An interesting thread in the Coalition leadership melee is that the dissidents are focusing on unpopular policies as well as just looking panicked about the opinion polls and the fact they and many of their colleagues may lose their seats.

Carefully raising some of Tony Abbott’s most unpopular moves is an effective way to appeal to other disaffected MPs and keep the destabilisation spiralling in the absence of any declared alternative candidates to spruik.



If the leadership changed, it would also give a new leader concrete things to change – even if they had sat in the cabinet that made some of the decisions being criticised. That would be a better start to a new prime ministership than saying something lame like “we were a good government that lost its way” as Julia Gillard was forced to do. It is laying the groundwork for a new leader to have a chance of giving the electorate a reason for the change. That doesn’t necessarily mean the electorate would buy the rationale, but it would at least give a new leadership team something to say.



And it leaves Abbott constantly on the defensive over his leadership style, and his policy record and his future agenda, without it being explicitly compared to anyone else’s style, or ideas or plan.



First Andrew Laming announced his private member’s bill to abolish knights and dames altogether – an obvious attempt to force colleagues to choose between the prime minister’s most unpopular policy ever and their loyalty to the leader himself.



Then Mal Brough dissected the Medicare co-payment policy and insisted it be “taken off the table” altogether. Despite flipping and flopping on its various permutations, the government remains wedded to a “price signal” for visits to the doctor, as the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, made clear again on Wednesday.



But as Brough pointed out, government spending on GPs is not the most out-of-control part of the health budget and is the most efficient place to spend money because it stops people getting sicker. It’s an argument backed by evidence and many health experts, and one the government has never effectively countered.



Even the veteran minister Andrew Robb, who backs Abbott, told ABC radio on Wednesday the government’s “policy surprises” on education and health had overshadowed its achievements and allowed the Labor party to “worry people”.



If this is a pattern, other policy sore points will be targeted by the dissidents next.



In the meantime Abbott and his supporters sound like they are offering up the same old slogans in defence of policies the electorate has already decided it doesn’t like.



The GP co-payment and the higher education reforms are still floundering around in the Senate. Deficit, the prime minister tells us, is still a looming crisis and “intergenerational theft”, but his last budget didn’t do all that much about it. He is now telling us he has done the hard yards, he will not cut much more and he is thinking about additional small-business tax cuts. When I asked a very experienced Liberal politician this week how that possibly added up, he said: “Well, of course it doesn’t.”



Childcare spending is absolutely a better way to keep more women in the workplace than the “signature” paid parental leave scheme, but the government has argued the opposite for the past five years.



Some in the Liberal party believe Abbott’s response to the impossible task of fighting a leadership battle against no one is to flush his opponents out – first with Tuesday’s leaks about a private meeting, after which Julie Bishop was forced to declare that she wasn’t counting votes and would not challenge, and on Wednesday with stories that Malcolm Turnbull had been ringing backbenchers to seek their vote. It is impossible to say whether this is true.



But we do know the prime minister’s most potent argument is that the Coalition should not descend into the same kind of chaos that discredited the Labor party. And that argument doesn’t really cut it if the Liberal party already has.

