Battlelines drawn: the individuation of Tony Abbott

Shelby Steele has a problem with Barack Obama. He believes the patently smart, mellifluous and fluent 44th President of the United States has arrived in the highest political office without ever properly defining himself (The Australian, January 2-3, 2010). The way aspiring political leaders do that is by taking positions, to show their hand and, thus, to give us a sense of their personal and political character.

Steele’s critique of Obama suggests that this process of political “individuation” is directly both a function of, and a window to, authentic political character.

Tony Abbott is a politician whose career is a more or less conscious reflection of the Steele Doctrine. Direct and forthright in his engagement with politics and policy, he appears to be happiest when he is being most authentic, even when it generates discomfort or even outright hostility.

Publication of Battlelines late last year was a major contribution to the individuation of Tony Abbott. The fact that it emerged so soon before his accidental elevation to the Liberal Party leadership only serves to render its significance potentially even greater. But accident can be destiny. The book offers a timely view into the gathering political character of a man who could be the next Prime Minister of Australia.

When you talk to people about Abbott, they often recall that he opposes stem cell research, trained to be a Catholic priest, was a boxing blue at Oxford and was one of Howard’s favourite enforcers. But he has angles that make him genuinely interesting. He is used to patrolling the borderlands of the liberal-conservative distinction. And for all his ability to adopt uncompromising positions which some find neither comfortable nor attractive, his life suggests a genuine capacity for community connection and engagement with people.

The other thing people often overlook is that Abbott has been in the politics business for 16 years. This is no neophyte or pretend “non politician”. He has some familiarity with the tools and methods of public power.

Abbott explains that “a litmus test for effective Liberal leadership is finding meaningful common ground between the party’s more liberal and more conservative tendencies.” (p57). Conservatives and liberals alike share a natural preference for freedom and giving people room to shape their own lives. But working out how that preference should play out can only be done, Abbott argues, in the real world of specific policies and remedies rather than argued over in the abstract (p60).

“Conservatives,” Abbott declares, “are engaged in their country’s history, proud of its symbols, concerned for its welfare, attached to its values and vigorous in its defence.” (p69). He lays claim to an instinct to “defer to authority and to respect tradition”. What matters is that each individual has been shaped by the past and will influence the future, “having both ancestors and descendants to keep faith with”. This, he argues, is an instinct “deeply ingrained in human beings, even if it’s grossly under-appreciated by intellectuals”. Conservatives, he concludes, mix inspiration and pragmatism as they remain “conscious of both loss and hope”.

Abbott suggests “there are few problems in contemporary Australia that a dysfunctional federation doesn’t make worse”. He explains that “the state governments have legal responsibility for issues that only the national government has the political authority and financial muscle to resolve … the state governments tend to wield power without responsibility while the Commonwealth suffers responsibility without power” (p 113).

Abbott advocates major change to the federation. He outlines his plan for a constitutional amendment to “provide that the Commonwealth Parliament can make laws for the peace, order and good government of the country”.

In his critique of the current government, Abbott claims that “… it lacks any clear rationale or narrative for the blizzard of announcements and almost manic activity in which it’s engaged; and … its leader is not a well-formed political personality whose acts seem to be considered expressions of consistent convictions” (p34). This is in contrast of course to John Howard, a major influence and mentor for Abbott, and presumably by inference with Abbott himself, intent on pitching his more muscular and authentic political character against the insipid persona of his opponent.

Using the 2020 Summit as his launching point - an event of which Abbott is predictably critical - he sketches the kind of Australia he presumably would be happy to incubate should he get the chance.

“A successful society such as Australia is unlikely to be improved by radical change,” Abbott argues. He claims that contemporary Australia is, in most respects, a better country that it was 40 years ago “precisely because there have been so few radical departures from traditional values and institutions”. “We have built on our strengths,” he explains. “We’ve adapted and evolved. Australia today has certainly changed, but it’s by no means unrecognisable as the country of our parents and grandparents” (p152).

In 2020, Abbott is confident that “Australia will still have one of the world’s strongest economies because the current yearning for magic-pudding economics will turn out to be short-lived”. The United States, he predicts, will remain the world’s strongest country and the partnership with America will still be the foundation for Australia’s security. Australia will remain what Abbott has learned to describe as a “crowned republic” because, he argues in a typically conservative cadence, “we will have concluded (perhaps reluctantly) that it’s actually the least imperfect system of government”.

