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IN January, Tony Abbott seemed finished as Prime Minister. But how things have changed. Now the leader under pressure is Labor’s Bill Shorten. Just ask his smiling deputy, Tanya Plibersek. The mischief began last week, with Shorten away and Plibersek acting leader. First, Plibersek declared Labor should now force its politicians to vote for gay marriage, rather than allow a conscience vote. Many Labor MPs were outraged. MPs — including devout Christians — who would feel morally obliged to vote against party policy could be expelled under Labor’s rules. Labor could split. Shorten, on his return, quickly rejected Plibersek’s bullying...

The security situation in the Mediterranean will continue to deteriorate to the point where we can expect Islamist raids on European islands, a recently retired Royal Navy Admiral has told Breitbart London. [snip] Rear Admiral Chris Parry CBE, the straight-talking former Director General of the Ministry of Defence Development, Concepts, and Doctrine Centre, ... made the comments in an interview this week as European nations gathered to discuss the sudden migrant crisis gripping the Mediterranean. THE THREAT OF ISLAM Parry, who warned in a government paper in 1990 that Islam would replace Communism as the main threat against the West...

While American leadership on the Islamic State terrorist group has been marked by reluctance and lethargy, the response of its Australian ally has been strikingly different.The anodyne words of the Obama Administration in describing the terror threat have been conspicuously absent in the highest levels of the Australian government. The latter has demonstrated repeated willingness to identify the enemy, with repeated references to “Islamist” and “the Muslim community”, and is yet to use the term “violent extremism”. This comes amid reports that Prime Minister Tony Abbott canvassed unilateral action against ISIS in Iraq with 3500 ground troops, with Australia’s leading...

HOW I’ve laughed. The howling pack of journalists trying to destroy Tony Abbott may have left him stronger. There are many reasons why the Prime Minister is making a stunning recovery in some polls. ..... And it’s working. First came a Newspoll showing Abbott more than halving Labor’s lead. Then came Monday’s IPSOS poll that (exaggeratedly) claimed the Liberals were now only a whisker behind, 49 per cent to 51. But there is one factor in Abbott’s recovery that media hasn’t yet admitted: Abbott’s media haters finally went too far and made him an underdog. They made it too obvious...

WOW. Despite everything they’ve tried to throw at Abbott — false claims about “unilateral invasions”, heckling at media conferences, wall-to-wall ABC and Fairfax attacks, open campaigning for Malcolm Turnbull and constant peddling of false claims of an imminent challenge — the media have not destroyed Tony Abbott. In fact, they have failed to stop an astonishing recovery, if the latest IPSOS poll can be believed. The Sydney Morning Herald grudgingly admits: “Australian voters have thrown Tony Abbott a lifeline just as his internal opponents were shaping to dump him, with a Fairfax-IPSOS poll confirming a pro-government shift is under way....

TONY Abbott suggested a unilateral invasion of Iraq, with 3500 Australian ground troops to confront the Islamic State terrorist group. Flanked by his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, in a meeting in ­Canberra on November 25, the Prime Minister said the move would help halt the surge of ­Islamic State in northern Iraq. After receiving no resistance from Ms Credlin or his other staff in the room, Mr Abbott then raised the idea with Australia’s leading military planners. The military officials were stunned, telling Mr Abbott that sending 3500 Australian soldiers without any US or NATO cover would be disastrous...

Australia had a problem with illegal immigration. It doesn’t anymore.In the past seven months, not one single illegal immigrant arrived on Australian shores. Not one single boat has docked on the Australian coastline.Compare this to the preceding four year period: over 50,000 illegal immigrants arrived on Australian shores. More than 800 boats. Upwards of 1000 people drowned at sea. A budget blowout of more than 10.3 billion dollars.Those that arrived were given welcome hampers, mobile phones, plasma TVs, housing, medical and other household items- all at a cost to the taxpayer.And the overwhelming majority of those that came were not genuine...

THE ABC is trying to destroy Tony Abbott. Its bias — actually unlawful — has never been so ruthless. Even the ABC’s hand-picked reviewer had to admit this week that the ABC’s coverage of the Abbott Government’s first Budget was marred by anti-Liberal bias — and she hadn’t even looked hard. Colleen Ryan, a former Fairfax editor, had been asked by the ABC to check its reporting of the Budget in the week after it was delivered. This Budget was the country’s first and best hope of reining in Labor’s massive deficits. If it wasn’t a make-or-break moment for the...

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has released details of the video in which one of two accused terrorists made threats about carrying out an attack on Australia and stabbing victims in their 'kidneys' and 'livers'. Mohammad Kiad, 25, and Omar Al-Kutobi, 24, were arrested in their shared squalid granny flat at Fairfield, western Sydney, on Tuesday afternoon, where a police raid allegedly uncovered a machete, a hunting knife, an Islamic State flag and a video featuring both the men, with one recorded making threats of carrying out an attack. During Question Time in parliament on Thursday, Mr Abbott said he was...

