by Bernard Keane
Crikey
Entering the mind of Tony Abbott is slightly scary. He is, after all, an enthusiast,
in the old sense of someone with rather strong doctrinal convictions. But he is
also a more complex character than the Mad Monk caricature would suggest;
this is a man, after all, who but for the grace — perhaps literally — of God might
have become one of Jonno Johnson’s chook rafflers on the Right of NSW Labor,
lining up with the hardline Catholics of the SDA.
He is also, courtesy of mere chance, probably now the highest profile replacement
in the event something untoward happens to Malcolm Turnbull. The faked email
affair, Christopher Pyne’s absence that week, and the timing of the Abbott book
has provided an unexpected shot of credibility and coverage to a man until recently
languishing, by his own admission, a long way from the action.
Abbott observes in the book, and repeated at his Press Club remarks yesterday,
that John Howard was a better Prime Minister in the 1990s than if he had won in
1987; defeat had purged him and made him a better leader. Judging by Battlelines,
Abbott has his own political journey ahead of him, but it’s a start.
Critically, the journey needs to take him away from John Howard, not merely
because the book is at its best when Abbott unmoors himself from his fallen
leader, but because, as Abbott said yesterday, the success of the Howard
Government, like all governments was peculiar to its time, and times change,
requiring new political generations to solve new problems and win new battles.
It may be difficult. Abbott clearly idolises Howard, describing his Government
in rapturous terms and continually returning to Howard’s philosophy and
experience as a conservative touchstone. Abbott is prone to idolising — B.A.
Santamaria also looms large in his life and thinking, as do other male leaders
Abbott found compelling as a young man. One suspects it gets in the way of his
understanding of the Howard Government, which he variously describes as
conservative, liberal and, above all, pragmatic.
His adoration for that Government leaves unanswered the question of why it
stumbled so badly with what Abbott calls the “catastrophic political blunder”
of WorkChoices, and why a government led by a man who in the 1980s despised
Medicare, Asian immigration and big government, became, in the mid-2000s,
the biggest taxing and spending government until then and one running the
biggest immigration program. There’s also a question — which the Right doesn’t
seem interested in addressing, of why the Howard Government was so like UK
Conservative and US Republican Governments, who all increased the size of
government or lacked fiscal discipline in contrast to their rhetoric.
It may be that Abbott is still not quite sure how to articulate his own brand
of conservatism. Unlike Peter Costello, whose political philosophy remains
something of a mystery despite his memoirs, Abbott devotes considerable
length to discussing Australian conservatism. Like many ideologues, and not
just those on the Right, Abbott sees his ideology everywhere. Most people
have conservative instincts, he avers. Friedrich von Hayek is revealed as a
closet conservative. Social conservatism is fundamentally similar to economic
liberalism.
Indeed, conservatism is why western societies have changed so much (yep,
I didn’t quite get that bit). By the end of an entire chapter exploring Australian
conservatism, it appears to embrace pretty much everything except the
activities of trade unions, whom Abbott clearly loathes.
When we finally get onto policy, Abbott finds the footing firmer and going easier.
He lacks any sort of overarching economic analysis but his three concerns are
defending middle-class welfare, fixing federalism and devolving responsibility
for health and education. For Abbott, middle-class welfare is an unmitigated
good, and means test the work of the Devil, or at least of the Devil’s Labor
helpers. Abbott happily justifies an entire culture of handouts to those who
don’t need them because of an obsession with effective marginal tax rates
and a desire to allow women to remain at home. Abbott keeps his faith out
of the book for the most part, but he can’t help but show just how much he
supports John Howard’s view that governments ought to encourage women
to drop out of the workforce and have kids.
“Women have fewer children than they would like,” he declares.
Indeed, women only feature in Battlelines as frustrated childbearers looking
for more support to stay home and raise children. He does admit the experience
of some of his female colleagues has changed his views, and argues that the
Howard Government missed an opportunity to establish a paid maternity
leave scheme, but undercuts it by arguing that employers should be compelled
to pay for it, not government — in effect suggesting that only stay-at-home
mothers merit taxpayer support.
Imposing parental leave on employers isn’t the only extravagance in the book.
Indeed, Abbott has followed the Howard lead and is a big fan of government
expenditure. He variously proposes dropping capital gains tax on new investment,
dumping means-testing on the baby bonus and Family Tax Benefit (A),
guaranteeing a minimum income level, adding dental care to Medicare and
spending an extra $1b on paying teachers, while proposing only the lifting of the
pension age to 69 (an excellent idea, albeit one that he says wouldn’t save much
money) and eliminating superannuation tax concessions by way of offsets.
It’s on federalism that Abbott makes his most substantial break from Howard,
and it’s where he’s strongest, accurately critiquing the current Government’s
buy-off-and-bribe “cooperative federalism” and drawing on his own experience
in government, particularly in health, to nail the problems of the current funding
structure. He proposes a constitutional amendment to give the Commonwealth
the power to override the States anywhere it likes — a mechanism he admits
might be misused by Commonwealth ideologues — he refers to the Keating
Government on IR but omitted the Howard and Rudd Governments using it
to override euthanasia and gay union laws. Abbott also wants to devolve as much
responsibility for health and education as possible to local communities and boards.
There’s plenty more, but touched on very lightly. Abbott’s comments on foreign
policy — including our rise as a regional power and the glories of the Anglosphere
— are best treated as excusable embarrassments and ignored. He has a visceral
dislike of Kevin Rudd, going to great lengths to bag him on any issue possible,
which suggests his self-identified goal of learning from what the Labor opposition
did well will be beyond him. There are some errors: I would hope it is not now a
given that Paul Kelly devised the idea of “the Australian settlement” when the
original idea was actually Gerard Henderson’s in Australian Answers. And Abbott’s
brief discussion of the LNP doesn’t actually make any sense.
But whereas Peter Costello failed to give any real insights into either the
Government that he was a critical part of or his own take on Australian
conservative thought, Abbott does both, and occasionally does it well. It’s a
start, though, not a finish: if Abbott wants to rest on his laurels for a while,
he should use it as preparation for more and better writing in the future.
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