That Was The Week That Was – No. 1, Part One

The Liberal Party, having spent the better part of a year contemplating its navel, has alighted upon a solution to its existential crisis of the sort that could only occur to a party for whom self-awareness has always been a type of heresy. And what a navel. The omphalos of Australian conservative life, that mystic centre from which metastasizes, in all directions simultaneously, a portfolio of negatively-geared rentals, anti-immigration sentiment, Hansonite dog-whistling, reflexive misogyny, and the serene conviction that politics is merely a ritual interruption between the private school and the private board.

For these are the people for whom public life is a sinecure on the RBA, a directorship at Qantas, a seat on anything associated with fossil fuels, a flag-draped photo opportunity, and an approving arm around Rob Nioa’s arms trade. Rob Nioa, to be precise about the arm in question, whose NIOA Group holds defence contracts worth hundreds of millions; $154 million to modernise the ADF’s small arms under LAND 300, $95 million to supply thirty-plus munitions types, $80 million for 30mm ammunition for the Boxer combat vehicle, and a joint artillery shell manufacturing venture in Maryborough bankrolled by the Queensland government, the US government, and the German arms giant Rheinmetall. Australia’s largest small arms dealer, son-in-law of Bob Katter, and a man whose political donations have flowed reliably rightward for the better part of a decade. The party of aspiration. Provided the aspiration involves artillery.

Tony Abbott, they whisper, is the answer.

One pauses to consider the question.

The man who stopped the boats is looking for votes. Fresh from his recent appointment to The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a High-Tory British climate denial think tank (because when your own country has decisively rejected you, there is always a home among the English eccentrics who rule the place), the Monk of Warringah now fancies himself the spiritual shepherd of a party that has lost its flock, its pasture, and both of its old, blind, mangy dogs who have scratched their fleas, yawned, squirmed just to get cosy, barked at shadows and farted into Press Club microphones, to standing ovations, for over a decade.

Both Abbott and the former National leader Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce are alumni of Riverview, that Jesuit nursery of Sydney establishment confidence. Pick Abbott and you will end up with nothing more than a sober Joyce. The Judaeo-Christian mumbo-jumbo and all its rich subtext of anti-Islam and holier than thou, without the entertainment value. You also have a protege of the late George Pell, and one of his staunch defenders, or as Latham us to hiss, in Abbott’s earshot (a) “failed priest”. Or simply “bad priest”.

Abbott described Pell in 2012 as “a person of significance and influence in my life,” saying “occasionally he will ring me with a thought” and “once or twice I’ve sought his counsel on important matters.” And after Pell’s child rape conviction: Abbott declared he would “never be a fair-weather friend” and confirmed he phoned Pell after the verdict, saying “this was someone who was obviously going through a very, very bad experience.”

For those with already too many painful memories (and the Liberal Party is banking heavily on this), a brief “love-pat” on the suppository of all wisdom. This is the man who advised the housewives of Australia, as they stood at their ironing boards, that an emissions trading scheme would raise their power bills. He was Minister for Women. His greatest achievement in that role, he solemnly informed the nation, was abolishing the carbon tax, because women, being particularly focused on the household budget, would appreciate the saving. He advised his daughters that their virginity was the greatest gift they could bestow upon a man. He threatened to shirtfront Vladimir Putin, who is a judo expert. He described himself as merely exuberant after rating a female candidate’s sex appeal on the campaign trail. He declared, with the full authority of a Rhodes scholar, that no one is the suppository of all wisdom. He meant repository, presumably. Though with Abbott one is never entirely certain what was meant to go where.

Love pat is what Trump calls his sailors trying to blow Iranians out of the water. This is the man the Liberal Party now proposes to install as its federal president. Not as a candidate. Heaven forfend. The wise elder. The keeper of the flame.

But understanding what Abbott represents requires looking not at the gaffe reel, entertaining as it remains, but at the portfolio he has quietly assembled since Warringah showed him the door. It is, in its way, a masterpiece of ideological architecture. A final business development network. Which is corporate argot for: he is ideologically sound, he opens doors in Canberra and London, and he will not surprise anyone.

He will not. Abbott began his career writing for Murdoch, The Bulletin and The Australian, before discovering that politics offered a faster route to the same ends. He spent thirty years as Murdoch’s most reliable editorial asset in Australian public life, faithfully prosecuting the climate denial, the culture wars, the border panic, and the reflexive hostility to the ABC that constitute the Murdoch editorial line in this country. He is now, in the most literal sense possible, on the board. The circle is not merely complete. It is hermetically sealed.

We need not dwell on his prowess as a Rhodes Scholar where Tony attempted to box in a wild swinging style, which the impeccably well-researched Don Watson calls the whirling dervish, doubtless Tony’s nickname at the time. A large part of him hasn’t changed. The rest of his portfolio confirms his Tory-try-hard architecture. Chairman of Quadrant, the worthy, if not wordy, conservative literary journal, where the ruling class talks to itself in elevated diction, a rag that has spent sixty years being the Sydney establishment’s answer to questions nobody outside the Sydney establishment was asking. Board of Trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Advisory Board of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. Visiting fellow at the Danube Institute in Budapest, Viktor Orban’s preferred intellectual finishing school for the Western right. Council for the Australian War Memorial. Board of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, that Toowong-born answer to the perceived threat of universities teaching something other than the Greeks and dead Englishmen.

This is not a portfolio. It is an ideology rendered as a CV. Every appointment interlocks. Every body feeds the same project: the conservation of a particular version of Western civilisation, white, Christian, fossil-fuelled, and profoundly untroubled by the future. Fox Corp is the mothership. The GWPF handles science. Quadrant handles the culture. The Ramsay Centre handles the universities. The Danube Institute handles international networking. And the Australian Liberal Party, should Abbott have his way, handles the politics.

Half a million American dollars a year to sit on a committee and keep the right people in the room. In his previous career he described himself, memorably, as the suppository of all wisdom.

It turns out he was the repository all along.

Part Two publishes this evening. Part Three tomorrow.

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