Careful What You Wish For, Abbott’s Trendy Critics

Before popular perception hardens into conventional wisdom, the misconceptions about the fall of Tony Abbott must be addressed.

A trendy school of thought on the Right says the Abbott government failed because Abbott was not a true believer in economic reform. These critics hold that the Abbott government’s failure to achieve budget repair was to be expected because Abbott allegedly learnt his conservative kind of politics at the knee of Bob Santamaria, and was more of a believer in DLP-style Catholic social justice than in free markets and limited government.

But this account underestimates the real political challenges posed by economic reform. To claim the Abbott government failed because Abbott was too conservative, too Catholic, and not a pure enough economic liberal is to indulge in the fantasy world of student politics where everything can be put to rights, and politicians can crash through simply by being true of heart and pure of conviction. This form of personality politics has simply turned Abbott into a whipping boy for those frustrated by the world the way it is rather than how they wish it to be.

When judged against the historical record, the Abbott government actually sat firmly within the mainstream of Australian politics. If you want to date when centre-right parties in Australia began governing like social democrats, don’t start with the 2013 federal election. Try 1901, when the non-Labor parties cheered the introduction of the White Australia Policy and set the protectionist pattern of the early Commonwealth. Or try 1855, when NSW became the first colony to give the vote to adult males and the institutional foundations of the workingman’s welfare state were laid. Or try 1788, when Governor Phillip opened the government store to feed the convicts, and embedded a lasting faith in the role of the state in Terra Australis.

No federal government has ever governed, let alone run successfully at an election, on a clearly defined economic rationalist agenda — not even the Left’s much-sainted Hawke-Keating government. As the great Australian historian John Hirst has correctly observed, at elections during the 1980s and 1990s the Labor Party “attacked the Liberals for supporting economic rationalism. But when elections were over the Labor government adopted economic rationalism.” The shining era of economic reform in Canberra was due to bipartisan collusion by the major parties, and not due to the triumph of economic rationalism at the hustings — let alone to the ideological purity of the leaders pushing that agenda.

Anyone who doubts this should recall the 1993 ‘unlosable’ federal election. The only aspirant for Prime Minister who has ever run on an economic rationalist platform is former Liberal leader John Hewson. For his trouble, Hewson was dubbed the “feral abacus” by Paul Keating. Ironically, Keating won the election by telling the Australian people that a vote for Hewson was a vote for the introduction of the key element of his Fightback plan. If Labor lost the election, Keating promised that Labor would pass the GST in the Senate.

This is to highlight how difficult it is to govern from the centre-right when the political centre of gravity in the country is located on the centre-left. It took a master politician like John Howard to get the GST legislated without bipartisan support, first by taking his policy to the 1998 election (the exception proving the rule that economic rationalism doesn’t play at the polls) and, secondly by agreeing to a compromise GST package to pass in the Senate. The Abbott government lacked political skill in prosecuting its agenda, especially given the unprecedented Senate situation with the minor parties, but that is not to say that Abbott’s problem was that his economic views were insufficiently pure. Abbott knew, as does any real contender for national leadership, that this kind of purity is a one way ticket to electoral oblivion.

To blame Abbott’s lack of purity for the failure of economic reform is to tilt at windmills instead of focusing on the real issues and political realities. The economic reforms that are needed to achieve budget repair will have to address the sacred cows of the welfare, health, and education systems, which account for the lion’s share of government expenditure. No politician in any western democracy knows how to wind back the entitlements enjoyed by so large a plurality of voters and then get re-elected so as to ensure the reforms endure. Remember the 2007 WorkChoices election — the Howard government’s economically rationalist Waterloo — and the subsequent re-regulation of the workplace by the Rudd government.

Rather than contribute any practical solution to these intractable political challenges, Abbott’s critics have personalised his government’s failure to end the age of entitlement. They have claimed that Abbott’s economic conservatism was apiece with his social conservatism and his Catholic faith. The veiled religious bigotry that has underpinned attitudes toward Abbott is one of the most unattractive recent developments in Australian public life.

Among Abbott’s chief critics on the Right are those who consider themselves to be economically dry and socially wet, and who are more comfortable aligning themselves with the ‘progressive’ social values of the cultural Left. By supporting the media-led campaign to sack Abbott, the anti-Abbott forces on the Right have craved the social approval of leftist elites — they have tried to hang out, as it were, with cool kids at the ABC, Fairfax, and on Twitter. They have more or less agreed with the Left that capital-C Conservatives should be barred from positions of national leadership — hence the thinly veiled delight at the axing of Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews from Cabinet.

But what the trendies on the Right haven’t realised is that this is likely to be counterproductive and to make it even harder to achieve economic reform. The cultural Left do not share their economic values, and freely employ the ‘Conservative’ tag to label proponents of market-based policies. By repeating the opinion poll-shaping attack campaign waged against Abbott, the Left could exercise an effective power of veto over any Liberal leader who does not measure up to their definition of social and economic progressivism.

The unremarked upon significance of Abbott’s fall is that the Left has been politically empowered. Those on the Right who are dancing on Abbott’s political grave should be careful what they wish for. They may yet repent the broader political consequences of allowing the Left to employ the politics of personal destruction to pull down a prime minster not to their taste.

Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.