Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott

By Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen

Tony Abbott came to office lauded as the most effective leader of the opposition since Whitlam, but the signs of an imperfect transition to the prime ministership would soon emerge. Why did Abbott fail to grow into the job to which he had aspired for decades?
Backbenchers complained about the leader's office, the lack of access, front benchers leaked about cabinet processes to the media. His long apprenticeship in religion, journalism and political life prepared him for neither the mundane business of people management nor the commanding heights of national leadership.
Public goodwill evaporated after a tough first budget the government failed to explain. Inside the Liberal party individual ambitions and a succession of poor polls produced increasing concern that the next election was lost. As a result, the horse named self-interest won yet again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780522869729

Wayne Errington

Wayne Errington is associate professor at Adelaide University. He has published feature articles and opinion pieces in all the major national newspapers. Together they have written John Winston Howard: The Definitive Biography (2007), Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott (2015) and How Good Is Scott Morrison? (2021).

Book preview

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

11–15 Argyle Place South, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia

[e-mail]

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 McPherson’s 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 ministers—Australia.

Politics, Practical—Australia.

Australia—Politics and government—2013–

van Onselen, Peter, author.

324.0994

Contents

Introduction: Values and Vices

1   Blood Oaths and Backflips

2   Opening Doors for Women

3   Zealot or Weather Vane?

4   Temper, Temper

5   What Does He Do with Those Ears?

6   Loyal to a Fault

7   Only the Penitent Man Will Pass

Conclusion: Confidence Lost

Acknowledgements

Sources

Index

Introduction: Values and Vices

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

Tony Abbott¹

This

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. Abbott’s greatest failure was that, given a period of grace by his party when he survived a leadership spill motion in early 2015, he didn’t 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 Abbott’s 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. I’ve never leaked or backgrounded against anyone and I certainly won’t 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 can’t be good for our country. And a febrile media culture has developed that rewards treachery.’²

Abbott wasn’t 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 Gillard’s leadership by continually allowing Rudd supporters to criticise her performance anonymously.³ Abbott was, of course, the ultimate beneficiary of the sniping against Gillard. Government media management, though, has advanced along with the pace of social media. Commentary and conniving fill the gaps left by governments unable to manage their affairs. Most of Abbott’s bad press came in response to his own public missteps. Or, in the case of the most extensive leak from Abbott’s cabinet, his haphazard policy development processes.

If Australia’s 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 party’s confidence that their leader knows what they are doing. The deficit Abbott’s government faced in opinion polls in mid-2015 should not have been insurmountable. Voters had plenty of doubts about the Bill Shorten–led alternative. Abbott’s 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 Australia’s 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 Abbott’s early goals that caused him the greatest difficulties: pledges to pay down debt and maintain the trust of voters by not breaking promises. He couldn’t 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 Senate’s hostility towards the government’s first budget, but that budget violated Abbott’s biggest commitment—to 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 Abbott’s 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 Labor’s unpopular taxes but the government’s 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 won’t give you a blow-by-blow account of the drama, other than to highlight the most important moments. Instead, the book’s seven chapters set out seven flawed aspects of Abbott’s prime-ministerial relationship with either his party or the public that led to his downfall as leader—his seven cardinal sins. Yes, Abbott continually showed poor judgement. It’s easy enough to catalogue the failure, but it’s 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 Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s failures to learn from. Gaining perspective on that requires some understanding of Abbott’s personality and background, which we provide in the early chapters. It was a measure of Abbott’s 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.

The first chapter examines perceptions of Abbott’s honesty: ‘reap as ye shall sow’. One guarantee of the modern media cycle is that any missteps will be replayed endlessly on 24-hour news and social media. So it was with Abbott’s brief appearance on SBS news on the eve of the 2013 election, when he made a series of guarantees on government spending that he had no intention of keeping. This from the man who had spent the previous three years burning a similarly discarded pre-election commitment from Julia Gillard—‘there will be no carbon tax under a government I lead’—into the public consciousness. All politicians change their minds over time. Abbott was no better or worse than his predecessors on this score. But his management of the broken promises once in office made things worse. Wrestling with his self-image as a decent man, Abbott attempted to obfuscate precisely what he’d promised in the first place.

