MISREPRESENTING ABBOTT 15 April 2012
Unless the ALP rediscovers a set of core values, learns how to communicate them to a public which has stopped listening to it, and manages to make people in western Sydney forget about Kevin Rudd, asylum seekers and “the lie” – or unless the Leader of the Opposition meets a sticky end during next year’s Pollie Pedal, and without saying anything about his cycling abilities this seems infinitely more likely than Lazarus Labor – Tony Abbott will be Prime Minister by the end of next year.
The Herald Sun’s controversialist Andrew Bolt recently took issue with the way Tony Abbott is conventionally portrayed in the press. The Tony Abbott we’re “usually shown”, Bolt says, is “an authoritarian, woman-hating and homophobic ‘Mad Monk’”. But Bolt sees other qualities in Abbott: “compassion, kindness, tolerance, courtesy and integrity”.
These qualities, Bolt argues, make Abbott a worthy candidate for Prime Minister. Bolt argues that a “biased” media is presenting a negative caricature of the Opposition Leader in an attempt to discredit him with the general public.
Like nearly everything Bolt writes, his argument is mostly disingenuous and based in distortion (the vast bulk of coverage that Abbott gets in the commercial media is positive), but it also contains a kernel of truth. The “Mad Monk” tag has stuck, but when the tag is used as shorthand for the idea that Abbott is guided first and foremost by the values and teachings of Catholicism, it is used inaccurately.
Abbott himself consistently downplays the role of Catholic values in his politics. “I have never made a political decision based on a religious value,” he told a Q&A audience in August 2010. “I’m running for office,” he said on the same program the previous April; “I’m not running for canonisation.”
When asked what Jesus would have done about asylum seekers, Abbott said that he suspected that “Jesus wouldn’t have put his hand up to lead the Liberal Party”. The questioner no doubt wanted Abbott to reflect on his answer with reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, but Abbott responded by reminding us that “Jesus drove the traders from the temple, as well”. The significance of this episode, Abbott told his bemused audience, was that “Jesus didn’t say yes to everyone”.
This single exchange demonstrates the flexibility with which Abbott approaches Catholic doctrine. Without getting bogged down in theology, it is worth emphasising that the traders were driven from the temple because they had debased it with their commercial activities. Ordinarily this biblical episode would have no application whatsoever to the question of asylum seekers, for whom the parable of the Good Samaritan – in which Jesus tells the story of a passer-by who provides assistance to a victim of persecution despite it being unpopular to do so – has far more relevance.
But Abbott is not particularly interested in theology. It’s true that Abbott spent two years in St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly, which is where one goes to train for the priesthood. But St Patrick’s was too liberal, was home to too many gay men, and encouraged far too much self-reflection for Abbott, who was mostly interested in political power. His attempts to use St Patrick’s for this purpose were continually frustrated, and after spending some months white-anting its leadership, he quit to become a journalist.
The “Mad Monk” tag has largely, I think, been used by commentators who struggle to account for Abbott’s quite puzzling conservatism. I say “puzzling” for a number of reasons. It’s not as if he never changes his mind. On Medicare (which he once vehemently opposed, calling it “socialised medicine”) and paid maternity leave (which in 2002 he said would come in “over this government’s dead body, frankly”), he has clearly been persuaded by evidence and force of argument. On taxation, climate change, industrial relations and immigration he has had, as the joke goes, “more positions than the Kama Sutra”. But on certain issues – especially those which have something to do with women’s bodies and women’s choices – Abbott is unshakeably resolute.
“I won’t be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated” against cervical cancer, he told a radio interviewer while he was Health Minister in 2006. “The problem with the Australian practice of abortion”, he told a university audience in 2004, “is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience”. He thinks many women see abortion as “the easy way out” of “awkward situations”.
Nothing will persuade him to see early-term abortion as a legitimate matter of women’s choice. A foetus is always a “social good” over which the state has sole legitimate authority, thus removing it from the ambit of the mother’s choice. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from a chapter of Abbott’s 2009 book, Battlelines, which is ostensibly and ironically intended to enhance the author’s appeal to women.
