minister.

Examples of reasons for having "NO Confidence" in Prime Minister Abbott are too numerous - and well known to not only Members of the House but also to the public, in Australia and in many places overseas - to mention.

We therefore ask the House to ensure that such a motion be tabled as a matter of urgency, and — if possible under the Rules of the House — to not require a Division, in order that Members may vote freely and completely in accordance with their conscience, instead of so as to abide with party constraints. Thank you.

from 744 citizens

Petition received.