A Reply to Tony Abbott: Grief Is Not a Mandate
Editor’s Note
In the aftermath of the Bondi killings, former prime minister Tony Abbott declared the attack “an assault on all Australians,” using the language of national unity to advance a familiar ideological script. This article examines who Abbott now speaks for, how his record in moments of crisis undermines his claim to moral authority, and why invoking “all Australians” can function less as compassion than coercion. It argues that grief does not confer a mandate, and that unity, if it is to mean anything, must be earned through restraint, humility and care for those directly harmed.
Picture Tony Abbott at the IPA lectern, Bondi’s blood barely dry, branding the killings “an attack on all Australians.” Unifying? Or just another flag planted on fresh tragedy? Grandstanding on grief, Abbott wants to speak for “all Australians” again. Instead, he climbs private grief, nationalises it, and crowns himself the nation’s voice, while blaming Labor and attacking “radical Islam.”
Before we accept the performance, it is worth examining the script, and the stagehands.
This essay is about three things: who Abbott is now speaking for, what his record shows when grief meets power, and why his invocation of “all Australians” is neither neutral nor benign.
Who Is Mr Net-Zero-Credibility Speaking For?
Abbott is not a former prime minister quietly offering reflection. He is a paid director of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s US outrage sausage-machine. Public disclosures show Fox pays him in cash and stock for his board service; it is a gig worth well over AU$500,000 a year, not an honorary, civic duty.
That role anchors him firmly in a shallow attention economy that monetises fear, moral panic and division. So when Abbott inflates a violent crime into civilisational war, a local horror into another chapter in “radical Islam,” he is speaking from inside the Fox wheelhouse, not from any neutral civic space.
Fox did not elect him to speak for Australia, but it does pay him to keep the outrage cycle turning.
Leadership, Remembered – or Absent
This is not the first time Abbott has been confronted by national trauma.
Australians have seen Abbott face terror before. During the 2014 Lindt Café siege, hostage-taker Man Haron Monis demanded to speak to Abbott live on radio. Abbott never picked up the phone. He followed briefings, stayed silent, and refused to shoulder personal authority at the moment he was being directly asked to exercise it.
Then, confronted with a direct plea in a live crisis, Abbott declined to act. Now, safely removed, he acts decisively on others’ grief.
Leadership is not obedience to advisers; it is judgement in crisis. And courage. The siege revealed a prime minister unwilling to own moral responsibility, or simply intercede, even as he now feels free to beat up Bondi into “an atrocity” that is somehow unique, civilisational, and all Labor’s fault.
“An Attack on All of Us” – or on nuance?
Declaring Bondi “an attack on Australia” does not widen compassion; it abstracts it. It lifts the event out of the lives of shattered families and relocates it in a symbolic nation that politicians can claim to represent.
Abbott collapses a specific act of violence into a civilisational story he already knows how to tell.
Yet Abbott’s own record undercuts the mythic unity he now invokes. As Opposition Leader and Prime Minister, his “stop the boats” rhetoric and derogatory language around Muslims and their “death cult religion” were not accidents; they were deliberate strategies designed to sharpen social fault lines for political gain.
You cannot spend years profiting from division and then drape yourself in unity when tragedy strikes. Moral authority does not reboot on demand.
The IPA Capture
Nor is Fox Abbott’s only institutional home.
In other ways, too, Abbott is no elder statesman guided solely by conscience. He is a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Institute of Public Affairs, a hard-right lobby group bankrolled by mining magnates including Gina Rinehart and other fossil-fuel fat-cats.
The IPA’s agenda; climate science denial, anti-renewables campaigning, deregulation on demand, and opposition to the Voice campaign (because, they cynically argued, a voice for Indigenous peoples would lead to a third chamber and “division”), is not pluralism. It is ideological capture.
A leader who treats a narrow, corporate-funded, and far from transparent lobby as a proxy for the national interest forfeits any claim to speak for the nation in moments of grief.
“All Australians” as Coercion
In Abbott’s mouth, “all Australians” is not inclusive language. It is a device used to shut down disagreement by implying that dissent is disloyal.
Question his framing and you are divisive. Reject his language, and you are quietly marked as un-Australian.
This is not unity. It is consensus by coercion; a rhetorical trick that uses the nation itself as a human shield.
Attention Economics Over Decency
Abbott’s calculation is as obvious as his attention-seeking. In a click-driven media ecosystem, “civilisation under attack” travels faster than restraint. It baits fury, earns shares, and guarantees Abbott another round of interviews and op-eds.
But common decency, simple humanity and good faith resist that logic.
The Bondi attack was a cruel, specific horror: a disturbed father and son radicalised into anti-Jewish hatred. It was not a referendum. It was not a clash of civilisations. Inflating it into an allegory about “all Australians” does not honour the dead; it exploits them.
Once again, grief is climbed, nationalised and monetised.
Who Speaks for Australia?
Abbott’s latest book, Australia: A History, clinches the pattern.
