By ABC's Barrie Cassidy Friday 6 February 2015

Photo: Tony Abbott is closely aligned with the chaos of the past six or seven years, but Malcolm Turnbull is immune. (AAP: Daniel Munoz)

Liberal Party MPs have to make a simple judgment - is Tony Abbott right or wrong when he says changing leaders will make their bad situation even worse? And if he's not the best leader, then who is? Barrie Cassidy writes.

Liberal Party MPs around the country contemplating Tony Abbott's fate can only get the judgment right if they properly understand why the Coalition has been deep in negative territory for 14 months now.

All sorts of excuses and explanations have been advanced.

The Trade Minister, Andrew Robb, the architect of some of the Coalition's best campaigns, told Jon Faine: "We (the Cabinet) feel we've fingered the things that have unsettled people and have overshadowed a lot of our achievements, and in fact frustrated us in the Senate and elsewhere."

And what did they finger? According to Robb, "there were some surprises in a policy sense; the way in which we rolled them out; the co-payment and the university changes. There's a lot of merit in these policies, but the way we rolled them out allowed our opponents to categorise them as cuts, when in actual fact they are significant structural changes to two very important parts of the economy."

"We should allow more time for debate of these things ... and we're confident that if we can get some clear air for the leader and the leadership group we can turn things around."

That does help to explain why the Government has struggled since the May budget; but what it doesn't explain is why the Government was in trouble well before that, five months into office and five months before the budget.

Why was the Abbott Government judged so harshly so early, particularly when the first few months were devoted to ridding the country of unpopular measures like the carbon tax and the mining tax, and shifting the balance on asylum seekers policy, the very issues that helped propel them into office in the first place?

Andrew Catsaras's graph averaging out the polls since the election is instructive.

The rot had set in by January 2014 when the Coalition trailed by 48 per cent to 52 per cent. A post-budget slump reduced their vote to 46 per cent. There was a marginal recovery, and then another even more pronounced slump that opened up a 10 point gap.

The key then is to analyse why the Government was on the nose virtually from the start.

Perhaps the closest anyone has come within the Coalition to nailing that is Western Australia Liberal Dennis Jensen who advanced the Churchill theory on 7.30: "Tony Abbott has been an absolutely fantastic opposition leader: in my view, the best the country's ever had. In effect, he has been a great wartime leader. We now need a great peacetime leader and quite frankly, the Prime Minister is still operating on that wartime footing."

You saw that when the Prime Minister said of his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, that she was "the smartest and fiercest political warrior that I have ever worked with".

A peacetime Prime Minister, reaching out across the community, needs a policy wonk, a conciliator, not a street fighter.

Then the problem was further underlined at the National Press Club Monday when Abbott made the extraordinary statement that people vote Labor only in "a fit of absentmindedness". When is the last time a political leader criticised voters for how they voted? How can that persuade them to reverse their vote the next time? What does that say about his mindset in terms of accepting and embracing people around the country as they are?

The fundamental truth surely is that Abbott was elected not with any enthusiasm or capital; he was elected as the mechanism to put an end to the failed, disunited and chaotic Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments.

That was his purpose, and once that was achieved, political malaise set in once again.

Trust very quickly evaporated. The devastating rhetoric in opposition started to haunt him in government. The simple creed, that a change of government would fix everything, collided with reality, especially the notion that debt and deficit was all Labor's fault and not part of internal and external economic dynamics.

Inevitably the rhetoric of "all things to all people" was going to lead to broken promises and disappointments.

So now the party room has to make a simple judgment - is Abbott right or wrong when he says changing leaders will make a bad situation even worse? Would it lead to the kind of chaos that Labor experienced?

It would if a defeated Abbott behaved as Kevin Rudd did, immediately setting about regaining the leadership through undermining and leaks. Is that what Abbott is saying he would do? Surely not.

One of the myths of politics is that changing prime ministers or premiers invariably leads to disaster.

Paul Keating governed for five years after knocking over the popular Bob Hawke; Julia Gillard won minority government after toppling Rudd and would have won majority government had he not leaked against her in the middle of an election campaign. Denis Napthine was on track to win in Victoria until the federal budget blew him away. Mike Baird is doing well in NSW after replacing the well-respected Barry O'Farrell. It doesn't have to be a disaster. It all depends on how it is handled, and how well the governing party copes with the change.

And the big difference between the Rudd downfall and potentially that of Abbott is that the move would need no explanation. It would neither surprise nor disappoint the majority, especially after the shenanigans of the last week or two.

What the public needs and wants is to eventually draw a line under a six or seven year period of dysfunctional and chaotic governments. Electing an Abbott-led government didn't do it. He was too closely aligned with the chaos through his ferocious prosecution of the previous government. You could argue that similarly, Bill Shorten, has a problem because of his role in the downfall of two prime ministers. Even Julie Bishop, who was at times savage and personal in her parliamentary attacks on Gillard, is not immune.

Malcolm Turnbull is immune; above it all.

Perhaps there is now a need for a variation on the 1983 theme - Bringing Australia Together.

Perhaps the public has been ahead of the parties for a long time now; the solution - the man that can draw the line under the chaos - might have been there all along, waiting for the call up.

But the question remains: can the Liberals move that far to the centre, or would that too be seen by the right as "a fit of absentmindedness", this time by their colleagues?

Barrie Cassidy is the presenter of the ABC program Insiders. He writes a weekly column for The Drum.

The public still wants an end to the chaos - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)