Battlelines

Tony Abbott

• Publisher: Melbourne University Press Digital
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780522864243
• eBook ISBN: 9780522864250
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

New introduction on why good policy matters and why books debating big policy ideas matter.Abbott argues the battle of ideas helps ensure political parties come to power knowing who they are, what they stand for, what the impact of the policies might be and how they can best be implemented. Good policy is 1% headline and 99% implementation — a lesson Labor has failed to heed. Liberal Party leader and parliamentary pugilist Tony Abbott offers a frank analysis of the way forward for the Liberal Party. Here he draws lessons from the dying days of the Howard Government, and gives his views on his contemporaries, including Kevin Rudd, Peter Costello, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull.In Battlelines, Abbott looks at the values and instincts that drive the Liberal Party and proposes policy that the party should adopt. This is the often humorous story of his own political development. He describes the truth about politicians' lives; his 'days from hell'; insider moments from the halls of power; and how a would-be priest believed he had fathered an unknown son. Battlelines outlines a state of play for the Liberal Party, cementing Tony Abbott's reputation as one of the Liberal Party's most interesting thinkers and fearless advocates.

1 The Making of a Liberal Politician

The brutal searchlight on politics and politicians really caught me one morning in February 2005. I was at the Adventist Hospital in Sydney to make a ministerial announcement. There was a forest of boom mikes and swarms of journos who wouldn’t normally go near a health launch. The heaving scrum was not there to talk about policy but to grill me about an old love and a new-found son.

Kathy had been my first girlfriend. She was funny, clever, artistic and charismatic. At nineteen, we had been deeply in love. There was one problem, though. A part of me said that I should join the priesthood. So our romance was on-again, off-again and in the weeks when we were an item rather than ‘just friends’ we played what used to be called Vatican roulette.

One day, she tearfully announced that she was pregnant. For us, an abortion was out of the question. At first, we were going to be married. Then I got cold feet. I was too young and, frankly, too confused for that responsibility. She didn’t think she could bring up a child on her own so decided that the baby should be adopted. I had let her down, badly, so after the birth we went our separate ways. Still, we’d remained friends, stayed in touch and often wondered what would happen if our baby made contact. My reaction, I always felt sure, would be to ‘dissolve into unmanly tears’.

Since July 1977 the unknown son had been a part of my life. It wasn’t something that I regularly discussed or even thought about on a daily basis, but it was part of my self-understanding. In 1983, when I finally did begin to train for the priesthood, I had needed to explain that I hadn’t always been able to live up to the ideals of the faith. In 1987, when I met my wife-to-be, Margie, and was inviting her to share a future, I had to warn her that she might meet a child who wasn’t ours. It was a minor talking point around Canberra too. My parliamentary sparring partner, former Labor MP and one time leader, Mark Latham, used occasionally to interject, especially when industrial relations was my topic, ‘you’ve had too many unions, Tony, you grub’.

Just before Christmas 2004, Kathy called to say that Daniel had made contact and was on his way to meet her and her family in Western Australia. I spoke to Daniel and arranged for him to meet my family too. There was excitement and awkwardness. My sisters reckoned that there wasn’t much family resemblance. Late in January 2005, the editor of The Bulletin called to say that he was aware of the reunion and was going to run a story. Eventually, there was a furious race to break the news and a 24-hour media frenzy.

About a week later, Kathy called again, distraught, to tell me that a 1976 flatmate had been in touch to claim that Daniel might be his. One night, apparently, there’d been a party. She’d come home late, her room was occupied, so she’d shared her flatmate’s bed. It was a blurred memory that she’d never mentioned before because she had been so certain that Daniel was mine—perhaps, she said, because she had so wanted Daniel to be mine.

When the test result came back, I don’t know who was more shattered: Kathy because she had misled someone she’d loved, or me because, after twenty-seven years wondering, I’d found someone else’s son. Still, having lost a child, I wasn’t going to lose a friend as well. Anyone can make a mistake. How you deal with it is the true test of character. The gutsiest interview I have ever watched was Kathy facing up to the mistake on Channel Nine. Of course, it was the connection with me that meant she had to go through that excruciatingly public ordeal.

