Julie Bishop for Australian PM? No thanks. By The Spectator Australia.

It has become apparent that Ms Bishop is a political lightweight, with poor, even non-existent, political judgement.

She’s the red carpet-prancing, polo-attending foreign minister who has no connection to the regions or the outer suburbs. She frequently appears vacuous and lacking any real conviction. She’s a fence-sitter on the big issues: SSM, energy, debt and deficit. …

Her (and her current boss’s) enthusiasm for the Iran nuclear deal was and still is troubling. Their joint betrayal of the national interest in ratifying the Paris Agreement at the very moment our major ally was walking away from it remains at the very core of why this government is now in so much trouble.

Were Ms Bishop, rather than a conservative leader, to replace Mr Turnbull, what is left of the older Liberal membership and base would abandon the party forever. The winners of such a change would only be Cory Bernardi and Pauline Hanson. Ms Bishop is widely seen as the woman behind the Abbott coup …

The only way back to electoral recovery and to beat Bill Shorten is for a re-directed Liberal party to get traction once more in the outer suburbs and regions where the swings against them are enormous. (In the trendy suburbs the swings are minuscule in comparison.) Voters in the ‘burbs will not fall for Julie Bishop. The aggregate polls which show her to be popular are as misleading and as self-serving as those which initially said Mr Turnbull was popular — they draw on inner city lefties who are Labor and Greens voters — and are of little assistance in determining whether someone can actually win a federal election. …

The latest Newspoll, showing a majority of Australians would ditch the Paris Agreement for lower energy prices, shows the clear path forward. The new leader needs to be someone who can relate to the hip-pocket interests of voters, for whom each new electricity bill is a kick in the guts. That will never be Julie Bishop. She’s not in their corner.