In the end, his attraction to Catholicism seems to be to that version of it espoused by the institutional church’s male hierarchy (and certainly not, for instance, Catholicism’s social justice heritage). Biographer Susan Mitchell emphasises his apparent attraction to a world of old male privilege in her attempted character assassination of Abbott in A Man’s Man, which is precisely the kind of profile Bolt complains about. But Mitchell does have a point: Abbott’s attraction to what he calls “tradition”, by which he often means the social rules and norms of an earlier age characterised by what feminists call “patriarchy”, is undeniable. The virtues that Bolt sees – “compassion, kindness, tolerance, courtesy and integrity” – are certainly there, but only to the point at which Abbott’s worldview is challenged.
Abbott is not merely “conservative”. His inner mind seems to occupy a social world that is obsolete by half a century. “This idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold,” he told another bemused Q&A audience in 2009, “just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand: I think they both need to be moderated.” Well, they were. Some decades ago. And the number of times he manages to put together the words “women” and “ironing” verges on the ridiculous.
And yet, barring unforeseen events, Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next Prime Minister. In part that is because the Labor Party will continue self-destruct. But it’s also because Abbott will do almost anything to become PM. As Opposition leader he possesses the force of will that characterised other challengers, including Rudd, Howard, Keating, Fraser and Whitlam. And he’s hardly punctilious about trading on fear and ignorance about climate change and asylum seekers in his pursuit of political power, a quality which enrages Labor. His charges that the government is dishonest appear to it as stones thrown from within a gigantic glass house.
He has a three-fold strategy borrowed from his time as a rugby player and coach: first, insist on unity in his own team; second, expose weaknesses in the opposition through unyielding verbal attacks; and finally, present a viable alternative. The first two stages have succeeded beyond the Liberal Party’s wildest hopes. Abbott’s relentless sledging, or “mental disintegration” (to borrow former cricket captain Steve Waugh’s phrase), has importantly exposed Labor’s doubts about itself.
Whether Abbott can present a credible enough alternative in the lead-up to the election remains to be seen, but as things stand he probably needs only to present an alternative more credible than the government. It’s likely he will simply revive Howard’s administrative model, which was good enough to survive four terms in office. He may continue to be personally disliked by a majority of the population on account of his capital-C conservatism, but in a two-person race he needs only to be more competent than Gillard and her team.
Tony Speaks! The Wisdom of the Abbott (Black Inc, 2011)
Unless the ALP rediscovers a set of core values, learns how to communicate them to a public which has stopped listening to it, and manages to make people in western Sydney forget about Kevin Rudd, asylum seekers and “the lie” – or unless the Leader of the Opposition meets a sticky end during next year’s Pollie Pedal, and without saying anything about his cycling abilities this seems infinitely more likely than Lazarus Labor – Tony Abbott will be Prime Minister by the end of next year.
The Herald Sun’s controversialist Andrew Bolt recently took issue with the way Tony Abbott is conventionally portrayed in the press. The Tony Abbott we’re “usually shown”, Bolt says, is “an authoritarian, woman-hating and homophobic ‘Mad Monk’”. But Bolt sees other qualities in Abbott: “compassion, kindness, tolerance, courtesy and integrity”.
These qualities, Bolt argues, make Abbott a worthy candidate for Prime Minister. Bolt argues that a “biased” media is presenting a negative caricature of the Opposition Leader in an attempt to discredit him with the general public.
Like nearly everything Bolt writes, his argument is mostly disingenuous and based in distortion (the vast bulk of coverage that Abbott gets in the commercial media is positive), but it also contains a kernel of truth. The “Mad Monk” tag has stuck, but when the tag is used as shorthand for the idea that Abbott is guided first and foremost by the values and teachings of Catholicism, it is used inaccurately.
Abbott himself consistently downplays the role of Catholic values in his politics. “I have never made a political decision based on a religious value,” he told a Q&A audience in August 2010. “I’m running for office,” he said on the same program the previous April; “I’m not running for canonisation.”
When asked what Jesus would have done about asylum seekers, Abbott said that he suspected that “Jesus wouldn’t have put his hand up to lead the Liberal Party”. The questioner no doubt wanted Abbott to reflect on his answer with reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, but Abbott responded by reminding us that “Jesus drove the traders from the temple, as well”. The significance of this episode, Abbott told his bemused audience, was that “Jesus didn’t say yes to everyone”.
This single exchange demonstrates the flexibility with which Abbott approaches Catholic doctrine. Without getting bogged down in theology, it is worth emphasising that the traders were driven from the temple because they had debased it with their commercial activities. Ordinarily this biblical episode would have no application whatsoever to the question of asylum seekers, for whom the parable of the Good Samaritan – in which Jesus tells the story of a passer-by who provides assistance to a victim of persecution despite it being unpopular to do so – has far more relevance.
