Peter van Onselen - Battleground

BATTLEGROUND

BATTLE GROUND

WHY THE LIBERAL PARTY SHIRTFRONTED TONY ABBOTT

WAYNE ERRINGTON
and
PETER VAN ONSELEN

MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

An imprint of Melbourne University Publishing Limited

1115 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

mup-info@unimelb.edu.au

www.mup.com.au

First published 2015

Text Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen, 2015

Design and typography Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2015

This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Text design and typesetting by Megan Ellis

Cover design by Design by Committee

Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Errington, Wayne, author.

Battleground: why the Liberal Party shirtfronted Tony

Abbott/Wayne Errington; Peter van Onselen.

9780522869712 (paperback)

9780522869729 (ebook)

Includes index.

Abbott, Tony, 1957

Liberal Party of Australia.

Prime ministersAustralia.

Politics, PracticalAustralia.

AustraliaPolitics and government2013

van Onselen, Peter, author.

324.0994

Contents

It is the nature of things that defeated politicians have few friends.

Tony Abbott

T his book is about a failure of leadership. Tony Abbott won an election with a big majority in 2013, despite enduring poor personal poll ratings. Two years later he was rejected by the Liberal Party. Prime ministers usually go through periods of adjustment to the unique demands of the job. Abbotts greatest failure was that, given a period of grace by his party when he survived a leadership spill motion in early 2015, he didnt fundamentally change his approach to dealing with the colleagues who controlled his fate. Abbott made plenty of poor decisions. He broke promises. He promoted few women to cabinet. His judgement in bringing back knighthoods perplexed all observers. Our aim is to understand the thinking behind such decisions by examining Abbotts values and vices, his approach to leadership and his inability to change that approach when required.

After Abbott lost the prime ministership in September 2015, he took aim at those he blamed for his downfall. There will be no wrecking, no undermining and no sniping. Ive never leaked or backgrounded against anyone and I certainly wont start now, Abbott said. After listing his achievements, and the work left undone, he continued: We have more polls and more commentary than ever before. Mostly sour, bitter, character assassination. Poll-driven panic has produced a revolving-door prime ministership which cant be good for our country. And a febrile media culture has developed that rewards treachery.

Abbott wasnt the first to comment on a media culture that allows the discontented to anonymously destabilise politics. Kerry-Anne Walsh rightly pointed out in her book The Stalking of Julia Gillard the role of her fellow journalists in undermining Gillards leadership by continually allowing Rudd supporters to criticise her performance anonymously.missteps. Or, in the case of the most extensive leak from Abbotts cabinet, his haphazard policy development processes.

If Australias political culture has become especially adversarial in the last few years, Abbott himself is hardly blameless. Live by the sword. Perhaps most importantly, poll-driven panic is avoided by a parliamentary partys confidence that their leader knows what they are doing. The deficit Abbotts government faced in opinion polls in mid-2015 should not have been insurmountable. Voters had plenty of doubts about the Bill Shortenled alternative. Abbotts problem was that neither his ministry nor the backbench had any confidence that the prime minister had the leadership skills to win again.

All newly elected prime ministers start with significant amounts of public goodwill, if for no other reason than that voters want to justify their decision to change the government. Abbott set up four key performance indicators from opposition for his prime ministership, and he quickly achieved two of them: stopping the people-smuggling boats and scrapping the carbon and mining taxes. These commitments were not mere formalities when Abbott won office. Few thought that he could truly stop the boats without destroying Australias relationship with our neighbours, but he did. There were those who doubted that environment minister Greg Hunt would be able to repeal the carbon tax, much less force an alternative policy through the parliament as he did. The abolition of the mining tax was more easily anticipated, but Abbott can still claim credit for achieving the outcome, and quickly. Given the high profile of these issues in the previous parliament, Abbott could reasonably have expected to have built, not lost, political capital early in his term.

It was the third and fourth of Abbotts early goals that caused him the greatest difficulties: pledges to pay down debt and maintain the trust of voters by not breaking promises. He couldnt meaningfully achieve one pledge without breaking the other. Solving what Abbott and his treasurer, Joe Hockey, frequently referred to as a budget emergency was always going to be more difficult than they had made it sound in opposition. Abbott made much of the Senates hostility towards the governments first budget, but that budget violated Abbotts biggest commitmentto honour his promises and not replicate the distrust of the Labor years. What the early achievements as well as failures showed was that the parliament respects an electoral mandate, but Abbotts was very thin. He is ultimately to blame for that because of the way he campaigned. Rarely has an opposition leader had such an opportunity as Abbott did to prepare the electorate for tough decisions, make modest, affordable promises and reap the rewards in rebuilding public trust in politics. The government had a reverse mandate not to do the very things they tried to do, cross-bench senator Nick Xenophon told us. He put an albatross around his neck from the very beginning. Abbott had a mandate to remove Labors unpopular taxes but the governments first budget went way beyond anything foreshadowed during the election campaign.

The story of the last few years will be familiar to most Australians, so we wont give you a blow-by-blow account of the drama, other than to highlight the most important moments. Instead, the books seven chapters set out seven flawed aspects of Abbotts prime-ministerial relationship with either his party or the public that led to his downfall as leaderhis seven cardinal sins. Yes, Abbott continually showed poor judgement. Its easy enough to catalogue the failure, but its far from obvious why someone who was capable of getting to the prime ministership would show so little awareness of the basic requirements of the position. This is especially true of someone who had spent so long in public life before reaching high office, and who had Kevin Rudds and Julia Gillards failures to learn from. Gaining perspective on that requires some understanding of Abbotts personality and background, which we provide in the early chapters. It was a measure of Abbotts problems, though, that when his MPs sent him the most public of messages that he needed to change, via the spill motion in February 2015, he failed to heed the warning. Despair among his colleagues became the strongest emotion. They put themselves out of their misery by putting Abbott out of his.