Toby Manhire: Bumbling Abbott Key's best friend

Tony Abbott seizes the US and Japanese leaders in a weird folk-dance manoeuvre. Photo / AP

Australian leader’s talent for serial faux pas makes his counterpart in Wellington look like a political giant

As spill-prone as a pissed kangaroo pouring cocktails, Australia could soon see its fourth change of Prime Minister in four years. Less than halfway into the term, amid the fallout from a catastrophic performance in Queensland state elections, Liberal Party backbenchers are worried about their prospects and they blame Tony Abbott.

Even many of Abbott's former cheerleaders in the Australian commentariat say he's a goner. As a spoof headline put it: "Julia Gillard rushed to hospital after overdosing on schadenfreude".

It's all a bit of a worrying prospect for John Key, too. Not because his Government is in the same ideological territory, nor because he and Abbott are soulmates particularly. It's all about contrast. The Australian PM is living, breathing, slithering evidence of the famous line by that Tasman-striding colossus John Clarke: "We don't know how lucky we are, mate."

While Key's credibility is tested by a recurrence of that brain-fade condition, this time in relation to police investigations into Mike Sabin, it is a walk in the park compared with the reputational damage brought upon Abbott by broken promises.

In Wellington, any rumblings of discontent or talk of National Party succession are drowned out by the agonised screeches washing across the Tasman. A column in The Australian - a Murdoch newspaper where a young Tony was once employed as a journalist - yesterday diagnosed "a complete breakdown of trust inside [Abbott's] Government, from top to bottom". Calls to overhaul Key's office pale in comparison with the furious demands by Conservative critics, including Rupert Murdoch, that Abbott produce his chief of staff's head on a stick.

As for the economy, Key has a man called English who has furrowed his brow slightly further over whether the promised surplus will be achieved. Abbott has a man called Hockey who has aged a decade in a year after being assailed for flipping, flopping and serially cocking up.

The straw breaking Abbott's back is his "team captain" decision to knight Prince Philip. As it happens, Key did much the same in 2012, making the Queen's husband a Member of the Order of New Zealand. It was daft, and Key was rightly criticised for this act of royal sucking-up, but not as daft as Abbott's rehash.

The New Zealand honour was announced as part of the Queen's Birthday round; Abbott honoured the man who once asked an aboriginal Australian, "Do you still throw spears at each other?" on Australia Day. And he has since confessed he did it against the fervent advice of pretty much everyone.

If you find Key's oratory plodding and repetitive, consider Abbott's speech on Australia Day 2014: "We celebrate the history that has made us who we are; the country that we love and the values and institutions that underpin it." He liked it so much the speech in 2015 went: "We celebrate the history that has made us who we are; the country that we love and the values and institutions that underpin it."

Oh well, he had other things to worry about, like knighting Prince Philip.

While Key delivers a reliable supply of faux pas, Abbott's are big, bolder, and altogether creepier. Apart from the entertaining "Canadia" and the "suppository of all wisdom" gaffes, there's his enthusing over female MPs' "sex appeal", his heartfelt messages about what "the housewives of Australia need to understand as they do the ironing", and that sleazy wink at a radio host when a phone sex hotline worker called to comment on the Budget.

Both men have three-way handshakes in their resumes, but while Key looked goofy at the Rugby World Cup, Abbott outgoofed him at the G20, grabbing the Japanese PM and the US President in a weird folk-dance manoeuvre. And Key's derp-face selfies appear altogether less mawkish compared with the infamous budgie-smuggling Tony in his Speedos.

Put Abbott beside Key and the New Zealand guy looks like a forward-thinker on climate change, a friend of refugees, a servant of the underprivileged.

If the decision by Key to use his speech at Waitangi yesterday to argue the case for joining the war effort against Isis seems ill-judged, it is dwarfed by countless examples of belligerent Abbottian "Team Australia" rhetoric, dripping in jingoism.

That contrast is a gift for Key. So Abbott's crisis is a problem for him, too; the most palatable successor, Julie Bishop, is much too human and untainted to stand alongside.

What to do? There must be someone in the New Zealand Prime Minister's office who could be sent to help. Find poor old Tony a schemer, a gunslinger, a mongrel. How about that enthusiastic cricketer David Warner? Does he have a blog?

Come on John, give us a day for all Ordinary Kiwis

Here we are again: February 6, Waitangi Day, or as the Prime Minister called it, "family fun day". That's "family" in the usual sense, rather than the geopolitical "family" which connects New Zealand to the mother country, and obliges us to join all their wars. Anyway, family man John Key, namby pamby progressive that he is, was up in Waitangi yesterday marking the 175th anniversary of the Treaty signing, in outrageous defiance of Ordinary New Zealanders, who, according to their official spokesmen, universally deplore the attention-seeking outbursts of the "grievance industry" and would much prefer a truly national day, you know, like Australia Day, which is a real laugh around the barbecue and that. (Nobody mentions that for Aboriginal Australians January 26 is "Invasion Day", because that's extraordinary.)

As an Ordinary New Zealand gentleman put it on the radio yesterday, ONZers want a day where they can "step out and say, 'Go, you bloody Kiwis!'". ONZers want to celebrate the things that matter to them. And what are those? From the available data, in the form of the most-viewed rankings on New Zealand news websites, it's pretty clear what matters to us: office sex romps.

So let's ditch this Waitangi nonsense and henceforth celebrate Office Sex Romp Day, a festival for all New Zealand. Enthusiastic colleagues everywhere will rip down the curtains, turn on the lights and copulate all over the office furniture. The rest of us, who are more bashful or work from home, will drink heavily on the street outside, cheering and singing the national anthem. Office sex romps, barbecues and some carefully timed firework displays. Go, you bloody Kiwis!