Paul Bongiorno

Well, I can tell you that the conservatives in the Liberal Party certainly believe he is and certainly have reached out to him.

But mind you, I believe he reached out to them as well.

What we should keep in mind is that the so-called right-wing liberals or conservative liberals are dominant in the National Party structure.

So he always had the numbers.

And it was quite interesting to see that

The other potential saviour, Alexander Downer, who all his life has been a very conservative liberal, well, the moderates were behind Downer.

But in the end, Downer pulled out and everybody said, look, we've got to give

Abbott ago, we know he'll be like a dog with a bone.

He's a brutally effective communicator.

And let's face it, our backs are to the wall.

So basically, what they were counting on was the fact that Tony Abbott won in a landslide from opposition in 2013 against the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd government.

But that great victory, which was a landslide victory, said, well, look, he knows how to win government.

They maybe forgot he didn't quite know how to hang on to government, but that's not quite their problem at the moment.

Obviously, we are in a degree of competition with other parties and voices on the centre-right, but in the end, our opponent, our enemy, if you like, is a really bad Labor government, a really bad green-left Labor government.

Well, there have been nine polls since the budget.

And in those nine polls, the coalition has gone backwards.

In three polls this week, the coalition's primary vote was just 20%.

And what we've seen is, for the first time this week, one nation in two polls even had more support than Labor.

So the strategy that's been employed since the budget by Angus Taylor and the coalition to go hard to attack Labor, to talk about broken promises, to talk about how damaging it will be to Australia as we know it, all that sort of language,

If anything, it's fed into one nation rather than fed into the coalition.