Because I was a politician, what would have been a personal issue and a family matter for those immediately concerned became a minor soap opera. As a politician, I had more or less learned to cope with living in a goldfish bowl. In this case, though, my former girlfriend, her son and my wife became the objects of public speculation and gossip because of their connection with me. It was an illustration of the toxic side to politics. Politicians are volunteers. They choose their life. Families are conscripts. Exposing your family to public notice is part of the inescapable downside of being in public life.

In an important sense, I owe my wife, my children, Kathy, Daniel and everyone closely connected with me a deep debt. Because I am in public life, they are too. My foibles might be considered fair game. Theirs should not be but are thanks to insatiable media and the inclination to turn public figures into actors in a morality play. Last year, for instance, a sideline incident at the under-tens northern suburbs netball grand final became a radio talking point for no other reason than it involved ‘Tony Abbott’s sister’. Because her fifteenth birthday party attracted some would-be crashers, A Current Affair wanted to interview my daughter for national television.

Public life can be deadly for families. Politicians’ spouses and children are (often incorrectly) assumed to share their views, inevitably get dragged into their fights and invariably are tarred with the same brush. They get caught in the searchlight even when it’s not aimed directly at them. All too often, family events are hijacked by political developments or have to be planned around the local branch barbecue or RSL dedication. It’s no wonder that some political spouses feel ‘ripped off’.

Since I became a member of parliament, Margie has had to run the household and organise our children’s lives mostly on her own. In recent years, she’s also held down a busy and responsible job. Although her life would have been much easier but for the career choices that I have made, she has always supported me in my work. One morning, noticing a headline about the circumstances of former MP John Brogden’s departure from the state Liberal leadership, she warned: ‘whatever happens, don’t you say anything about it’. Foolishly, I did not entirely heed this advice and spent weeks publicly apologising and trying to explain.

Margie reckons that she first questioned my suitability as a potential partner on our second night out when, apparently, I had expected her to discuss the continuing aftershocks of the political upheavals of the 1950s. On our honeymoon, we’d spent three days sailing near Stradbroke Island in Queensland. Every morning, we had to work the boat off the sandbanks on which I’d stranded it as the tide went out overnight. As the yacht finally gyrated down the Broadwater under a stiff nor’easter and a badly managed ‘goosewing’ rig, her hands bleeding from pulling on unfamiliar ropes, Margie asked whether I always did things the hard way!

Even the toughest MPs sometimes wonder whether political life is worth the personal cost. Judging by politicians’ divorce rate, their spouses often conclude that it’s not. The hours are killing, the rewards modest, the responsibilities daunting, the exposure relentless, the gratitude uncertain, and the strain imposed on family members quite unfair. The rigours are more intense because almost no one outside politics fully appreciates them. Yet someone has to represent an electorate in parliament, help lead political parties and take responsibility for decisions about the future of our country. If you want to make a difference, it’s the price you’ve got to pay.

Australians shouldn’t feel sorry for politicians. Still, if they understood the nature of political life, they might be less incorrigibly critical. If politics were just another job, almost no one would take it. If politics were a ‘career’ that people might enter for money, interest or lifestyle, almost no one would stay in it. Any true vocation involves something akin to love. Military personnel, for instance, would not put their lives on the line; health professionals would not continue to deal with demanding patients, or teachers work with difficult students, without a passionate belief that what they did really mattered—that it’s an end in itself. Unless people’s hearts are in the hard tasks, no level of remuneration or kudos can compensate for the challenges and risks involved.

There’s an element of paradox in politics, as in other vocations. A soldier must want peace but prepare for war. A police officer must fight crime but mix with criminals. A teacher must have a passion for learning but endless patience with the ignorant. In a similar vein, a politician has to be a leader but cannot be a dictator. Politicians have to stand out in some way but also have to be ‘of the people’.

