The Smell of Blood

February 3, 2015
Written by:
John Kelly
1 Reply

It’s in the air right now. You can actually taste
it. The knives are out. The phones are running hot. How many more
clichés can one fit in one paragraph? Politics can be a savage sport, a
blood sport. And it generally is when opposing parties face off in
parliament. But when the fighting starts within a party, when friend
becomes foe, that’s when the blood starts to flow.

On Channel 7’s Sunrise this morning, David Koch asked PM Tony Abbott
if he had asked Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop not to challenge
him for the leadership and she refused. Abbott dodged the question, did
not answer directly and then told Koch that the people weren’t
interested in leadership speculation.

Er…yes they are.

We only have to think back to the leadership turmoil between Kevin
Rudd and Julia Gillard to realise how damaging this is for the
government right now. The media, once so supportive of the LNP will now
hunt down every whisper, every side turn, every evasive moment, anything
anyone inside, or out, of the party room utters. It’s a blood sport.

They
will pursue any trail they suspect will lead them to a hint of, when
and from whom, a leadership challenge might come. And come it surely
must. It is no longer months away or even weeks. It is days away and the
Canberra press gallery can smell it. It will come because the media
won’t leave it alone. It could be today, tomorrow or Friday.

Actually, Friday is a good day for a leadership challenge because
members can disperse to their electorates after the event and hide from
the pursuit of journalists eager to write follow-up stories; a bit like
reporting after the big game. There’s always a juicy ‘what happened
when’ story to be discovered.

So now we sit and wait. There will be a party room meeting, someone
will text someone that it’s on, and the media will go into a frenzy. All
scheduled TV programs will be suspended, reporters will transmit live,
and the entire country will come to a halt…..well, maybe not the entire
country. But the waiting will be excruciating. Then we will hear the
outcome.

The party will be united once again and….oh god no…someone will step
forward and say, “And now we must get on with the job of fixing Labor’s
debt and deficit disaster.”

And
then we will know for sure that nothing has changed. Same polices, same
mantra, same three word slogans. No grand vision, no exciting new
ideas, just same old, same old.

We know that there’s nothing new under the political sun, but can we at least have something better than this?.