A glance at Britain after thirteen years of Tory rule highlights the contrasting great achievements of Tony Abbott, our 28th Prime Minister after his landslide win against Labor ten years ago on September 7. Abbott not only mercifully ended the appalling Rudd-Gillard regime but was much more impressive than the last five UK Tory leaders as well as of course his two Liberal successors.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery and so it is that the hapless Rishi Sunak in January started repeating Abbott’s promise to ‘stop the boats’. Since then, 21,000 more illegal immigrants have crossed the Channel, with the assistance of the UK authorities. Over 100,000 have arrived this way on the Tories’ watch. In the past year, of the 45,000 who arrived, two were removed. Over 50,000 illegal immigrants are being put up in hotels across the land, at a cost of £6 million a day. Thousands of hotel staff have been sacked to make way for government contractors who take over.
Efforts to establish new legislation to deter the people smugglers, chiefly through offshore processing in Rwanda, are interminable. Meanwhile, Tory ministers tolerate Home Office civil servants maintaining their long-established tradition of white-anting any attempt to stop illegal immigration, spending the rest of their time on initiatives such as pushing for greater recognition of the hitherto shamelessly overlooked rights of staff who change gender on a regular basis.
Sunak has now acknowledged that he may not be able to stop the boats by the next election, due around the end of 2024. The issue is ‘complex’, he says. He’s tried to change the subject by launching a campaign to encourage more people to take up playing chess.
It’s not hard to imagine Abbott in opposition leader mode in full flight in Question Time laying into Sunak over this shambles. Sunak might not be in his current predicament of heading to an election with a major broken promise if he’d asked Abbott to stop the boats, as Boris Johnson asked him to help out on trade. But the British establishment is irredeemably squeamish about robust border protection and will probably remain so.
By contrast, it’s startling to be reminded of the speed with which Abbott stopped the boats. While in 2013, the last of the Rudd-Gillard years, 20,587 illegal immigrants arrived on 300 boats, in 2014 there was just one and in subsequent years none.
Abbott of course left a legacy of a wide range of other achievements. He abolished the carbon tax Labor said it wouldn’t introduce; he increased defence spending from Labor’s 1930s-level of 1.5 per cent to the NATO target of 2 per cent. And while Labor focussed on the vanity project of getting Australia a temporary seat on the UN Security Council, Abbott directed the completion of free trade deals with our top three export markets, China, Japan and Korea. In doing so, Abbott proved again John Howard’s line that Australia doesn’t have to choose between its geography and its history. He achieved more to help our exporters than any other leader in our history – and more than all Labor’s prime ministers put together. This legacy includes launching negotiations to achieve a free trade agreement with the EU, which, before Brexit, seen as a single economy, was the largest in the world; even minus Britain, it’s still the third-largest. Labor oddly ignored this opportunity to expand our trade opportunities beyond Asia. The initiative laid the groundwork for the recently-concluded Australia-UK free trade deal. Compared to Abbott’s long list of achievements, the legacy of his Liberal successors Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison is thin, with only the latter’s AUKUS deal allowing Australia to develop nuclear-powered submarines worthy of note.
In cutting short Abbott’s prime ministership to just two years, the Liberal Party didn’t just defenestrate a leader who is both serious-minded and has a better ability to get on with ordinary Australians than other recent Liberal prime ministers. They also ousted someone with an outstanding commitment to service, both to charity and to community voluntary work. It would also be hard to find a politician with more decency, a stronger sense of humour and a better judge of character. Having had the opportunity to study Vladimir Putin at close range, in early 2022 he was one of the few who accurately predicted that the tyrant would launch a war against Ukraine.
Had Abbott’s term not been cut short, his achievements would almost certainly have included a major step to reconciliation with the first Australians. To the profound irritation of the Left, Abbott had no rivals among Australia’s political leaders when it came to familiarity with and interest in Aboriginal affairs. His regular stints doing voluntary work in Aboriginal communities, and his commitment to live and work in them for a week each year if elected prime minister, were unprecedented. Based on his deep familiarity with Aboriginal affairs, he planned a referendum on constitutional recognition for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander in 2017 on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 referendum, which established that the indigenous population would be treated equally with other Australians in censuses. Abbott was confident his referendum would command the 90 per cent level of support which the 1967 referendum did. But Turnbull didn’t pursue the idea, so we now have the disaster of Labor’s ill-conceived and divisive alternative.
Only ten years ago, no one talked of the ‘Left wing’ of the Liberal Party. But unfortunately for Australia, it’s since been relentlessly in the ascendant. Tony Abbott was torn down by the elements in his own party for whom his proven election-winning abilities were less important than his conservatism on abortion and gay marriage and his defence of the monarchy. The Coalition drifted into standing for little more than Labor-lite. Peter Dutton and his strong rejection of Labour’s ‘voice’ proposals represents a commendable correction and he deserves additional credit for reviving Abbott’s sensible alternative referendum proposal. But as Abbott’s experience, and that of Britain’s Tories, reminds us, like other Anglosphere conservatives, he’ll need to be strong not to bow to the relentless pressure to capitulate to the new pieties of the woke-liberal establishment.
Mark Higgie was Tony Abbott’s international advisor 2010-14