Chapter 2 defends Abbott from charges of misogyny but analyses two important elements of how he related to women while in government. We start with the debate over the number of women in the new ministry, especially the cabinet. Abbott had been Liberal leader for nearly four years by the time he became prime minister—plenty of time to encourage more women into parliament. The unconscious bias of not promoting women was something Abbott couldn’t recognise. We also seek to explain the relationship between Abbott and his much maligned chief of staff, Peta Credlin. An outmoded sense of chivalry caused him to unthinkingly leap to Credlin’s defence rather than exploring the truth of claims that she was having a damaging impact on the government’s morale. Given the way she was prepared to speak to Abbott in private, he should have been aware of how she may have spoken to his colleagues when he wasn’t present. Credlin had a significantly higher profile than John Howard’s chief of staff Arthur Sinodinos ever did, and with that profile came public criticism. She quickly came to represent the communication and coordination problems in the government, perhaps unfairly. Backbenchers said that they could barely catch her attention, much less get past her to talk to the prime minister. Frontbenchers complained that she would nobble their authority, even entering the debate in cabinet or the Expenditure Review Committee. Abbott defended her at every turn, even after Credlin’s relationship with Liberal deputy Julie Bishop became toxic.

Considering the ideological conflict within Abbott that many have observed, we nevertheless find that zealotry in defending his world view became one of the most important limitations on his ability to understand the nation. Indeed, we explain in Chapter 3 that his commitment to the Western traditions in which he was schooled never left him, making him more reactionary than conservative, seeking to take the nation back to social arrangements it had outgrown. We start with Abbott turning on his base by breaking an important promise to them—the repeal of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. It was the first ideological backflip of his prime ministership, one that alienated some of his most influential supporters. Towards the end of his prime ministership, when he should have been broadening his appeal to address sustained poor polling, Abbott instead turned back to his staunchest supporters, pandering to their prejudices on social and cultural issues. This represented zealotry when it wasn’t required. Abbott’s timing was all wrong.

Chapter 4 is about anger. Understanding Abbott’s battle with aggression is complex. He was no Kevin Rudd, prone to regular outbursts at colleagues and public servants away from the cameras. But there was a seething anger, usually controlled, during Abbott’s prime ministership. The public saw the rage in Tony Abbott when he was confronted by Channel Seven’s Mark Riley with comments Abbott had made to soldiers in Afghanistan as opposition leader. We discuss the way Abbott’s albeit occasional private outbursts of anger amazed colleagues and cruelled chances of building the relationships essential to successful leadership. While an election victory can hide all manner of problems, outbursts of anger in the office weren’t forgiven because the government was struggling in the polls. When it came to controlling his temper, Abbott and Credlin were a potent mix. While he didn’t ‘sweat the small stuff’, as one Abbott supporter put it, she did. With Credlin carrying the authority of the prime minister, this quickly became a problem. The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) managed to alienate journalists and colleagues alike, notwithstanding the efforts of its more affable members.

Abbott’s failure to listen to advice beyond his private office is the subject of Chapter 5. By February 2015 a backbench revolt saw 39 of Abbott’s 101 parliamentary colleagues register a protest vote against the man who had led them into government. There was no sentiment towards the authority of the leader usually afforded to Liberal Party election winners, and no inclination to protect the dignity of the prime ministership or the man occupying the office. Those wavering were mostly concerned about how the public would react to yet another execution of their chosen prime minister. Abbott was sent a message, saved from humiliation only by the binding votes of his frontbench—without a challenger even raising their hand. The vote of no confidence in Abbott emerged from concerns that he wasn’t listening or learning in the job. It was telling that Tony Abbott’s ‘classes of 2010 and 2013’ led the charge against him less than eighteen months after they were first elected to government. Given the prime minister’s refusal to engage adequately with the backbench, MPs started to question his capacity to steer them to victory at the next election. His government’s bond of trust with the voters was never re-established after its disastrous first budget.

