Comments two days after he said he would leave parliament if he lost the prime ministership come as Arthur Sinodinos warns if Turnbull leaves parliament, it would be a tough battle for his seat

Malcolm Turnbull has committed to run as prime minister in a 2019 election, two days after he said he would leave parliament if he lost the prime ministership.



“I can assure you I will be prime minister for a very long time,” Turnbull told reporters on Monday. “I will be running at the 2019 election and will win. So that’s my commitment.”



Turnbull refused to enter into the bitter internal feud, fuelled by Tony Abbott, that continues to plague the government, but the industry minister, Arthur Sinodinos, has warned that if Turnbull left parliament, the battle for his seat of Wentworth would be tough.

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On Sunday Turnbull said he would leave parliament if he lost the prime ministership. His comments again raise the potential of a byelection for the Coalition government, which holds a one-seat majority in the lower house.



Sinodinos, a key Turnbull ally and former treasurer of the New South Wales Liberal division, said Wentworth, a small-l liberal stronghold in the eastern suburbs of Sydney, proved the Liberal party had to cater for both liberal and conservative views.

“Wentworth is always a tough seat to win and Wentworth is a good illustration of the challenge the Liberal party faces, that it has to be a party for all parts of Australia, it has to be a party that appeals to philosophies across Australia and that is why I say it is an amalgam of liberal and conservative,” Sinodinos said.

Sinodinos said John Howard realised the need for a pragmatic principled leader who combined the best of conservative and moderate traditions “while indicating to the community we are not just there to shove one particular view of the world down their necks”.

Sinodinos was speaking as Abbott continued his campaign of destabilisation, which in the past week has included laying out an alternative policy manifesto, calling for the examination of nuclear subs which he did not do as leader and calling for a change of rules in the NSW Liberal division, which he also failed to move on when it was called for three years ago. Adding fuel to the Abbott campaign were remarks by Christopher Pyne a week ago, claiming victory for the moderates in the Liberal party to a meeting of factional allies and hinting at a plan to get marriage equality passed.

Barnaby Joyce described the internal divisions of his Coalition partner, the Liberal party, as an “accursed soap opera” full of “fluff and mirrors”.



Joyce backed in Turnbull’s leadership and accused critics of having an awful lot of spare time.

“If other people want to have other peripheral discussions about basically fluff and mirrors, well they can do it but I’m not going down that path, that’s not what I get paid my wage for,” Joyce told the ABC.



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“I want my nation, your nation, your listeners’ nation to be a stronger place and that’s what I get paid my dollars by your listeners to do and I’m not going to get involved in this accursed soap opera and if other people want to get involved with that, go right ahead.”

At the same time, the acting Labor leader, Tanya Plibersek, has reflected on her party’s bitter internal division during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, saying she feels bad for the country.

“We spent too much time, we wasted too much time fighting each other and I think we learned a very bitter lesson in a very hard way,” Plibersek told the ABC. “We lost government sooner than we should have.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Reflecting on Labor’s bitter division during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments, Tanya Plibersek said: ‘We wasted too much time fighting each other.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

“I know that what’s going on at the moment would be consuming way too much of the prime minister’s intellectual and emotional energy and it’s not good for the country. I feel bad for the country.”

On Monday morning, as the government celebrated the first anniversary of July 2016 election, Sinodinos admitted there was nothing the leadership could do about Abbott’s behaviour.



“If you are the government you can only control what you control,” he told the ABC. “I can’t control Tony Abbott, so what I can do as a minister is keep doing the things I can do in my portfolio.

“What the prime minister is doing, what we are all doing as a team, as a cabinet, as a political party, [is] get the message out there about what we can control.”

But Abbott continued to ignore warnings from colleagues to desist, telling 2GB’s Alan Jones that he simply wanted the best possible government.

“I want us to be the best possible government and we will be the best possible government if we come up with policies that are going to take pressure off power prices, take pressure off housing prices, let’s very significantly scale back immigration, get the budget under control,” Abbott said.



Abbott’s recent remarks also add to the bitter feud between the conservative and moderate factions in the NSW party in the lead-up to a July conference over the preselection rules.



Since his prime ministership, Abbott has joined a push for democratisation of the party, allowing grassroots members a vote in preselections, as they do in other Liberal states. The NSW division will meet in July to consider recommendations to change the rules in John Howard’s 2014 report on party structure.

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Sinodinos said plebiscites were not something new to the Liberal party and the matter would be settled towards the end of July, but the party should always accommodate liberal and conservative elements.

“Conservativism in the Liberal party context has always been about preserving the best of the past while adapting to the future, so what’s happening now is while people debate new issues coming up, how do we adapt as a political party?” he said.

“That is not in itself a bad thing to do, to debate the future direction of the party.

“The question is as a government, you can’t always sit there having ideological or philosophical discussions, you have to get on and do practical things and one of the things that made the Howard government a success was its capacity to retain a philosophical core while also being pragmatic in the pursuit of principle.”



When Abbott lost the leadership, he told a post-ballot press conference: “My pledge today is to make this change as easy as I can. There will be no wrecking, no undermining and no sniping.”



Sinodinos would not enter into debate over the deliberate nature of Abbott’s campaign but he pointed out that the Turnbull government had passed policy measures such as Gonski 2.0 school funding, when the Coalition had previously failed to pass measures.



“We’re changing tack on what we can get through, ultimately the Australian people will judge us on getting the job done,” he said.

“When the parliament is not working, if things are not getting done, it’s the government of the day that pays the price so we have to keep getting things done and that will bring its own reward.”