In at least one important respect, though, politics is harder than most other vocations. Australians normally profess to respect soldiers, police and teachers. They don’t generally admit to respecting politicians; quite the opposite, in fact. ‘To the prick on “Lateline”’ was the salutation on an email I received recently (addressed to me rather than the interviewing journalist!) from someone claiming to be a staunch Liberal voter but upset over something I’d said. The members of other vocations do not normally face the personal vitriol and public exposure that politicians have to take for granted.

Politicians live on a public stage but without the leeway that is sometimes extended to celebrities. Occasionally, when a politician is on a roll, faults are explained away. More often, though, no benefit of the doubt is given. Kevin Rudd’s visit to a ‘gentlemen’s club’ in New York was excused on the grounds that ‘everyone’s human’. Mostly, though, politicians who have a significant lapse of judgment or a moral flaw at the very least become pariahs-de-jour for a critical public.

Scrutiny is a necessary part of politics, but its intensity and unforgiving nature are among the reasons most people find the prospect of public life so uninviting. No one can ever be entirely ready for its humilia ting rituals, such as ‘are you a fool or a knave?’ cross-examinations from the media or the occasional ‘you have ruined my life’ accusation from an unhappy constituent. It’s understandable that cancer sufferers, for instance, desperate to get a new drug on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, would try moral blackmail on health ministers who have to stand up for rigour in decision-making. Only prime ministers normally have to wear the accusations of blood on their hands from grief-stricken relatives, as John Howard did after Bali. Still, this kind of pressure is what leads the public to conclude that politicians would have to be slightly crazy to want the job.

Most politicians are a mix of idealism and ambition. The highly driven and the deeply idealistic individuals who enter public life all have a personal story. That story helps to explain the positions they adopt and the decisions they take. Understandably, people want to know whether the person seeking their vote is fair dinkum. Their personal histories nearly always cast light on their public life. All of us are the product of the people, institutions and cultures that we have lived among. We aren’t ‘programmed’ by experience, but we’re certainly shaped by it.

In an essay for Quadrant, the British conservative thinker Roger Scruton says that our own self-respect requires us to respect our culture and its institutions. This, he says, ‘is the first maxim of conservative politics: self-respect requires respect for institutions; to the extent that we learn a habit of mockery towards our inheritance, to that extent do we mock ourselves’.¹ The second task of the conservative, he says, is to ‘give up this breast-beating, guilt-ridden desire to throw away our inheritance’.² Indeed, I have often pondered the psychology of people who seem uncomfortable with the society that has formed them. There is much about Australia that I would like to change, but not its fundamentals. How could I, given the extent to which it’s made me what I am?

My parents had two messages for their children: first, ‘be as good as you can be at whatever you do’, and, second, ‘we love you whatever happens’. Of course, there was not too much ‘kids will be kids’ tolerance when, for instance, some devilry drove me and the neighbouring children, as eight-year-olds, to carve our names into the duco of the cars in the street. Still, while I was growing up I never had the impression that my parents were mad at me rather than about my (fairly frequent) misdeeds.

For several years of my childhood, every weekday, I walked the couple of kilometres or so from home to Chatswood railway station with my dad before the train ride to school. I can only remember the odd snatch of conversation, which, I’m sure, would have been about trivia as well as the things that were going on in my life. I do very clearly recall, though, Dad’s insistence that it was better to be a good man than a successful one. Later, when I felt ‘out of it’ at a new high school, I vividly remember him consoling me with the advice that if I learned to like others they would eventually find something to like in me.

Both my parents taught by example. From Mum, I learned that the ideal home welcomes people and makes them feel part of the family. From Dad, I learned that you should always look for the best in others and try to be for them what you would have them be for you. That doesn’t mean that life in the Abbott household was a re-run of ‘The Brady Bunch’. It seems to be the nature of the parent-child relationship that there’s always so much more that ought to be said. Still, I could not have asked for a better start and for more ongoing encouragement. Mum and Dad were the best type of parents, nearly always thinking well of their children, sometimes to the point of imagining that we’re better than we really are.

