Meanwhile the mainstream media are doing a good job of keeping the Abbott is a failure theme up over the Christmas/New Year break (why wouldn't they?, he gives them so much negative material to work with).
Source: HERALD SUN - RIGHT WING BIAS
Libs ponder how to change a bad Abbott
30 December
COALITION MPs back home in their electorates for the holidays after a horror year will no doubt be praying the Prime Minister’s Christmas reshuffle will be the reboot the Government so desperately needs.
Catching up with friends and family over the summer, and hearing what they think of the Government, Coalition MPs wouldn’t be human if the didn’t ponder whether their ship might be sailing better under a different captain. For, as an analysis of recent newspolls published by The Australian this week shows, the PM is unpopular all over the place at the moment. When put to Coalition MPs that the problems might stem from the top, they are quick to reply that the Liberal Party is not about to repeat Labor’s mistake with Kevin Rudd. But what if the analogy is a false one? What if Liberal MPs should be comparing their situation with Labor’s under Julia Gillard?
In Gillard’s time, ALP state operatives conducting focus groups to find out how things stood for then Opposition leader Daniel Andrews kept hitting a problem: the prime minister was so unpopular it was impossible to get people to focus on state issues.
“As soon as you mentioned her name they were off — you couldn’t get them back on to the subject,” a senior Labor official reminisced about the Victorian state election, and what implications — if any — it might have for federal politics. These days, he reflected, the boot is on the other foot. “They hate Abbott the most of any politician I have ever seen. He completely dominated the Liberal brand. Our problem with Napthine — in the beginning, anyway — was that people were willing to differentiate between him and Abbott.”
Removing that differentiation, he explained, was an important part of Labor’s campaign — hence the TV ads merging the PM’s face with the premier’s. There was no doubt in this official’s mind it had worked. “By the end they were saying ‘Nah, they’re all the same’,” he said. The Labor man had one other observation, which if it is showing up in Liberal research ought to be giving the party’s brains trust sleepless nights: “Even Liberal voters don’t like the guy.”
What is surprising talking to Libs involved in the state election is their similar assessment of the Abbott situation. “He’s a real problem,” a senior Liberal said. “He’s in serious negative territory and, despite what people think, that’s starting to infect other states as well. It’s going deeper than just leader concerns — it’s starting to infect the brand.”
Looking to the next federal election, this Liberal was in no doubt the party is in trouble. “It’s going to cause no end of headaches in Victoria, particularly with female voters. It has become more pronounced over the last 12 months. And that’s a real worry.
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What would be giving me sleepless nights if I were a Liberal official would be that Abbott’s unpopularity seems to be so deeply ingrained. Normally PMs start with a honeymoon period and grow less popular. Sometimes they come back — as John Howard did — sometimes, as Gillard found out, they don’t. Abbott’s problem is that at the time he was elected his net favourability rating — the number of people happy with him minus the number unhappy — was not much more than zero and peaked less than two months after he was elected, before starting to decline.
By the time of the May Budget his net favourability rating was already deep in negative territory, then it went off a cliff. The surge in affection for the PM in the wake of the downing of MH17 only took him back to the unfavourability rating he had before the Budget.
The questions the Liberals need to answer — quickly — are why? And is there anything they can do about it? The usual answers to the first question include: too Catholic, too Right-wing, too sexist, too many promises broken, too macho, too many enemies in the Left-wing media, too insert-prejudice-here. All of which might be true, but, with the exception of the broken promises, all the things people seem to dislike about Abbott were on display last September when we decided to make him PM. According to one pollster, the macho thing is a real issue. “Women — or rather some women — just don’t like him, they find him aggressive.” Incidentally, this pollster was of the view the Libs’ women problems go much deeper than just Abbott. As he said, for a Government that had a serious gender gap in its polling, it was an odd decision in the state election to spend so much time promoting a great big toll road.
There’s probably not much the Liberals can do about the way Tony Abbott walks and talks. It’s far too late for a Daniel-to-Dan Andrews-style makeover. But what someone familiar with focus group research suggested to me this week is that the problems for the PM go much deeper than the ostensible reasons the public dislike him — the real problem is that he reminds Australians of the chaos and nastiness of the Rudd-Gillard era, a period most of us would like to forget. Being relentlessly negative as Opposition leader proved brutally effective but appears to have come at a terrible cost. If so, Abbott should appreciate the wisdom of Galatians 6:7: “For whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/opinion/libs-ponder-how-to-change-a-bad-abbott/story-fni0fh8t-12271...