It is a nostalgic hymn to British triumph that skims over First Nations’ ownership, dispossession and the unfinished moral business of colonisation, offering instead a comforting yarn of pioneers and statesmen much like its author.
Reviewers have noted how lightly it treats invasion, massacre and Indigenous resistance, and how little it engages with the plural, contested country Australians actually inhabit.
This is a vision of Australia that is narrow, elitist and superficial: unwilling to face the land’s contradictions, acknowledge its many voices, or recognise achievements that fall outside a colonial, Anglocentric frame.
Like his mentor John Howard, for whom the life of the mind has always been an optional extra, Abbott approaches the arts as ornament rather than necessity and treats imagination with suspicion.
Vision? Wash your mouth out.
Abbott’s new book further disqualifies him from any plausible role as the voice of a pluralist nation built, at its best, on self-criticism, open-mindedness and tolerance. What it does attest to is the reflexive cultural cringe of a ten-pound Pom, still marooned on the margins of the country he presumes to speak for.
Seen Leaders Hide Behind “Unity”?
This is not an argument about ideology. It is an argument about legitimacy.
Grief does not confer a mandate. Tragedy does not license ideology. Unity is not claimed from lecterns; it is earned in silence, restraint, humility, compassion and care for those directly harmed.
While Bondi families bury their dead, Abbott buries nuance. Those families deserve better. Australia deserves better than having its name – and its grief – used as a prop by a man whose primary loyalties now lie with Fox’s ratings and the IPA’s donor base.
Fox News did not elect Tony Abbott to speak for Australia. Neither did grief. Neither did tragedy.
If unity is to mean anything after Bondi, it will not come from those who hide behind “all Australians” as a place to stand. It will come from those willing to step back, listen first, and speak – if at all – with care, restraint and circumspection.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
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His nickname wasn’t Scabbot for no reason.
Sadly, it seems very few, if any of our political leaders know what unity is!! Both the tone and words of their comments are divisive and inciteful, they seek conflict, not compromise.
Until such time as Australia rejects this political duopoly, nothing will change, neither side wants to govern, what they want is control.
He was always a loathsome character, a self-important mediocrity, and an utter failure as prime minister of Australia. No credibility whatsoever.
An unwiped arsehole, a mediaeval primitive, a moronic mouth, a Merde Dog misfit, totally unAustralian, malodorously mucky, vomitous, a pox…but, merry Xmas to all.
Tone the Botty was the most divisive and incompetent excuse for a PM this country endured! His Bondi message was shit!
The statement from this article that deserves strong repetition is this one: “The Bondi attack was a cruel, specific horror: a disturbed father and son radicalised into anti-Jewish hatred. It was not a referendum. It was not a clash of civilisations.”
The reaction to the Bondi attack by RW MSM and grifters followed the Atlas Koch Heritage Foundation script from Project Esther, described May 2025 by the NYT:
‘the think tank is exploiting real concerns about antisemitism to advance its broader agenda of radically reshaping higher education and crushing progressive movements more generally.
Project Esther exclusively focuses on antisemitism on the left, ignoring antisemitic harassment and violence from the right’
Heritage cooperated with anti-immigrant Tanton Network on Project2025 for the Trump regime, while several years ago, in addition to Tucker Carlson, a good friend of the late white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton worked for Fox News reporting to the top; according to Gertz in Media Matters (& NYT) article ‘If you are in business with Fox News you are on the hook for its white nationalism’ (Nov ’22).
Then one of Abbott’s opaque offshore roles is at the Danube Institute Budapest, supported by government and oil company of PM ‘mini Putin’ Orbán; also had employed Abbott’s advisor, but he was disappeared from website when Russia invaded Ukraine, but still hangs around posts incessantly on X….
The same Danube Institute is partnered with Atlas Koch Heritage Foundation of which their Danube lead John O’Sullivan worked along with The National Review founded by Bill Buckley whose quest was to avoid influence of John Birchers, KKK and open anti-semitism.
Fast forward, Orwellian messaging and gaslighting by RW MSM and influencers like Abbott that ‘the left is anti-semitic’, but Americans today would disagree, why?
Heritage Head Kevin Roberts did not call out the open anti-semitism and praise for Hitler in the recent Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes interview.
Headline from Reuters, replicated widely in the US, but not Australia?
‘US Heritage Foundation thinktank staff quit amid antisemitism controversy. Dec 22 (Reuters) – Over a dozen employees have left jobs at the Heritage Foundation or were fired in recent days, according to the influential right-wing U.S. thinktank, as it grapples with allegations from former supporters that it has aligned itself with those accused of antisemitism.’
Shocked not as old Australian elites of the right and left follow 19-20thC culture…..
Andrew, thank you.
This is exactly the through-line many people miss.
