Tony Abbott, Alexander Downer for Lib president? What a choice

For a failed party that currently votes in the under-twenties below One Nation even in Coalition with the National Party, the choice of federal president is a fitting one: two former male political failures.

In the blue corner, Australia’s worst prime minister, Tony Abbott, failed to win for even two years before his party abandoned him and then lost his seat in what remains the best demonstration of how the Liberals have systematically alienated their heartlands.

And in the other corner, also blue, is Alexander Downer, briefly Australia’s worst opposition leader and then worst foreign minister, best known for his handing over of Australian foreign policy to the Bush administration and his still unexplained role in bugging the East Timor cabinet, who then went to work for Woodside, the main beneficiary of the bugging.