But Abbott is not particularly interested in theology. It’s true that Abbott spent two years in St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly, which is where one goes to train for the priesthood. But St Patrick’s was too liberal, was home to too many gay men, and encouraged far too much self-reflection for Abbott, who was mostly interested in political power. His attempts to use St Patrick’s for this purpose were continually frustrated, and after spending some months white-anting its leadership, he quit to become a journalist.
The “Mad Monk” tag has largely, I think, been used by commentators who struggle to account for Abbott’s quite puzzling conservatism. I say “puzzling” for a number of reasons. It’s not as if he never changes his mind. On Medicare (which he once vehemently opposed, calling it “socialised medicine”) and paid maternity leave (which in 2002 he said would come in “over this government’s dead body, frankly”), he has clearly been persuaded by evidence and force of argument. On taxation, climate change, industrial relations and immigration he has had, as the joke goes, “more positions than the Kama Sutra”. But on certain issues – especially those which have something to do with women’s bodies and women’s choices – Abbott is unshakeably resolute.
“I won’t be rushing out to get my daughters vaccinated” against cervical cancer, he told a radio interviewer while he was Health Minister in 2006. “The problem with the Australian practice of abortion”, he told a university audience in 2004, “is that an objectively grave matter has been reduced to a question of the mother’s convenience”. He thinks many women see abortion as “the easy way out” of “awkward situations”.
Nothing will persuade him to see early-term abortion as a legitimate matter of women’s choice. A foetus is always a “social good” over which the state has sole legitimate authority, thus removing it from the ambit of the mother’s choice. Such is the conclusion to be drawn from a chapter of Abbott’s 2009 book, Battlelines, which is ostensibly and ironically intended to enhance the author’s appeal to women.
In the end, his attraction to Catholicism seems to be to that version of it espoused by the institutional church’s male hierarchy (and certainly not, for instance, Catholicism’s social justice heritage). Biographer Susan Mitchell emphasises his apparent attraction to a world of old male privilege in her attempted character assassination of Abbott in A Man’s Man, which is precisely the kind of profile Bolt complains about. But Mitchell does have a point: Abbott’s attraction to what he calls “tradition”, by which he often means the social rules and norms of an earlier age characterised by what feminists call “patriarchy”, is undeniable. The virtues that Bolt sees – “compassion, kindness, tolerance, courtesy and integrity” – are certainly there, but only to the point at which Abbott’s worldview is challenged.
Abbott is not merely “conservative”. His inner mind seems to occupy a social world that is obsolete by half a century. “This idea that sex is kind of a woman’s right to absolutely withhold,” he told another bemused Q&A audience in 2009, “just as the idea that sex is a man’s right to demand: I think they both need to be moderated.” Well, they were. Some decades ago. And the number of times he manages to put together the words “women” and “ironing” verges on the ridiculous.
And yet, barring unforeseen events, Tony Abbott will be Australia’s next Prime Minister. In part that is because the Labor Party will continue self-destruct. But it’s also because Abbott will do almost anything to become PM. As Opposition leader he possesses the force of will that characterised other challengers, including Rudd, Howard, Keating, Fraser and Whitlam. And he’s hardly punctilious about trading on fear and ignorance about climate change and asylum seekers in his pursuit of political power, a quality which enrages Labor. His charges that the government is dishonest appear to it as stones thrown from within a gigantic glass house.
He has a three-fold strategy borrowed from his time as a rugby player and coach: first, insist on unity in his own team; second, expose weaknesses in the opposition through unyielding verbal attacks; and finally, present a viable alternative. The first two stages have succeeded beyond the Liberal Party’s wildest hopes. Abbott’s relentless sledging, or “mental disintegration” (to borrow former cricket captain Steve Waugh’s phrase), has importantly exposed Labor’s doubts about itself.
Whether Abbott can present a credible enough alternative in the lead-up to the election remains to be seen, but as things stand he probably needs only to present an alternative more credible than the government. It’s likely he will simply revive Howard’s administrative model, which was good enough to survive four terms in office. He may continue to be personally disliked by a majority of the population on account of his capital-C conservatism, but in a two-person race he needs only to be more competent than Gillard and her team.
Tony Speaks! The Wisdom of the Abbott (Black Inc, 2011)