The results are in from Bradfield and Higgins and the Liberal vote has held up in a spectacular way. With a large percentage counted, the Liberal Party got sixty five percent of the two party preferred in Bradfield, and fifty seven percent in Higgins, at the end of an exciting week with great leadership changes in the Liberal Party.
With no sitting member personal vote, to bolster the vote this is a terrific result for the Liberals and Tony Abbott. It shows that the vote for the green side of politics, is nowhere near enough to carry the next election, and it is probably time for Abbott to show strong leadership, and actually stop pandering to the media and rah rah green Climate Agitators, with their doom and gloom predictions.
The first thing Tony Abbot should start to do is insist that the States come back into the federation, and abide the results of a referendum in 1900, that gave us as Australians a great Constitution. The States are almost all Labor, and so far Rudd has failed to curb their excesses. He has still not fixed homelessness, unemployment is still a problem, and the other great promises he made have not materialized. The bye elections show there is no mandate for an ETS, and that a double dissolution could see Rudd be a second James Scullin, the hapless Prime Minister in 1929: A one term wonder, whose term will be eminently forgettable, despite his popularity

Pete,


Your rejoicing that it showed that the green side of the electorate won't carry the next election is well too premature. Both those seats were comfortable Lib seats to start with.
It was noted than in one seat the greens vote increased.

I would suggest there is a clear difference between a strong government and the writhing mass of personal ambitions that make up the current parties.

As stated before I don't trust the conservative element in the Liberals largely for the above reasons and their pandering philosophy.

I have no doubt It was not a vote for Abbott.
Equally I think he will get a lift in the polls, for a time.
He can regard himself as lucky, that Parliament is not to sit until February.
Few wish to consider this, but Greens took them selves out of the climate change debate.
Given two conservatives voted to pass the changed bill, surely if the greens had too we would be close to passing it.
Compromise, the basic oil of politics was not on the table for the increasingly radical greens.
Not only in these very safe seats but increasing in the future the greens are unlikely to be of much use in bringing about real change.

I think the by-election results are an endorsement of, not Abbott,but the Liberals new stance on the ETS.

The Liberal party parliamentry members had a secret ballot on the ETS and about 2/3 voted against it. I think if Labor did the same they would get a similar result and I think that would also be reflected in what people generally think. They now know the ETS is a tax and they will have to pay, and there is much more doubt about human induced climate change.

So much for the predictions about a serious backlash against the Libs.

This was the Greens big chance, with no Labor candidates and a hot enviromental topic, but that did not materialise. People are sceptical about a new tax and sceptical about the validity of AGW.

With no personal following, the Liberal candidates must have got a lot of votes that normally would go to Labor. Of course there were a few that went to the DLP, Sex party, etc, but not many.

It seems the theory of AGW is crumbling, time will tell.

I’m sure these by-election results are not an endorsement of Abbott nor of the Liberals stance on the ETS.

Safe Liberal seats, no Labor candidates, what did we expect the results to be??

Peter, I’d hardly say “they held up in a spectacular way”, in Higgins at least, with just ~57% of the vote. In the absence of a Labor contest, that’s not hugely convincing!

Yes it was the Greens big chance, especially with a high-profile candidate like Clive Hamilton. He didn’t do too badly but it wasn’t unsurprising that he didn’t get up. Hopefully he’ll be back for another shot before too long.

We certainly need people like him in our currently hopeless parliament!

I was on the ground at one of the Polling Booths, on Saturday in the Federal Bye Election, and there were serious doubts in the Liberal Party supporters that their vote would hold up. The young barristers, law students and suburban mums handing out the How to Vote Cards, were not confident, and were passionately diligent in their efforts.

As it turned out, the Liberal Party romped it in. What the Honourable Tony Abbott has to do now is address another running sore that the Labor Party has not been able to fix. He must if he is to make Rudd another Scullin, take on the Labor State Governments head on, and insist that they show respect for the efforts of the Canberra politicians.

One of the ways he can do this is to visit Peter Spencer who is two weeks into a hunger strike, up a wind tower at Shannons’s Flat south of Canberra and hear his grievances about the total destruction of the justice system in Australia. The Honourable Tony Abbott has a law degree but never practiced as a lawyer, but with his training is in a position to know the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is in fact law, and that the Attorney General, who did work as a solicitor, is pulling the leg of every Australian pretending that the Parliament did not pass it into law.

It is about a two hour drive to Shannon’s Flat, in the litmus test electorate of Eden Monaro. Historically the party who wins Eden Monaro wins the Election. It is represented by an Army Lawyer, who should be addressing the problem of Peter Spencer. All Tony Abbott has to do to win the next election is give Australians a credible alternative, to the promising jack whose promises are running hollow in respect of homelessness, which verges on hopelessness, and pull the mightily unpopular Labor Governments in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland into line. He can do this by insisting federal laws are obeyed, and win the Christian centre by delivering social and political justice.