And the other thing Bernard, your notion about getting frozen out doesn’t really work - look at Lindsay Tanner. Competent handle on your work sells itself. Tanner shouldn’t be so high profile but he is. Swan is used to being the political head kicker and shouter. But that doesn’t work for a solid reliable trustworthy treasurer - he seems way smart enough, he just needs to develop a much better bedside manner like his fireside chat with Laurie Oakes yesterday on 9 (though bedding down a $15 Billion spend over 5 years does sort of create a post coital calm all of its own).

Bernard: Implying that Hockey is capable of running NSW is preposterous.

Can’t we do a deal with Nauru where we send all these Liberal failures to Nauru? We pay them a wage and inject their parliamentary pensions into the Nauru economy. This is a win-win scenario. It’ll save us heaps on our aid bill. There must surely be close ties between the Libs and the Nauruan “government” forged during our foreign policy glory days of the Pacific solution? Oh, how I miss those halcyon days when we were deputy sheriff and where history had come to an end.

Mind you, the nasty little Jesuit is very much missing his time in the sun.

Bishop is a lightweight. Her position as deputy leader was very much because she controlled the WA Libs, and Nelson needed those votes to take the leadership. I expected her to depart with Nelson, so was surprised when Turnbull kept her on - maybe he wanted a weak Treasury spokesman so he could control the depsatch box on questions on the economy.

Perhaps it is due to a lack of female talent in the Libs, in which case putting Bishop up to balance Gillard is starting to look like tokenism.

with Barnett making a hash of the West and going into defecit, He has pulled the rug from under Bishop. the West doesn’t need her, Turnbull doesn’t need her, and heaven knows the country doesn’t need her.

if Turnbull decides to vote with the Govt on IR reform, then as the last samurai supporting Work Choices, Bishop will have little choice but to fall on her sword

WA are the last hold out of Work Choices with all that resources boom till recently.

Bishop is the economic dry wedded to WC as an ideology and a political strategy for her powerbase. But now a few things have sort of changed her whole mojo.

First there’s the Global Financial Crisis, now Economic Crisis with such as Twiggy Forest down $10 billion in paper wealth. That’s still big bikkies in any one’s language. Now miners in WA on their $150K blue collar wages might even be thinking … err we might actually change our mind on that work choices bizzo now. We never really liked that Howard Battler tag now nice Mr Rudd is there giving my mum a good Chrissie Present. And my daughter reckons the Deputy PM is cool, and well everyone knew Work Choices was John on his anti union ideology. Just as well it got trashed last week. And if the mine closes at least Labor are the Mummy Party.

In fact that Julie Bishop banging on about unions and Work Choices … well you know it’s all a bit embarrassing really now the GFC is scaring the bejesus out of the blokes at work. She can just f*ck orf.

And being expert politicians there in the Coalition they see Bishop as a pollie defying gravity like Fortescue’s shareprice. Like nature, politics abhors a vaccuum. She ain’t got a power base much in WA anymore, especially with the Libs back in at State level with the goodies. Van Onselen is just a symptom. So is the grumbling in the Party room. It’s the economy stupid!