Abbott agrees that we will be more cosmopolitan than ever but perhaps less multicultural “because there will be more stress on unity that on diversity.” Some progress will have been made towards “closing the gap” between Aboriginal and other Australians’ standard of living, but that will reflect for the most part a willingness by fewer Aboriginal people to live in what Abbott describes in several places as “welfare villages”. Much of the improvement for Aboriginal people will be because “more of them will have received a good general education”.

More generally in Australian society, families won’t break up any more often, Abbott suggests, “because old-fashioned notions about making the most of imperfect situations will have made something of a comeback”. But later he admits that “regretting the rate of family breakdown is not the same as casting moral aspersions on everyone whose marriage has failed. If the marriage is making the life of a spouse of child wretched, it may best be ended” (p176).

By 2020 there will have been bigger fires, more extensive floods and more ferocious storms “because records are always being broken”. But sea levels will be much the same, he suggests, desert boundaries will not have changed much, and “technology, rather than economic self-denial, will be starting to cut down atmospheric pollution (pp153/154).

It is common sense to minimise human impact on the environment and to reduce the human contribution to increased atmospheric-gas concentrations. But it doesn’t make sense “to impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future”. His pragmatic environmentalism includes advocacy for bike paths, more showers in work places so people can walk or ride to work and an understanding of the personal autonomy that people get from their cars and not having to rely on often inefficient and unreliable public transport systems (“kings in their own cars”, as he describes it).

Abbott suspects that much of the global warming debate is being run by those seeking to achieve major shifts in lifestyle to accord with their values and beliefs. But suspect motives don’t de-legitimise good policy. “The fact that a fringe would like Australians to live like the Amish,” he concludes, “doesn’t of itself invalidate reducing carbon emissions as prudent insurance against possible future harm”.

“I doubt,” he concludes, “that Australia in 2020 will seem alien to someone who’d been out of the country for the previous decade. Much stays the same even in the midst of huge changes. Short of an economic catastrophe, powerful external threat or improbable domestic revolution, the changes of the coming decade will be modest and incremental” (p178).

Modest and incremental change is presumably what we could expect from PM Tony Abbott who will know “what to try to preserve, what to change and how change should be brought about” (p153). Conservatives are not optimists or pessimists, Abbott rehearses, but realists. They have a proper appreciation of the strengths of society as well as its individual and collective capacity for folly. They have, he explains, an appreciation of the need to get things right but also an appreciation of how easily this can go wrong (p72). A conservative is someone who “normally only changes what has to be changed, makes the changes conform as far as possible to established principles and afterwards maintains that nothing much as really changed at all”(p73).

John Howard is Abbott’s archetypal conservative reformer, going with changes that were “in accordance with the best values and characteristic behaviour of the Australian people”. In the Northern Territory intervention, for example, Howard was adopting “opportunism based on values” (p77), looking for policies that “could be described as conservative or liberal but what mattered most was whether they worked” (p76).

Abbott’s outlook on issues of global security in a shifting and uncertain world is predictably fashioned around the central role of the US in global affairs. He accepts that if Australia is to matter in the wider world, Australians should expect more, not less, future involvement in international security issues (p159). He admires America and doesn’t question “Americans’ collective desire to be a force for good”.

Some people have compared Abbott to Mark Latham, seeing in both some shared characteristics of blunt speaking, an instinct for a stoush (the back cover blurb of his book stereotypes Abbott as “parliamentary pugilist”) and a willingness to muscle up to cut through and make a point. Abbott would doubtless be horrified by the comparison.

But I wonder if the comparison might more accurately be with Bob Hawke, another Rhodes scholar who learned how to combine his considerable intellect and capacity for direct, engaging communication with the levers of public power to fulfil a sense of personal destiny and prosecute a distinct political agenda. And someone who, like Abbott, decided pretty early on that his strongest suit was his authentic personality and slightly uneven, but genuine character.

Political leaders become interesting when they show us who they really are, something which happens as they take stands, often unpopular and counter-intuitive, on issues that define their political character. The evidence of his political career thus far, and in Battlelines, suggests Abbott is happy to live by the exacting standards of this imperative. He seems to be a man dedicated to the art and craft of political leadership and to mastering its powerful and unpredictable rhythms. Writing him off as a creature of the many stereotypes which cling to him, and which he sometimes nurtures, would be a mistake, I think.