Chapter 6 shows how loyalty became a problem for Abbott through the example of his friend, and Speaker of the House of Representatives, Bronwyn Bishop. Her refusal to resign and his failure to force her out became a farce. Even some of Abbott’s closest supporters in the media were openly condemning him. But as we saw on the last full day of Abbott’s prime ministership, he shows loyalty only up to a point. When it became obvious to him that he would lose the ballot, he sought a deal with Scott Morrison to run as his deputy and thereby assume the position of treasurer. Morrison politely declined, questioning why Abbott was suddenly prepared to throw Hockey ‘under the bus’. Another misjudgement, when Abbott put both leadership positions to the vote, gave Julie Bishop the excuse she needed to run as Turnbull’s deputy. In the end Abbott showed loyalty to only one person beyond himself: his chief of staff.

That sins can be forgiven is a tenet of Abbott’s Catholic faith. His failure to learn from his mistakes and change the way he conducted his prime ministership is the subject of the final chapter. Tony Abbott saw no reason to remake himself, so the Coalition government remade itself without him. Leaders like Winston Churchill, Robert Menzies and John Howard who remade their approach to the task usually had more time for reflection. It takes a spectacular failure to prompt the degree of soul-searching required not only to change tactics but also to address personal failings and rebuild the relationships at the heart of leadership. Abbott faced spectacular failure in February 2015, but while he used the following months to change some policies, he didn’t fundamentally change his approach to the job.

John Howard looms large in this book, not just as Abbott’s political mentor but as an example of how Abbott might have led successfully. Shortly after the 2007 election defeat, in an edited collection charting the future of the Liberal Party in the wake of Howard’s departure, Liberals and Power: The Road Ahead, Tony Abbott contributed a chapter entitled ‘A Defence of the Howard Government’.⁴ Having discovered that he could muster only a handful of votes in a post-election leadership contest, Abbott wasn’t ready to engage in the contest of ideas. Instead, he interpreted Howard’s successes almost as a marker to a future Liberal government. It makes eerie reading now, in the aftermath of Abbott’s two years as prime minister. The observations he made shortly after Howard’s defeat—about leadership style, approach to engagement with colleagues, approach to the media and opponents, and what choices leaders must make when choosing their political battles—would have been sound advice for Prime Minister Abbott. However, he took a different path and it cost him the job less than two years after being sworn in. It was what journalist Paul Kelly called Howard’s ‘remorseless self-knowledge’ that ensured he was willing to change the way he governed.⁵ By contrast, during Abbott’s two years in the political wilderness after losing government in 2007, when he was in the shadow cabinet but detached from the daily combat of politics, he learned little, instead using the time to fashion his policy thinking in his 2009 book, Battlelines. His plan was to seize the leadership and defeat Labor, not reflect on how to govern. It is telling that Abbott largely cut himself off from the advice Howard sought to offer during Abbott’s prime ministership.

Abbott had seen the Howard policy-making machine at its peak when he was elevated to cabinet in 2001. Howard sought to find the right balance between leading and listening to the electorate and his backbench, an approach based on his own observations of cabinet as treasurer, his bitter experience of shadow cabinet during his first stint as leader, and the early problems of his prime ministership. The Rudd government was also instructive for Abbott in what to avoid. Rudd was quickly tagged as an ill-tempered micromanager in opposition. Once in office, the stories of a chaotic PMO quickly became legend: a bottleneck in decision-making centred on the prime minister’s desk; alienation of the backbench through a lack of consultation and highhanded treatment from the leader. Abbott mocked Rudd about this across the dispatch box. With quite different backgrounds, Howard and Rudd had in common their elevation to leader a year or so before an election was due. Abbott has been recognised as the most successful opposition leader since Whitlam, the two sharing the relatively rare opportunity to fight successive elections as leader of the opposition. Whitlam’s effectiveness as opposition leader, though, was based around a program for government for which he could claim a mandate and successive election wins. Abbott’s term as opposition leader will need to be reassessed in the light of his short term as prime minister. Every month in government revealed another way in which Abbott was unprepared for the job. He should have taken his own advice, when reflecting on Howard shortly after the 2007 defeat: ‘Howard made the transition from effective Opposition leader to successful prime minister because he had developed a policy framework that touched deep chords in the Australian people.’⁶

