A leader still behind the party

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This was published 13 years ago

A leader still behind the party

By Lenore Taylor

Tony Abbott has been a ruthless and effective opposition leader. He has taken the federal coalition from an all-in-brawling mess to an election-winning position in the opinion polls in just six months. The great irony is that now the biggest hurdle standing between the Coalition and that victory is also Tony Abbott.

Abbott's personal satisfaction ratings have plummeted almost in lock step with Kevin Rudd's. The green vote has spiked to unprecedented levels, apparently because voters don't like the leader either of the major parties has on offer.

The former Labor pollster Rod Cameron believes that with almost any other leader the Liberals would now be almost assured of victory.

Faced with the disastrous Nielsen poll on Monday, which showed Labor in an election losing position, the government's message was: ''If this is how people vote, then Tony Abbott will be prime minister.''

Presumably that wouldn't have been their message if their own focus groups were saying voters liked the idea of ''Prime Minister Abbott''.

The Liberals set about inoculating against the latest anti-Abbott campaign almost before it began.

The finance spokesman, Andrew Robb, was on ABC radio that same morning. ''What we're seeing with the Labor Party - there's a panic that's starting to permeate their ranks and the personal attacks. It will be, I think, personal smear will be the hallmark of Labor's campaign over the next few months,'' he said.

Abbott's explanation was that he had suffered some collateral damage while taking Kevin Rudd down.

''I guess when you're in a fierce head-to-head political contest and the Prime Minister is suffering a catastrophic decline in public standing, you tend to take a bit of collateral damage,'' he said.

The immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, was insisting voters should think of Tony Abbott as they thought of John Howard.

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''I think people are more and more getting to know Tony Abbott. They are seeing more of his character, which has been proven over many years of involvement in politics and public life. He is very much a known entity out there. And Tony is one of those politicians that you tend to respect. A lot like John Howard … I mean, Tony is someone who has strong convictions and someone who tends to be very authentic and honest with people, and I think that stands him in stark contrast to our current Prime Minister.''

Except that voters don't see Tony Abbott as they did John Howard - at least, not as they saw the former prime minister towards the end of his career, when he had built the respect to which the immigration spokesman refers. Even as he was facing electoral annihilation in late 2007, John Howard's satisfaction ratings were still at 51 per cent. The same poll has Tony Abbott's current satisfaction rating at 37 per cent.

The reason Abbott was twice, and almost three times, passed over for the Coalition's top job after the 2007 election was precisely because his colleagues did not think he would have broad swing-voter appeal.

He withdrew his nomination for the first post-election ballot for ''want of support''. He didn't even stand when Turnbull beat Nelson. And as Turnbull's leadership fell apart, he promised to withdraw his nomination and defer to Joe Hockey if the younger colleague chose to stand.

When he won the leadership, he knew he had to try to reshape public perceptions - using his admirable physical fitness regime to showcase himself as a genuine bloke rather than a ''gay, lame churchy loser'', as one of his daughters once described him.

He had to win back the conservative base and reunite the show by quickly improving its opinion poll standing, which he did incredibly successfully through a combination of his own campaigning skills and Labor's astonishing recent political ineptitude.

On occasions he still overindulged his tendency for rhetorical pugilism - remember what the worms thought of him during the National Press Club debate with Kevin Rudd on health.

But now he's focused squarely on the middle ground - wearing suits and trying to be statesmanlike, like when he passed up all offers to comment on David Marr's quarterly essay about the Prime Minister by saying he would ''leave the psychoanalysis of the Prime Minister to others''.

Despite having written in his book Battlelines that ''First-term oppositions can't normally wait for the government to lose. New oppositions normally need … some attention-grabbing policies'', he seems to have come to the conclusion that this first-term government is the exception.

He's concentrating on taking advantage of the government's mistakes, making himself into a small target and shelving for now the attention-grabbing policies he spent his whole book talking about. He's concentrating his media interviews to softer talk-radio appearances and most shadow ministers are staying out of the spotlight altogether.

But still Abbott seems to ring that little warning bell of incredulity in the back of voters' minds.

When he says the backflip on the emissions trading scheme shows Kevin Rudd ''didn't really believe in anything'', the warning bell might vaguely recall that this was the bloke who Malcolm Turnbull said had six different positions on the issue in as many weeks and who started discussions about it by saying ''Mate, I know I am a bit of a weathervane on this, but …''

When he rails against the government disregarding due process, there's this nagging memory that this was the guy who announced his only major policy initiative - the paid parental leave plan - without taking it to shadow cabinet or the opposition party room.

And former ministerial colleagues have told how during the Howard government years whenever Abbott lost an argument in cabinet or the expenditure review committee he would immediately head into the prime minister's office to try to have it overturned.

Abbott's small target strategy has been crafted around the Rudd government's astonishing recent capacity for self-harm.

And the intense focus on the government has distracted attention from the continuing tensions within the Coalition about direction and ideology, and at some point inevitably leadership. It seems unlikely Malcolm Turnbull has stayed in Parliament and is appearing on shows like Channel Ten's daytime women's talk show The Circle (as he did yesterday) simply for the fun of it - even though he did seem to be having a good time.

The danger is that the strategy also makes it more difficult for Abbott to use a positive message to reshape himself in voters' minds, which the polls are telling him is a necessary prerequisite for him to pull off the first defeat of a first-term government since 1931.

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