The Abbott gov is terminal - political commentator Laura Tingle

I think she's saying what everyone is thinking. The Abbott gov is now lurching from one crisis to the next, patching things up for the short term with no thought of what it'll mean come election time. Shooting themselves in the foot at every turn. How much longer can this go on before something gives?

It's not often in Australia you read political commentary such as this. 

If you hang around in Canberra long enough, you start to recognise the point where a government has become terminal, where the death spiral is irretrievable. It's got nothing to do with the polls, or leadership rumblings. 

It's the point where the sheer stupidity of its decisions is so obvious, so craven, so contradictory, that everyone involved – ministers, backbenchers, the opposition, the media, voters – just know it can't go on like this. 

Some would argue that most of the Whitlam government's time in office was like that. But the days when Malcolm Fraser warned voters their money was safer under the bed than it would be under a Labor government, the days of forged faxes under the Keating government, the days when John Howard pledged $9 billion of spending in just one campaign speech, when Kevin Rudd announced the moving of the Sydney naval base to Queensland, all smacked of that time when everyone knew all was lost.

But with the exception of Whitlam, all these things happened with just days or weeks to go before polling day. 

We are as much as 12 months from the next election. Abbott's conservative supporters might not want to abandon him. Scott Morrison is clearly positioning as an alternative conservative candidate. 

But at some point the conservatives – and the Coalition more broadly – will have to decide not just whether they are prepared to lose an election, but whether they are prepared to have the Coalition's reputation for good government become likened in history to that of Whitlam's. Read more