A shot at the title

We’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.

Advertisement

This was published 13 years ago

A shot at the title

By Shaun Carney

After winning the Liberal leadership by one vote, it's remarkable that Abbott is within striking distance of The Lodge.

WINNERS are grinners and losers are … well, the ones who didn't win. But, with a week to go and the Gillard government taking a lead in the latest polls, it's time to pause and consider just how well the Coalition has done under Tony Abbott's leadership.

Even if the Coalition falls short next Saturday, the political discipline shown by the Liberal and National parties since Abbott took over only eight months ago has been remarkable.

In the past 12 days, the discipline has at times been a little too tight and has led the Coalition's campaign down some self-destructive paths - chiefly the decision to withhold policy costings from Treasury, Abbott's treatment of broadband policy as a lower-order issue and the dodging of a second leaders' debate after initially requesting three debates.

These are tactical judgments that have cut away at the Coalition's prospects for victory because they play to Labor's key point of attack against Abbott, which is that he would be an unacceptable risk as a prime minister who cannot keep to his word and is hiding his real policies.

That said, just look at the operating assumption here: the Coalition is in with a chance of victory. That, in itself, is a tribute to the extent to which Abbott has been able to marshal his troops.

In December, he defeated Malcolm Turnbull in the party room by a single vote. Only two years before that, in the wake of the Howard government's election defeat, Abbott put up his hand to succeed John Howard and had to pull out when he realised that he was considered by his colleagues almost as a fringe candidate.

A week before Abbott defeated Turnbull in 2009, an Age/Nielsen poll showed that only one in five voters favoured him as leader; Turnbull and Joe Hockey scored higher ratings. In the fractious atmosphere leading up to that ballot, Hockey had been front runner. At one point, he could have commanded up to 80 per cent of the vote - until he proposed a conscience vote on the emissions trading legislation, then being debated in the Senate.

That killed Hockey's chances of becoming leader. On the surface, it had looked like a reasonable way of breaking a deadlock on what was then a highly divisive issue within the Liberal Party. But it misread the mentality of Liberal MPs and the party's membership; after two years of Kevin Rudd and his government riding high in the polls and enjoying the spoils of office, they did not want debate and consideration. They wanted a much more intensely political approach from the leadership.

Abbott was tailor-made to provide it. He brushed aside the narrowness of his victory in the party room and stamped his political personality on the Liberals. He declared that the party's mission would be to oppose the government.

Advertisement

Abbott did not take any notice of his overall ratings in the opinion polls because his goal as leader was twofold: to apply constant pressure on the government and to draw together the Liberal base.

By starting out that way, he was opening up the possibility that the Coalition would be able to make its own luck. That is, should anything go wrong on the Labor side, he would be in a better position to exploit it. The strategy of standing in Labor's way on just about every policy and pronouncement would naturally increase the chance that something would go wrong for Rudd.

Abbott's initial judgments were correct. The Liberal base was energised. It resented the existence of the Labor government and wanted to see it frustrated and publicly excoriated at every turn. The negotiations over a new climate change treaty collapsed in Copenhagen in Abbott's early weeks as leader. From there, his fortunes continued to improve, culminating in the removal of Rudd as prime minister, and his competitive position in this election campaign.

The official Liberal line on Rudd's defenestration, that he fell victim to a cabal of faceless men, might be a good line to throw around, but it denies Abbott the credit he deserves for weakening and undermining his opponent. Of the three Liberal leaders Rudd faced during his time as prime minister, Abbott was the only one to apply sustained pressure and Rudd's political operation wobbled mightily as a result.

Sure, Rudd contributed to his own demise by losing his ability to communicate publicly and thumbing his nose at conventional cabinet processes, and he suffered at the hands of unforgiving players within the ALP, but Abbott's role was vital. Part of the job description for every opposition leader is to bring down a prime minister. This happened on Abbott's watch and, as a result, Labor's run through the campaign has been shaky, to put it mildly.

Meanwhile, within his own party, the divisions over climate change that brought about his rise to the leader's chair have evaporated. This confirms what became increasingly evident under Howard - that the modern Liberal Party is driven overwhelmingly by political imperatives rather than fine arguments about ideology and policy.

At the grassroots level also, Abbott's leadership has done a lot to consolidate the Coalition's base vote. Its primary support has consistently been above 40 per cent in the published polls for months now, roughly equivalent to the vote the Coalition attracted at the last election. Today's Age/Nielsen poll shows it pulling 41 per cent.

Although that poll suggests the Coalition would lose, these are still strong numbers for a first-term opposition. Along with the way in which Liberal MPs overcame their differences in order to take up the fight to Labor under Abbott, they demonstrate that the Coalition and its support base understand the compromises needed to attain power.

The Coalition has managed to hold itself together and frighten the daylights out of the government. The leader who not many people wanted can take a lot of the credit.

Shaun Carney is associate editor.

Most Viewed in Politics

Loading