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott is facing an uphill battle after a Newspoll has revealed the Coalition’s worst polling ­figures, and Liberal MPs are divided on the leadership spill. The latest Newspoll, taken ­exclusively for The Australian, shows the Coalition’s primary vote down three points to an eight-month low of 35 per cent. Labor is up two points to 41 per cent. In two-party terms, the government’s vote went to 43 per cent with Labor on 57 per cent, which is the Coalition’s worst result since November 2009. Tony Abbott has admitted he could be removed as leader on Monday but...

8.31am: Half an hour to go. You can read a handy pointer to how a leadership spill works here (although do note the 102 partyroom has been reduced to 101 after one MP called in sick): 8.28am: Tony Abbott will need to channel John Howard’s historic 2001 recovery in the polls if is to emerge victorious, says Mathias Cormann: ‘Abbott has done this before’ 8.25am: Chris Kenny is saying on Sky that he is hearing there is strong support for the spill. 8.22am: Tony Abbott spoken briefly while leaving the church service.“We want to put the internals behind us and...

No link yet - this is breaking news based on leaks.

JOHN Howard has urged the Liberal Party to give Tony Abbott more time to improve his performance amid signs the Prime Minister will stare down a leadership spill today but risk an ongoing revolt and subsequent challenge. The former prime minister said that “obviously some things have to change” but that Mr Abbott should be given the chance to fix the problems, in an influential move in the battle over the government’s future. Malcolm Turnbull will contest the leadership if today’s spill succeeds but Liberal MPs said a majority was unlikely to vote for change today despite frustration with Mr...

In recent weeks, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has started referring to the Islamic State terrorist organisation by a name they reportedly despise — Daesh. Australia’s allies in the Middle East have suggested the Western world not use monikers such as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), or IS (Islamic State) as they legitimise the group’s aspirations. “Daesh hates being referred to by this term, and what they don’t like has an instinctive ­appeal to me,” Abbott said. “I absolutely refuse to refer to it by the title that it claims...

THE United States embassy in Canberra advised President Barack Obama not to make the provocative, anti-Abbott speech on climate change which he made at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. That the President acted against the advice of his own embassy reveals a deeply divided and in part dysfunctional Obama administration, unable to reconcile its foreign policy objectives and its domestic imperatives. The speech was not only damaging for Tony Abbott, as it will be used by all his opponents on climate change up until the next election, it was a disaster for US foreign policy, because the gratuitous climate...

The focus of the 2014 Group of 20 summit meeting in Brisbane, Australia, was on stimulating economic growth across the industrialized world. Thanks, though, to President Obama’s grandstanding and attempted sabotage of the agenda as laid out by the host country, climate change also came to prominence. For several months prior to the G-20, and despite strong Australian resistance, radical environmental groups had been lobbying for inclusion of global-warming issues on the meeting’s agenda. Mr. Obama was happy to oblige them. His endorsement of the U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change just before the G-20 was a signal that he...

THE Queensland government, as host of last weekend’s G20 ­summit, is incensed over what it sees as an ill-informed, insulting speech from Barack Obama about climate change, the Great Barrier Reef and coal. Federal Coalition members are also angry at the US President’s public intervention in the Australian climate change debate at the G20 last Saturday, when most of his remarks in the summit’s closed session on energy, where the issue was discussed, were devoted to US gas supplies and production that have been boosted by coal-seam gas and shale oil. Tony Abbott told the G20 session that the “four-fifths”...

TONY Abbott has foiled Barack Obama’s attempt to hijack the G20 with climate change, refusing to put a cent into the US President’s push for a $10 billion global green climate fund. And as chair of the G20, he succeeded in ensuring global economic growth and job creation was at the top of the final declaration yesterday, delivering a blow to Mr Obama’s attempts to elevate climate change to a first order issue .... ... Mr Abbott refused to allow the final communiqué to include a binding requirement that all G20 nations commit to the Green Climate Fund announced by...

BARACK Obama blindsided the Abbott government in Brisbane, pretty viciously. Through his remarks on climate change, he has damaged the government politically. It’s a strange way to treat a friend but it is ...Obama’s presidential style, especially as the power ebbs from him in the dying days of his reign. ...damage may not be long-lasting because the US President’s remarks bore little relation to anything he can deliver or will do. Instead, they reprise the most ineffably capricious and inconsequential moments in the Obama presidency: grand gestures, soaring visions, which never actually get implemented in the real world. Obama went...

PRIME Minister Tony Abbott has promised to send Australian military forces to the Persian Gulf to assist in attacks on the Islamic State. He told media in a press conference in Darwin today that he had decided to prepare and deploy an armed force to the UAE to assist the United States in its military action against the Islamic State’s forces in Iraq and Syria. He warned “should this extend into combat operations, it could go on for some time” Mr Abbott said his reaction to the latest video showing the execution of British aid worker David Haines was: “Shock,...