Canning by election D-Day - Lieberals despair over Abbott

The Lieberals are now in a hopeless mess with not the slightest idea WTF to do about it. They have painted themselves into the proverbial corner and it looks like wailing and gnashing of teeth from here. Sack cloth and ashes of biblical proportions. Well they're mostly all Catholics you know.

The back benchers are again in total WTF? despair. Punch drunk from all the self inflicted Lieberal hits in the head. They want Abbott gone again. Well sort of. Maybe not. See they can't really make up their mind again, like 6 months ago. So some of them are now saying "Canning!" as the D-Day thing for Abbott, although it does sound much; like just off the cuff rhetoric when they can't think of any other way to voice their frustration. And they hate the whole team now, asserting that the whole Team Abbott is fucked:

One senior government MP said there was a developing view in the party that while in February the Prime Minister had been the focus of concern, now people were asking of the leadership team "where are you?"

"Everyone has had a gutful of the leadership team," the MP said, singling out Mr Abbott, Treasurer Joe Hockey, Employment Minster Eric Abetz and Attorney-General George Brandis. ​

"We turned Bronwyn [Bishop] into a huge saga, now Dyson Heydon is going to be a huge saga .There is no way he [Heydon] can survive but he has to cut himself loose."

"A loss in Canning and it's all over for him [Mr Abbott]." Read more

Canning is however a Western Australia Lieberal stronghold. It was won by the Lieberals in 2013 with a 12% comfort zone. So it does seem that it'd be safe to let of steam from the back bench and say "Canning!" without it really meaning much.

Unless of course Labor did the impossible and actually won the seat. Um, which as bad as the gov is doing it may just happen: 

The comments came after a Newspoll in the West Australian seat of Canning showed the Abbott government faces a disastrous 10 per cent swing against it in next month's byelection, which will fill the vacancy created by the death of Don Randall. 

The Newspoll, taken last weekend and published on Tuesday in The Australian, showed that the Liberal Party would hang on to the previously safe south-eastern Perth but with the margin slashed. 

In 2013, Mr Randall easily won the seat with 61.8 per cent of the two-party-preferred vote. According to Newspoll, the Liberal Party can now only claim 51 per cent. From the 2013 election to today, the Liberal Party's primary vote has dropped from 51 to 41 per cent of the vote, while Labor's has jumped from 26.6 per cent to 36 per cent. Read more

The biggest problem is though that nobody is stepping up to take the Lieberal poison chalice. Well who would? It would take some kind of a miracle from here to save the federal election for the Lieberals even with a change of leader, and once the election is lost the leadership will change again. So whoever takes over may find Abbott has poisoned things so much that they get the blame for the election defeat as well. Who would want to take on that?

MPs being sounded out said the approaches appeared to be informal and not being done with the imprimatur of either Mr Morrison or Mr Turnbull. Read more