All Abbott’s leadership vices were on display in opposition. Even some Liberal MPs who voted for him thought he was just another place-holder and the Coalition was at least another term away from government. Their thinking was to let Abbott loose to mollify the party base and take some paint off Rudd. Shortcomings of political leadership are inevitably about the relationship between leaders and supporters. Abbott’s tendency to alienate those who voted him into the Liberal leadership and those who voted the Liberals into government arises from a combination of his flaws. The thumping victory in 2013 obscured the concerns of his colleagues about Abbott’s personal style, that he was a bully and a policy lightweight. These perceptions of Abbott didn’t so much underestimate the man as underestimate the time it would take the voting public to overcome their distaste for Labor and place Abbott under the microscope.

Public perceptions of leaders can be transformed when they achieve the top job. New prime ministers can delegate the role of attack dog while they set out the vision, lay the wreaths and glad-hand the world’s leaders. Abbott could afford to show more of his positive side—to stoke hope instead of fear. Dispatching Gillard and Rudd, though, would prove much easier than overcoming his own flaws. Abbott misunderstood the task of leader. He demanded respect but he would not lead. Friends of Abbott sat down with him shortly after the 2013 victory, cautioning him not to break promises and to tread carefully in the knowledge that the overwhelming victory was more a reflection on the previous Labor government than an endorsement of what Abbott had offered. In a time when the government was arguing that the economic cycle required bringing the age of entitlement under control, Abbott’s approach to policy development showed poor priorities. As trade minister Andrew Robb attempted to explain after the first spill motion, the public saw some of the more ideological proposals such as increasing university fees as a ‘solution to problems they weren’t aware we had’.⁷ A government that promised to be predictable was springing surprises on a regular basis.

After the problems Labor confronted having deposed a first-term prime minister, it seemed improbable that the Liberal Party would repeat a mistake still so fresh in the memories of voters. One factor blinding Abbott to the looming reality that his job was under threat—not just from Bill Shorten’s Labor Party but from within the Liberal Party’s own ranks—was his confidence that having won government with 90 of 150 seats in the lower house guaranteed time was on his side. Where Prime Minister Paul Keating relentlessly pursued the case for economic reform, as did Howard, Abbott fell back on the slogans that had unseated Labor: surplus good, deficit bad; cut the waste, stop the boats. Find the baddies and wage war on them. There was, we were assured, a plan.

The ‘captain’s call’ of knighting Prince Philip in early 2015 was the catalyst for the first vote on the leadership. But concerns among Abbott’s colleagues went deeper than fears of electoral oblivion. Some MPs wanted to shock Abbott into listening, after which they hoped he would become a better prime minister. Others knew that even an unsuccessful spill motion in February would be the first step towards removing Abbott. Had he been willing to listen to warnings about his leadership style and government decision-making, his secure parliamentary majority and length of time until the next election could have seen him remake himself in office. As Julie Bishop told him when he demanded a public statement of support during the February 2015 spill motion, ‘I’m not your problem. You are your own worst enemy.’⁸ Perth backbencher Dennis Jensen, the first to publicly call for Abbott to resign, advanced the ‘Churchill theory’ that Abbott was a good wartime leader but couldn’t govern in peacetime. Churchill lost his prime ministership in the dying days of World War II as the British public turned its attention to recovery and chose Labour’s welfare policies. Britons brought him back years later as a mark of respect, but there will be no such gesture for Abbott. He was effective in exposing the weaknesses of the Labor government but unsuited to the day-to-day business of running the country. Publishing his masterpiece Triumph and Demise within a year of Abbott’s election win, Paul Kelly noted that ‘Tony was a work