What we saw after Bondi wasn’t an organic eruption of concern. It followed a well-rehearsed script developed by the Heritage Foundation under Project Esther, reported by the New York Times in May 2025. As the NYT put it, the project instrumentalises genuine fears about antisemitism to pursue a broader goal: reshaping universities and neutralising progressive movements. Crucially, it targets only antisemitism on the left, while systematically ignoring antisemitic harassment and violence from the right.
This isn’t a side issue. The same Heritage ecosystem collaborated with the anti-immigrant Tanton Network on Project 2025 for a second Trump administration. It also sits uncomfortably close to Fox News, where figures associated with John Tanton moved easily through senior roles. As Angelo Carusone and Matt Gertz documented for Media Matters in 2022, and as you say, the NYT has echoed since, “if you are in business with Fox News, you are on the hook for its white-nationalist problem.” That problem didn’t vanish. It was laundered.
Now layer in Tony Abbott. (Did he ever renounce his citizenship of the UK?) One of his equally murky offshore gigs has been with the Danube Institute in Budapest, a body backed by the Hungarian state and energy interests aligned with Viktor Orbán. The Institute quietly removed Abbott-linked advisers from its website after Russia invaded Ukraine, but the ideological traffic never stopped. The Danube Institute partners with the Atlas-Heritage network, and its Danube lead, John O’Sullivan, emerged from the same intellectual lineage as National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. to keep the overt antisemites, Birchers and Klansmen at arm’s length. That firewall has since collapsed.
Fast-forward to today and we get the Orwellian inversion: right-wing media and influencers, Abbott included, insisting “the left is antisemitic” while declining to challenge antisemitism when it comes from their own side. The silence from Heritage president Kevin Roberts after Tucker Carlson platformed Nick Fuentes, complete with Hitler praise, was telling.
What’s striking is the information gap. In the US, this broke through. On 22 December, Reuters reported that more than a dozen staff had quit or been fired from the Heritage Foundation amid accusations it had aligned itself with antisemites. That story ran widely in American outlets. In Australia, it barely registered.
So yes, your final point lands. Much of the Australian political class, right and left, is still operating with a 19th- and early-20th-century mental map of culture and power. Meanwhile, a transnational network has moved on, learned how to launder ideas, and discovered that moral panic travels faster than context. Bondi became a stage for that machinery, not because people don’t care about antisemitism, but because care itself has been weaponised.
Andrew, thank you.
This is exactly the through-line many people miss.
What we saw after Bondi wasn’t an organic eruption of concern. It followed a well-rehearsed script developed by the Heritage Foundation under Project Esther, reported by the New York Times in May 2025. As the NYT put it, the project instrumentalises genuine fears about antisemitism to pursue a broader goal: reshaping universities and neutralising progressive movements. Crucially, it targets only antisemitism on the left, while systematically ignoring antisemitic harassment and violence from the right.
This isn’t a side issue. The same Heritage ecosystem collaborated with the anti-immigrant Tanton Network on Project 2025 for a second Trump administration. It also sits uncomfortably close to Fox News, where figures associated with John Tanton moved easily through senior roles. As Angelo Carusone and Matt Gertz documented for Media Matters in 2022, and as you say, the NYT has echoed since, “if you are in business with Fox News, you are on the hook for its white-nationalist problem.” That problem didn’t vanish. It was laundered.
Now layer in Tony Abbott. (Did he ever renounce his citizenship of the UK?) One of his equally murky offshore gigs has been with the Danube Institute in Budapest, a body backed by the Hungarian state and energy interests aligned with Viktor Orbán. The Institute quietly removed Abbott-linked advisers from its website after Russia invaded Ukraine, but the ideological traffic never stopped. The Danube Institute partners with the Atlas-Heritage network, and its Danube lead, John O’Sullivan, emerged from the same intellectual lineage as National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. to keep the overt antisemites, Birchers and Klansmen at arm’s length. That firewall has since collapsed.
Fast-forward to today and we get the Orwellian inversion: right-wing media and influencers, Abbott included, insisting “the left is antisemitic” while declining to challenge antisemitism when it comes from their own side. The silence from Heritage president Kevin Roberts after Tucker Carlson platformed Nick Fuentes, complete with Hitler praise, was telling.
What’s striking is the information gap. In the US, this broke through. On 22 December, Reuters reported that more than a dozen staff had quit or been fired from the Heritage Foundation amid accusations it had aligned itself with antisemites. That story ran widely in American outlets. In Australia, it barely registered.
So yes, your final point lands. Much of the Australian political class, right and left, is still operating with a 19th- and early-20th-century mental map of culture and power. Meanwhile, a transnational network has moved on, learned how to launder ideas, and discovered that moral panic travels faster than context. Bondi became a stage for that machinery, not because people don’t care about antisemitism, but because care itself has been weaponised.
Excellent article David!
“What it does attest to is the reflexive cultural cringe of a ten-pound Pom, still marooned on the margins of the country he presumes to speak for.”
In other words, verbal excrement of his choice! Return to sender, Britain that is, we have no use for this type of crap, expensive, distasteful crap that it’s been.