The ABC is continuing to run a special web page entitled, ‘Liberal Turmoil.’ This has to be one of the most blatant acts of bias ever shown by the ABC on their taxpayer funded website.
The ABC is gone into hysterics, fearful of Abbott’s conservative agenda with words like ‘coming from the clouds’, ‘mutiny’, ‘shock’, ‘extreme’, ‘unlikely’, ‘the experiment’, etc…to describe Abbott’s victory. The impression is to give readers the idea that Abbott is not really up to it, and that the Party is deeply divided over carbon taxation and therefore Abbott’s leadership. However, the ABC has completely ignored the secret ballot to delay Rudd’s carbon tax that Abbott conducted after the leadership vote amongst the party room. Abbott won an overwhelming majority to push for the delay and if not delay then out right opposition to the tax.
The ABC has also ignored the grass roots campaign waged by Liberal Party supporters and members to get Abbott into the leadership. From Paul Sheehan:
Malcolm Turnbull had long languished in the opinion polls, but now his party’s grassroots had mobilised against him. ”I have never seen anything like it,” said Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells when I called to ask why she publicly abandoned Turnbull’s leadership on Friday. By yesterday afternoon her office had logged almost 8000 emails and calls opposing the proposed emissions trading scheme.
By my rough estimate, more than 400,000 such emails and calls have been sent to the 99 federal Coalition members over the past two months.
It is an estimate Senator Cory Bernardi, from South Australia, thinks is conservative…
This is what made the Liberal Party room so crowded yesterday, the crush of opinion from ordinary Australians that members brought into the room with them.
So there is an overwhelming consensus within the Liberal Party and amongst its supporters to oppose Rudd’s carbon tax and that means supporting Abbott as leader. Where is the turmoil? And then there is Alan Jones:
On October 27 I had a long private talk with him (AJ). We discussed the internal ructions. I mentioned someone I thought could galvanise the party if he came to Canberra in a few years.
No, Jones replied, he thought there would be another process similar to the one where the Liberals, after churning through leaders, turned to John Howard. He thought they would again turn to a tough veteran, somebody the media had written off.
Did he have anyone in mind?
”Tony Abbott.”
The ABC also tried its best to stop Howard taking the leadership in 1994, and looked what happened – in power for nearly 12 years. Turmoil indeed.
He believed Abbott, like Howard, was widely underestimated and could do a much better job of mining the electorate on visceral issues like immigration and higher taxation, a road Rudd had chosen to take via the emissions trading scheme.
Abbott, he believed, as a plain-spoken, mortgage-bound, often painfully frank man, could cut through with voters in a way Turnbull’s Point Piper patina never would.
So everyone from the centre-right’s number one media personality down to the everyday supporters rallied for Abbott. Effectively the only recalcitrants are the 20 or so members that voted not to delay and oppose Rudd’s carbon tax. This is probably the most unified the centre-right side of politics has been since about 18 months before the 2007 election. There is no turmoil and the ABC should remove its website!
UPDATE
Only two Liberal senators crossed the floor to vote with the government on carbon taxation. Hardly ‘turmoil.’