As best I can remember, my interest in public life first stirred as a child reading the Ladybird books that my Mum brought home. These usually turned out to be about great figures in history: Julius Caesar, Francis Drake and Henry V are three that I seem to recall. The lesson, invariably, was that duty and honour carried the day. They were caricatures, of course, as I was to discover over time, but uplifting ones. In the real world, good doesn’t always triumph and justice doesn’t always prevail. Even the best turn out to have their flaws. Despite that, ideals don’t cease to matter because they’re never perfectly achieved or because their adherents are compromised.

In those days, the mid-1960s, ‘history’ started with the Greeks and the Romans before focusing on the story of England and Britain’s influence on the world. Not surprisingly, I became an admirer of parliamentary democracy, freedom under the law, and liberal institutions. As these were largely made in England (although often improved elsewhere), I also became an incorrigible Anglophile.

I was born in London while my father was studying for a specialist qualification, then not available in Australia. When I eventually went back to England as a student, I didn’t feel that I was visiting a foreign country, despite the passport queues at Heathrow airport. As I flew over the city of London, it felt like more than a homecoming. The metropolis was not just the inspiration for a Monopoly board but the chief source of the language I spoke, the centre of the system of law I lived under and the fountain of the democracy I cherished. It belonged to me as much as to any Briton. ‘Beating the Poms’ is as important to me as to any other Australian, but it’s like wanting New South Wales to beat Queensland in the rugby league state of origin series. Only on the sports field are the British an alien tribe. Indeed, it would be a very rare Australian, I suspect, who feels like a stranger in any English-speaking country regardless of disagreements that might exist between governments or about policy.

Apart from my parents, the church was the biggest influence on my early life. From 1966 till 1975, I was at St Aloysius and then St Ignatius College, Riverview, in Sydney. The college mottos, ‘born for higher things’ and (roughly translated) ‘do as much as you can’, give a good idea of the Jesuit ethos at that time, which I thoroughly as similated, sometimes to my masters’ annoyance.

In year twelve I wrote a precocious essay concluding that Riverview would be a better school if it turned out the future leaders of society as well as good professional men. To the best of my recollection, the offending sentence had to be removed for the essay to appear in a school publication. When one of my classmates was not made a prefect—unfairly I thought, because of his involvement in a silly prank—a friend and I lobbied all the other prefects to have this injustice rectified. In one-on-one discussion with us, everyone agreed to support our position. In the subsequent round-table meeting with the headmaster, no one else did.

In October 1975, the then governor-general, Sir John Kerr, presented the prizes at the school’s speech day. A routine vice-regal engagement turned out to have fallen in the middle of an unprecedented political struggle in which the governor-general would be umpire. When it was my turn to shake Sir John’s hand, I said that I had a car outside to take him to the Liberal Party rally in town. He took the joke in good part, but the school authorities thought I had made a spectacle of myself. Years later, perhaps to prevent some similar lapse, John Howard did all the talking during my one and only presentation to the Queen.

On more than a few occasions, high spirits, exuberance, and sometimes—yes—overindulgence have landed me in considerable trouble. At the end of my second year at university, challenged at a public meeting by a fellow platform speaker about where I stood on an issue (I was standing behind her), I touched her on the back and made a facetious remark. She claimed that I’d indecently assaulted her, and a criminal charge went to court, where it failed. After a big night out in my fourth year of university, a squad car observed me trying to bend over a street sign in a test of strength with a fellow student. This time, I pleaded guilty, but no conviction was recorded. After a particularly riotous Queen’s College middle common room dinner, a mate and I detoured through Magdalen College on the way home and did a little late-night gardening. Filled with remorse as the enormities of the previous evening seeped back, I slunk into that blessed plot late the next morning in time to see the long-suffering college gardeners repairing the last of the damage. At least I had been finally cured of the impulse to break things.

One virtue that the Jesu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 The Making of a Liberal Politician
• 2 A Tale of Two Governments
• 3 What’s Right?
• 4 Unfinished Business
• 5 Australia’s Biggest Political Problem and How to Fix It
• 6 Making the States Do Better
• 7 If the 2020 Summit Had Been Fair Dinkum …
• Postscript: Days from Hell
• Afterword: A Week Really Can Be a Long Time in Politics
• Appendix: A Bill to Amend the Constitution
• Notes
• References
• Index