In my piece for The Drum the other day on how there is a sense in which we are still living in the Howard Era, I made this comment about Tony Abbott:
Tony Abbott promises a Howard restoration, flanked by spectral shadows – Bronwyn Bishop, Kevin Andrews and Philip Ruddock.
Abbott’s program, as has been repeatedly noted over the last little while, seems to consist solely of a desire to have as many elections as it takes to undo everything the ALP in office has done since 2007. It’s as if he wants to stand at the window of the Lodge with bell, book and candle and exorcise the spectre of Howard’s defeat, and damn the historical memory of Labor’s ascension.
Tony Abbott’s project is in fact oriented to the past rather than the future, and it seeks to reinstate the past by projectively erasing the present.
It’s in this sense that his dream is impossible, and that may well be his downfall.
It’s out of kilter with reality in more than one way. I alluded to the first in my piece, noting that the Abbott/Howard dream of compulsory Anglo suburban patriarchalism no longer reflects anything but a vanished and defensive norm, though it’s a norm which retains power to manifest itself in a retrogressive racial and social protectionism. The other sense in which Abbott’s project is incapable of realisation is in his failure to understand that it will prove impossible to turn back the clock. The Repealathon will never take place.
I also said this, in comments on the LP discussion of my Drum article:
Governments have to govern for minorities as well as majorities, which is something Tony Abbott does not understand. The notion that everyone will jump for joy, or simply acquiesce, if he tries to undo everything done by the current Labor government is an absurdity, and one which will be his undoing, if indeed he ever becomes PM.
It’s been customary to gesture to Kim Beazley’s futile promise of the repeal of the GST in 2001 in discussion of Abbott’s Repealism. But the more relevant analogy is with John Howard’s learning to live with Medicare, and indeed much of the legacy of the Hawke and Keating governments. Despite the fact that, in many instances, he undid much of it by stealth, he was intelligent and perceptive enough as a politician to realise that settled policy needed not to be overtly disturbed.
There is, of course, the fact that Medicare was extremely popular, while the carbon price is not. The NBN is, and the pokies pre-commitment pledge is probably a matter of indifference to most voters. It’s here, of course, that the hope of its architects that it will be seen in perspective after its introduction is salient. But, over and above that, the belief on which Tony Abbott is acting, that opposition is deep as well as broad, is a misprision. Ravings about ‘tyranny’, megaphoned through the media, are not identical with the views of most voters.
The Coalition would do well to reflect, here, on Tony Abbott’s own profoundly mediocre polling.
Finally, there are the many absurdities and inconsistencies in the ‘blood pledge’, ranging from the ludicrous nature of ‘savings’ which would be necessary in budgetary terms to the dangers of trying to govern from opposition (which is the actual effect of Abbott’s warnings to business), among others that can be cited. An Abbott government with no other program than reaction, and a petulant demand for an early double dissolution, is and will be deeply unappealing. Nor is it at all unlikely that Coalitionistas enamoured of a return to the ministerial benches would be prepared to chance throwing such comfortable accommodations away in pursuit of the ‘blood pledge’.
In truth, though, the media cycle, here spiralling into the future and making the topic of the present something that may never occur, may have done Tony Abbott no favours. And the likelihood is not at all insignificant that all this frenzied and febrile discussion may prove to have been moot, as a Labor leadership change would fundamentally alter all political calculations.
Cross-posted at Larvatus Prodeo.
