Ten years later

Ten years ago today Australia awoke to find, without surprise, that the previous day’s election had unseated the Labor government of Kevin Rudd and chosen his opponent, Liberal leader Tony Abbott, as the new prime minister. It was a decisive victory, with Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition winning 53.5% of the two-party-preferred vote and 90 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. Labor was reduced to 55 seats, with another five for minor parties and independents.

The lack of surprise came not just from the margin but from the sense of inevitability about the result that the media had diligently fostered over the previous two years. Long before precedents or poll results justified any such conclusion, Labor was portrayed as doomed beyond all hope.

And eventually the reports became self-fulfilling, at least when combined with Labor’s own apparent death wish. Continual tension between Julia Gillard and Rudd, culminating in the latter’s return to the leadership in June 2013, finally exhausted the electorate’s patience. Although the leadership change produced a brief revival in support, it had fully dissipated by the time of the election two and a half months later.

But Abbott’s tenure was also a short and unhappy one. The enthusiastic backing of News Corp was not enough to prevent a series of embarrassing episodes and a concomitant decline in the polls, which led to his removal in a party room coup in September 2015 and his replacement by Malcolm Turnbull.

Abbott’s legacy, however, lived on. The Coalition remained in government for a further seven years, with narrow election wins in 2016 and 2019. And it remained identifiably Abbott’s party, with neither Turnbull nor his successor, Scott Morrison, departing in any significant way from the agenda that Abbott had set. Abbott himself remained in parliament, scheming for a comeback, until his own constituents disposed of him at the 2019 election.

That did not silence Abbott either: he has popped up regularly since then as a commentator on various issues, and is currently one of the leading organisers in the “No” campaign for the Indigenous Voice referendum. Nor has the Liberal Party made any serious attempt to escape from his influence: an email yesterday from Liberal head office praises Abbott for leading “with energy and discipline” and describes his victory as “a proud moment in our history.”

It also acknowledges that the party “didn’t get everything right in Government” and has “a responsibility to learn the lessons from our defeat,” but under Peter Dutton’s leadership there is little sign of such a process.

The critical turning point in recent Australian politics was the 1996 victory of John Howard, which allowed him to shape the Liberal Party in his own image. But although Howard’s vision was narrow and conservative, he was also a skilled politician who knew to respect the electorate’s limits. Under Abbott, Morrison and Dutton that restraint has evaporated and the party has taken itself out of the mainstream with a minimum of self-reflection.

Australians are used to the idea that American trends tend to arrive here with something of a time lag. Some have suggested that in this case it went the other way, and that Abbott was a precursor of Donald Trump and the Trumpist politics that has since spread to a number of other countries (including such phenomena as Brexit, of which Abbott was a strong supporter).

But Abbott was no Trump. He was both an ideologue and, at least by the standards of politics, an intellectual; two terms that by no stretch of the imagination could be applied to Trump. His frequent political mis-steps were signs not of a lack of ability, but of a basic disdain for democracy – his goals were set independently of popular approval, and his changes of front always related to means, not to ultimate ends.

And the (again, for want of a better word) intellectual concerns that animate Abbott and his occasional colleagues – like Canadian pop-psychologist and führer-aspirant Jordan Peterson – are not necessarily the same as those that animate the Trumpists. That has not stopped them so far working as close allies, but there is no guarantee that will continue.

To pick the most obvious example, Abbott and his Liberal successors have shown no sign of emulating Trump’s support for Vladimir Putin; they remain firmly in the Ukrainian camp. Since I think this issue (or at least the clash of worldviews of which it is a symptom) is driving something of a realignment in western politics, that’s something to keep an eye on. More about that next week.

But there’s one striking similarity between Abbott and Trump. Both Trump’s victory in 2016 and Abbott’s near-victory in 2010 (the essential foundation for the 2013 win) were largely the product of enormous and uncritical media attention: some of it no doubt politically motivated, but mostly due to editors and proprietors hungry for good copy, which both men provided in volume.

In each case, the media decided that selling papers and advertising space was more important than the future of their country. Sad.