Out, damned spot! Take meddling Tony with you

"Stubborn stains on your shirtfront? Gravy on your favourite blue tie? Spots that shouldn't be there on your leopard print? You want to look fresh and new but everything comes out of the wash the same old grey?

"Try Polliegone, our new wonder product. Its active ingredients, Reality and Self-Awareness, work to clean up and brighten the dirtiest laundry. It removes the grime you never thought you'd shift. Add a cup and a half to your next load and we promise you won't believe the difference!"

If only it were that simple.

As the Liberal Party learns once again, some stains persist no matter what you throw at them. Tony Abbott is one of them, along with his sidekick Peta Credlin. No amount of scrubbing seems to get rid of them. Not being turfed out of the prime ministership by his own party after only two years in the top job. Not losing his own seat. And for both of them, not a decade of being largely ignored as a pair of fringe right-wing commentators.

Since the May 3 election loss, Abbott and Credlin have been back in the trenches, waging war. Not against Labor, as you'd expect, but against their own party and its new leader Sussan Ley and the moderate faction that prevailed in narrowly electing her to the top job.

Abbott is demanding Ley proceed with her predecessor Peter Dutton's federal takeover of the NSW division of the party, prompted by the latter's egregious failure to nominate candidates for last year's local government elections. The takeover has always been opposed by the moderate faction, seen as a naked power grab by their rivals on the right.

The last thing Ley needs as she firms up her leadership is Abbott shouting from the sidelines about a factional brawl irrelevant to most Australians. And the last thing the Liberal Party on the whole needs is a failed former leader exerting influence over its inner workings.

There's nothing new about former PMs making unwanted intrusions into their parties' affairs. Howard and Keating you can understand; love or loathe them, they made names for themselves in office and earned their place as historical artefacts.

But Abbott? As PM, he was such a disaster, even his own faction helped turf him out. There was his calamitous first budget, which broke a slew of election promises. His captain's calls, including reinstating knighthoods and bestowing one on Prince Philip. His climate denial. He wasn't helped by his gaffes, from eating unpeeled onions to winking while talking to a sex worker on radio or the 30 opinion polls which showed he and his government were on the nose. In two short years, he'd turned a landslide into a mudslide. It's been downhill for the Coalition ever since.

So his lingering sway over the party is inexplicable. And his meddling - including his role in the defection from the Nationals of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price - will do nothing but destabilise the Liberals, already at rock bottom.

Ley would do well to learn some lessons from Labor, which fends off deftly Keating's occasional explosive barbs. It still shows great fondness to its former PM but his influence over how the party functions is negligible. If the Liberal leader can demonstrate she's immune to Abbott's sidelines hectoring, she can only go up in the public's estimation.

Right faction Liberals would also benefit from distancing themselves from Abbott. They don't need his intrusion when they have much more contemporary talent in their ranks, Andrew Hastie and James Paterson included. You know, people with some understanding of the 21^st century.

As for Abbott, a full cycle of Polliegone might help him realise that winning factions is less important than winning government. And that continuing to exert influence over the Liberal Party will do nothing for its credibility or his own. Reality and self-awareness can cure tone deafness.

HAVE YOUR SAY: Should Tony Abbott stop meddling in Liberal Party affairs? Is his lingering influence over the party surprising given his failure as a PM? Do you have more respect for former prime ministers who ride off into the sunset, keeping their opinions to themselves, than those who keep themselves in the public eye? Email us: echidna@theechidna.com.au

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THEY SAID IT: "Justice means minding one's own business and not meddling with other men's concerns." - Plato

YOU SAID IT: Billionaires' money would be better spent fixing problems on Earth, wrote Garry, rather than indulging fantasies about colonising Mars.

"Thank you, Garry, for giving voice to my internal dialogue," writes Margaret. "Humans evolved on Earth, with Earth, along with the other life forms. Why in the heck would we want to be transplanted into an alien environment with no animals, no vegetation, no breathable air, where existence is a perpetual struggle? We have to cling onto the last chances we have here and try to salvage what we can or else we go under as a species and take a bunch of other species with us. Making and/or possessing large amounts of money and the power that comes along with it, seems to come at a price - debit on the common sense, rationality and humanity side of the ledger.

"We can learn an enormous amount from exploring space, but we don't need to live in impossible conditions to do it," writes Sue. "I would have put Musk's fantasy in the mid-life crisis category but I think I prefer your Peter Pan syndrome diagnosis. What is it with billionaires? With all that money, why can't they do constructive things like create jobs, fund health and wellbeing programs in areas of need - that would probably give them tax breaks as well - lead the way by developing renewable energy technology, buying land and creating programs to revitalise the populations of endangered species? Those would give them the fame they seem to need and do everyone some good as well."

Chris writes: "I reckon that it's a great idea about Musk, Bezos and the whole gang heading off to Mars. The sooner the better. It would be even better if they also took along Donald Trump and his entire wrecking gang plus all the members of the US Congress and Senate as well. That way, we could clean out the whole shebang and start again. What about including Benjamin Netanyahu as well? Also, shove in Putin and maybe Xi Jinping, the North Korean El Supremo and their government leadership and all the Hamas gang. It'll have to be a pretty big rocket to take all these jokers but, boy, wouldn't it be worth it to see them all blast off and never come back?"

"Garry, you leave little for me to say; you have covered the subject well," writes Maggie. "So I'll just add that moving a few (dozen? hundred?) people to Mars does nothing for the billions left behind. I hope that Musk gets to Mars soon. And stays there."

Anita writes: "A wonderful argument against Mars' colonisation, Garry. Because we've been wrong before in underestimating the potential of exploration, most assume we're wrong again. They think Mars is another 'New World' like the Americas or Australasia. This is not so. Human beings are adaptable omnivores, but we still have a limited number of options regarding habitat. It has to be 'Earth-like', so they think terraforming will solve it, but it won't. The radiation could kill us en route! We have to spend the funds available on viable projects to remediate our environment. Aiming for human settlement of Mars is pie-in-the-sky, wishful folly."

"It is everyone's responsibility to get one's priorities right," writes Arthur. "Wisdom is required to get priorities right. Unfortunately being wealthy does not equate to being wise. Musk, Bezos and Trump demonstrate that to be true. The poorest people have to decide between eating or spending their sparse resources on luxuries. They make a wise choice to eat. The wisdom of their choice is immediately obvious. The wealthy can decide to buy half a dozen motorcars which are of no use to them but the stupidity of their decision is not obvious, nor is the morality or lack of it clear. Some billionaires, the wiser ones, spend large sums on charity but they are in a minority."