Why Australia's conservative hard-men set British Tory hearts aflutter

By Bagehot

WHAT is it about Australia that makes British political types go weak at the knees? British politicians are a bit of a parochial bunch, in the main. Apart from America, which obsesses all politicians everywhere, most British political insiders struggle to maintain an interest in electoral goings-on among mere foreigners. Australia, somehow, is different. A shared history and language cannot explain it: few British politicians are terribly interested in Canada.

Yet scan the most-visited Conservative blogs and discussion sites, and the too-close-to-call election unfolding in Australia just now is big news, with lots of praise for the robust brand of politics espoused by the opposition leader Tony Abbott. Mr Abbott is a social conservative and endurance athlete who has run a disciplined campaign around the issues of tax, cutting the public debt, curbing waste in government and the highly emotive question of asylum seekers arriving by ship in the remote north of the country. No matter that the ships are rather rare and most illegal immigration to Australia involves people arriving by scheduled airline and overstaying their visas, Mr Abbott has repeatedly vowed to re-open a reception centre for Australia-bound would-be refugees in Nauru, a tiny Pacific state, and to "stop the boats".

"Australia's election winner is conservatism", cheers Conservative Home, a website that is compulsory reading for British Tories. More cheers from Dan Hannan, a Eurosceptic Conservative MEP and journalist with a big grassroots following. He hopes Mr Abbott wins the election in part because it would, he says, annoy bien-pensant British journalists and Leftists who oppose the Australian's positions on things like abortion, gay marriage or climate change. Or as Mr Hannan puts it, the "elites" dislike Mr Abbott because: "he has committed the two unconscionable heresies of our age: he believes in God, but not in climate taxes."

Why such enthusiasm?

Part of it is a longstanding idea that Australia is somehow a bluffer version of Britain, so that political strategies which succeed in Australia could be worth trying out back home.

As leader of the opposition, Tony Blair paid several high-profile visits to talk to Australian Labor's toughest strategists, and was close to a muscular Christian priest and community activist, Peter Thomson.

Most dramatically, Lynton Crosby, a veteran Australian political strategist who helped his home country's conservatives to four election wins, was brought to Britain to oversee the 2005 election campaign by the then Conservative leader Michael Howard. Mr Crosby brought with him the concept of "dog whistle politics": slogans designed to send a message to receptive parts of the electorate without offending the mass of ordinary voters. Thus Mr Crosby crafted posters for British streets saying things like "It's time to put a limit on immigration", over the nudge-nudge slogan "Are you thinking what we're thinking?" Mr Howard crashed to defeat, but Mr Crosby retains a cult following in some Tory circles.

This time round, though Conservative Home and Mr Hannan are scrupulously loyal to Mr Cameron, I have a hunch that much of the British Tory kerfuffle over Mr Abbott is not really about Australia at all. I think it is a sublimated form of grumbling from the Conservative base, provoked by what they see as the soggily centrist line taken by their leader and prime minister, David Cameron. Mr Cameron hugs huskies and says climate change is a terrible threat. Mr Abbott has called arguments in favour of emissions trading schemes to tackle climate change "absolute crap" (though he later said this was "a bit of hyperbole").

Mr Cameron is a posh social liberal, Mr Abbott is a Roman Catholic volunteer fireman and surf life-saver, a bloke's bloke. Above all, Mr Abbott has rejected talk of detoxifying the conservative brand in favour of a classic core vote strategy, talking relentlessly about illegal immigration and taxes to get out the conservative vote in the suburbs. There are plenty of grassroots Tories who harbour the belief that Mr Cameron would have won an outright majority this year if he had talked tougher on things like immigration.

I have one last explanation for the British fascination for Mr Abbott and similar hardmen of Australian politics. British politicians, like politicians in lots of countries, are a pretty geeky bunch: pale, owlish types who spent their youths pushing leaflets about council housing policies through letterboxes, or thrusting and plotting their way to the executive vice-presidency of their students' union. That makes them oddly susceptible to the macho swagger of politics, Aussie-style (this is the country, after all, where a recent leader of the opposition referred to the then government as "a conga line of suck-holes"). At the very least, British politicians visiting Australia show a marked desire to display bloke-ish credentials and dispel the idea that they are "proper Poms".

Bagehot speaks from (minor) personal experience here. Back in 1998, as a cub foreign correspondent, I once spent part of a slightly odd afternoon in a suburban Australian sports bar with William Hague (then Conservative opposition leader). I confess I had to look out my original piece to remember the details. I had completely forgotten that Mr Hague was accompanied by his chief of staff, Sebastian Coe (a former Olympic athletics champion), and a twenty-something aide, George Osborne. I recalled watching Mr Hague give a speech in Brisbane, the day before, but had forgotten he was preceded by a high-school marching band dressed in blue satin uniforms, embroidered capes and white Stetsons, who played a robustly percussive version of "Waltzing Matilda".

The sports bar was in a western suburb of Sydney. Mr Hague was on his way to the half-finished Sydney Olympics site in a consular Jaguar when he annnounced he was keen for a beer (it had been a long couple of days). It was a slightly horrible bar, filled with fruit machines (or pokies, to the locals). Dressed in suits, and ignoring the disbelieving stares of the regular patrons, the Tories lined up at the bar to order pizza, and ask what the best local beer was to try. A "midi" of Cascade was ordered and Mr Coe introduced, duly causing a mini-Olympic stir. "Pizza and a beer, the traditional meal when working late," said Mr Hague. According to my record of the afternoon, the barman then confided that one of the pokies had recently paid out A$14,000. Mr Hague told young George to shove a coin into the machine and have a go. My notes record that the future Chancellor of the Exchequer was "slightly reluctant" but did as his leader asked. I do not record him winning.