Better than Abbott, but that says very little. HP; and its good that he'll lose the next election even if he lasts that long.
Massive FF. Though, he's made some dumb decisions (like calling elections last yr).
They had to have elections last year; the real blunder was to go for a July double dissolution election rather than your standard half-Senate in October. Even then I doubt that they'd been in any better of a position if they had waited; they may well have lost the election had they gone to the autumn, plus they'd be dealing with the old Senate (which was hostile to the government and I'd imagine only more so after an election considering that some of the micro party Senators who'd have lost their seats would be kicking around until next July anyway with no real reason to be easy on the party that they probably consider to have cost them any chance of continued power, plus the next July 2017 Senate would still have had a few more hostile elements in it.
Its hard to say how a half Senate election would have gone because god knows how the doubled quota and the transfers that'd have caused would have ended up: I still think that the cross bench wouldn't have been any smaller than in the previous Senate: probably 9 or 10 Greens; probably 2 and possible 3 Xenophon (although him not being on the ticket might have cost them a few votes), certainly Hanson would have got in and One Nation might have found a second Senator and honestly who knows about the other small parties: the lack of ticket voting costs them guaranteed preferences but they may well have benefited from exhaustion: the fact that they got elected in a full Senate election suggests that they'd have ended up with over half a quota in a half-Senate which puts them in a good place to grab the last seat - plus you'd have had Leyonhjelm definately there (and possibly a second Liberal Democrat provided that he didn't have a personal vote), Ricky Muir and the only PUP senator that didn't leave the sinking ship still around for the best part of three and a half years (the Senate normally doesn't change its membership until the July after a Federal Election, hence why in the few elections before the last one Senators were elected and sat around for the best part of a year to get into office), all of whom knowing that they'd face a real challenge with the new voting system and so probably not willing to help the government.
Although it could have been even worse; imagine if they'd had to do a Double Dissolution with the old voting system...
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