He’s ‘too archetypically conservative’. He’s too much of a ‘King Catholic’. He views the world through a ‘narrow ideological prism’. He’ll ‘split the party’. He’s ‘unelectable as prime minister’. Under his leadership, the centre-right Liberal party will become ‘a down-market protest party of angry old men and the outer suburbs’.
As these barbs indicate, Tony Abbott is as much a hate figure among Australia’s left-leaning academics and columnists as Margaret Thatcher was in the senior common rooms of Britain’s great learned institutions. But just as the BBC/Guardian forces badly underestimated the Iron Lady, so too have the journalists down under been spectacularly wrong about the ‘Mad Monk’. For Abbott — a monarchist, Rhodes scholar and devout Catholic — has almost singlehandedly resurrected the conservative cause in the Antipodes. At last Saturday’s federal election, the government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard copped what Abbott called a ‘savage swing’. So much so that the Australian Labor party not only conceded a double-digit poll lead in just a few months, it has now lost its governing majority. And although it could still run a minority government on the backs of a few Independent MPs, Labor is battered, bruised and bedevilled. Not since 1931 has a first-term government lost its parliamentary majority.
It was not supposed to be this way. When Kevin Rudd defeated the Liberal-National coalition government three years ago, the conventional wisdom predicted a New Labour-like political realignment in Australia. Not only did it spell the end of John Howard — the 33-year parliamentary veteran who president George W. Bush once lauded as a ‘man of steel’. It signalled the nadir of conservatism and the dawn of a new era of progressivism. After the 12-year interlude of the Howard era, we were told, normal programming had been resumed.
From early 2008 to late 2009, the political and media class followed the Labor script. Rudd was in the political stratosphere, apologising to indigenous Australians, rolling back pro-market labour laws, prosecuting his case to combat what he called ‘the great moral challenge of our time’ (global warming) and blowing the big budget surplus bequeathed by the outgoing coalition government on wasteful pork barrelling. Meanwhile, the opposition parties were vacillating, divided and leaderless, unable to present a clear conservative alternative to Canberra’s big-government agenda. A 15- to 20-point poll disparity was the norm.
But that was then. The turning point came last December when Abbott took over the Liberal leadership. His predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, a David Cameron acolyte who is best known in Britain for his crusading role in the Spycatcher case in the 1980s, had proved a willing accomplice in Labor’s agenda, most notably its plans to rush an emissions trading scheme (ETS) into law on the eve of the Copenhagen climate gabfest. Within a few months, though, Abbott became such a formidable challenger that Labor panicked, literally overnight. Faced with a series of bad opinion polls, Labor hard-heads removed the seemingly impregnable Rudd in an internal party revolt and installed Gillard, who as Australia’s first sheila prime minister was favoured to increase Labor’s majority in parliament.
But like most leadership crises, this one ended badly. The factional union thugs who run Labor executed someone they loathed (Rudd) but, in the process, they sparked some revenge knifings in the form of highly sensitive Cabinet leaks. All of this was a recipe for disaster.
But there’s another more plausible explanation for the dramatic political reversal in Australia. Abbott did the very thing so many British Tories have shied away from in recent years: he had the political nerve and moral conviction to sell his conservative agenda.
The contrast with the Tories is telling. Cameron is a ‘moderniser’ whose ‘progressive conservatism’ is well past all that Thatcherite talk of free markets and family values. Abbott unashamedly supports what he calls ‘the standard liberal-conservative predilections for smaller government, lower taxes, greater freedom, a fair go for families and respect for institutions that have stood the test of time’. Whereas Cameron inches close to his opponents to contest an ever smaller patch of the middle ground, Abbott has the guts to differentiate himself from the rest by strongly opposing Labor’s big spending, debt-ridden policies and supporting tough border protection. Although his message aggravates the metropolitan sophisticates, it resonates with his party’s conservative base as well as Middle Australia, where the political gravity remains right of centre in the post-Howard era.
Perhaps nothing better demonstrates this point than Abbott’s response to climate change. For years, the Aussie debate had been conducted in a heretic hunting environment: it was deemed blasphemy to dare question Labor’s grand ambitions to implement an economy-wide cap and trade scheme. Even many Cameron-style Liberals wanted to bow to Labor’s agenda. But Abbott bravely challenged this cozy consensus, reportedly describing man-made global warming as ‘absolute crap’ and an ETS as ‘a great big tax to create a great big slush fund to provide politicised handouts, run by a giant bureaucracy’.
At the time, commentators predicted that his ‘ill-judged’ opposition to the ETS would amount to ‘electoral oblivion’, a ‘political suicide mission’ and ‘the road to ruin’. If anything, it was a political godsend for conservatives. Following the Copenhagen fiasco, and with the ETS beginning to look like an electoral liability, Labor apparatchiks went to water and postponed its introduction to 2013.
Abbott’s success was so impressive that even a former socialist like Julia Gillard could not avoid his gravitational pull and she was forced to define herself in relation to him. In essence, she and her spinners decided to give up on old battles — a 40 per cent mining tax, soft asylum-seeker policy, the republic, gay marriage — as lost, and fight Abbott on his own terrain. But there was a difference. Abbott’s positions were based on conservative convictions whereas Gillard was insincere and calculating. Most voters knew she had many masks; they just didn’t know whether they’d seen her real face.
Whether or not he emerges as prime minister, and agree with him or not (I disagree with him on the Afghanistan war which he strongly supports), Abbott has not been afraid to challenge progressive orthodoxies and provoke people into thinking and then arguing about liberal received wisdom. The lesson: in our spin-soaked political environments, conservative convictions still count. Someone should tell David Cameron.