Punch lines

The Commonwealth, under a coalition government, would devolve management of public hospitals in the same the way it did for the employment services network and nursing homes.

Employment services aren't as capital-intensive as health services are, and there were never any federal government nursing homes: AAP has disgraced itself by implying that there were, and sloppy in not finding this out.

"That's why, generally, Commonwealth services are delivered much better that state services."

Compared to what? The Feds don't run schools, the states don't run defence (look at that masterwork of federal administration, and despair). There were Federal repatriation hospitals but they were handed over to the states.

Mr Abbott said the states were presently running the hospital system with giant top-down bureaucracies.

"The trouble with our public hospital system is that no one is in charge."

That's the very problem with employment services, and defence, and pretty much every exclusively federal area of policy (not a Rudd thing or a Howard thing - it seems endemic to Canberra really). Abbott has no excuse for blithely ignoring it and it is an indictment on journalism as a profession that he was allowed to get away with it. Next time you hear the journosphere screaming about blogs, consider the free pass that so-called professional journalists gave Tony Abbott on these silly pronouncements.

Local administrators were frightened to make decisions without referring to them first to senior health department bureaucrats or the minister's office, Mr Abbott said.

As Health Minister, Tony Abbott projected the ethos of the Howard government whereby any decision could and would be micromanaged regardless of policy, process or any consideration at all, really. He's complaining about an environment that he set up and, if re-elected, would make worse not better. Why did nobody call him on this?

Local hospital boards should be able to keep any revenue they receive from treating privately-insured patients and donations.

Local hospitals face almost no risk of being overwhelmed with donations or in stretching to accommodate private services. This reveals just how weak his vision is, a non-solution to a non-issue.

Abbott's triumph over the Mersey Hospital in Tasmania shows he must be kept well away from any sort of health system anywhere. Healthcare was a weak point for the Liberals throughout the 1980s and '90s, and now it will become one again thanks both to this fool, and the persistent failure to keep his comments to the portfolio to which he's been allocated.

Abbott is mouthing loyalty to Turnbull but actually undermining him, in a similar way that John Howard did to anyone leading the Liberal Party other than himself. He wouldn't know what Liberal health policy is and has no right to pre-empt it. Turnbull might be bemused but he must put Abbott in his box. If he fails to do so the Liberals will find themselves with a leader determined to turn a party of government into a small band of jihadis, who will keep Labor in government federally and in NSW by providing such an obnoxious rallying point such that swinging voters will be repelled from voting Liberal.

Abbott's key flaw, as I've said earlier in this blog, is his fragile sense of manhood - the overweening nature of his participation in boxing and rugby, his abrogation of responsibility over his teenage pregnancy (and his failure to weave that experience into a sensible and nuanced wider policy), his portrayal of the monarchy as a source of maturity which Australia cannot find within itself, his admission that he leaves his wife to raise his daughters single-handedly, and his persistence with a series of silly policies in office for no reason other than "backing down" might make him look and feel weak. Howard had this too, but in Abbott it is much more brittle.

The idea that Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader would help Labor define what it stands for assumes that Labor needs external help in defining itself.

Turnbull must take on Abbott's book and trash it, and with it nailing the politically toxic idea that Abbott might have a greater future than a past. Battlelines has to be presented as an innumerate Fightback, or The Things That Matter without the wit and hidden depths - it is not a manifesto for government of anything but some obscure European principality in the 13th century. The book, and the idea that it is more important than the business of opposition, is a series of punchlines waiting for reality to set up the jokes; Turnbull should set them up and knock 'im down. A chastened Tony Abbott might be motivated to take on Jenny Macklin's stumblebum performance in FAHCSIA; a rampant Tony Abbott is no good to anyone, inside the Liberal Party or out.