The only way out for abbott is vier the side door. Turnbull is an obvious choice, being knifed by abbott would seem not a good idea.
The coalition are in ruins and unrecoverable under the present system.
If Turnbull was the pick, it would mean an election of course.
But probably with rabbit and joe and pyne and bishop gone. Turnbull could possibly win an election.
What ever way they go there is going to be a lot of blood spilt.

Hasbeen
I think you and the liberals will be doing a lot of shuddering.
Personally I think the Abbott government has lost the plot. I can not see how the Abbott government can go to the next election and expect anyone to believe anything they say, which will make it well nigh impossible for them to win the next election whenever it is held.

The best hope I can see for the liberals to win the next election is to replace Abbott and Hockey as soon as possible. Turnbull is the logical choice but whether the party is willing to entertain the idea of changing leaders so soon after a successful election is another question.

The situation is similar in some respects to the problem the Labour party faced before the last election, when they dumped Julia simply because under Rudd they knew they would lose by a smaller margin. In the present case Turnbull may turn out to the Liberals only hope of winning.

The only other possible scenario I can see is all the unpopular measures in the budget fail to get through the Senate and the Liberals claim it was only an ambit claim anyway, in which case they will have to start from scratch with a new budget. That way they might just get away with it, but it begs the question of why go through all that pain for no gain.

The only way that the liberal Party has any chance of facing an election without suffering catastrophic results; would be to get rid of Abbott,Hockey and Pyne ! They need fresh faces really big-time ! Although that will not win at the next Election, that may help towards easing their pain ! I have inferred such on the Liberal website ,where they are all in some sort of state of denial ! You can bury your head in the sand as much as you like,and Tony can box away with his eyes shut, that will not stop the pain that's coming their way !

It remains surprisingly unremarked, but it is worthy of noting The latest federal budget provides for the establishment of Australia’s second carbon tax. That is right. The Coalition government is proposing a carbon tax of its own in the form of an indexed excise tax on carbon-based fuels. It appears that instead of “axe the [carbon] tax”, the more apropos campaign slogan for the Coalition would have been “axe carbon emissions trading and tax carbon energy inputs directly”.
Maybe it’s because it was not an untruth, or was it to replace the original carbon tax, which only fault is it was implemented by labor.
What ever it was its another tax which we were not going to get.
The mining tax is best known as the resource super profits tax, or RSPT. It is designed to replace the confusing array of royalties that mining companies presently pay to the states. Any profit made by mining companies that is above 6% of their capital investment would be taxed at 40%, and all royalties presently paid to the states would be rebated.
The Federal Government says the mining tax is not raising any money. At the same time, it says scrapping the tax will benefit the budget by over $13 billion

The only reason scrapping the mining tax would improve the budget position by $13.8 billion is because the Government included the abolition of eight spending measures in its legislation.
Seven of these measures had direct links to the mining tax in Labor's budgets, but the Schoolkids Bonus - which is the largest single saving at over $5 billion - did not.
Including this measure dramatically increases how much the legislation can improve the budget position.
Furthermore, Senator Cormann did not mention these "associated measures" in his claim. Scrapping the mining tax alone would leave the budget $3.4 billion worse off over the next four years

you would think that Paul1405 would shut up about tax breaks after the billions wasted on the Green religion. No shame!