James Campbell: The 10-year anniversary of Tony Abbott’s overthrow will reopen Liberal Party wounds
The looming 10-year anniversary of Tony Abbott’s ousting as Prime Minister by Malcolm Turnbull will reopen Liberal Party wounds that remain raw.
Opinion
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There’s an important political anniversary coming up in a few weeks which will reopen wounds that have yet to heal.
I’m not talking about the dismissal of the Whitlam government by Sir John Kerr, which took place 50 years ago in November, but the dismissal of Tony Abbott by the Liberal Party room, the 10th anniversary of which will be marked in about six weeks’ time.
For some of those who can remember The Dismissal and the passionate arguments it provoked for years afterwards, the idea that 50 years later no one would really care, would have seemed unlikely.
In 2025, however, aside from a couple of elderly Leftoid academics, I can’t think of anyone who is still interested in the rights and wrongs of that episode and I’d be surprised if any columnist under 50 – they do exist – will bother marking it.
But while the Unmaking of Gough is unlikely to stir much argument, the 10th anniversary of the Unmaking of Tony will be a different matter.
A decade on, the rights and wrongs of that defenestration are still very much live questions in Liberal land.
In contrast 15 years later, Labor folk have reached a sort of consensus about the defenestration of the Ruddster – Kevin Rudd – which can be summed up as ‘while in retrospect it wasn’t a good idea, it can still just about be defended because he’s so awful’.
As I said, there’s no such consensus about the wisdom of getting rid of the T-man.
The attitude of Liberals to his successor Malcolm Turnbull is a curious inverse of the attitude Labor people have towards Julia Gillard.
Laborites don’t particularly hold the execution of Rudd against Gillard – the general view is that while obviously she was its beneficiary, no one thinks for a second she was its author.
And if it became clear pretty quickly she was no good at being prime minister this doesn’t seem to have affected the affection most Labor people still have for her.
In contrast for some Liberals, that Turnbull was actually quite good at running a government is just something else they have to hold against him.
Obviously Turnbull’s behaviour since he was sacked in 2018, which has basically seen him make as much trouble for his former colleagues as he can, has made it hard for Liberals to defend the decision to give him the top job.
Most recently Liberal MPs have been infuriated – if not surprised – by the revelation by Joe Kelly in The Australian a week ago that he has been sharing his view about the defects of AUKUS with Elbridge Colby, the US undersecretary for defence policy who has since been charged with reviewing the agreement.
In contrast to Turnbull, who can’t seem to put enough distance between himself and the Liberal Party, Abbott has never been busier in conservative circles.
Lately he has been involved in encouraging Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to jump across to the Liberals; he’s warned against quotas for lady MPs; given a speech in Budapest praising Hungary’s Viktor Orban for stopping “a wave of illegal migration – or peaceful invasion”, and involved himself in the aftermath of the Deeming-Pesutto court case in Victoria.
He’s also been keen to make it clear nothing will stop him helping the conservative movement, not even death itself.
Last month he added his support to a push by the right wing activist outfit Advance – of which he sits on the board – encouraging people to leave it money in their wills, which given a recent report that the average Liberal Party member’s age is 68, could, if successful, pay real dividends in the short term.
Given this turbocharged activity level it is to be expected Abbott will be popping up everywhere in the days surrounding the anniversary of his exit.
We can expect him to expand on his theory in a recent podcast about why things didn’t go so well for Peter Dutton and Co in May, namely “from January on, we failed to pick fights” and when the party did pick fights such as over working-from-home for public servants “as soon as we came under a bit of pressure, we pulled back, we kind of lost our mojo a bit, we lost direction a bit.”
Meanwhile, the best those who were behind Turnbull’s accession can hope for is he’s away that week.
Which is a pity, because the reason why his colleagues removed Abbott was a good one at the time and hasn’t changed – namely he was on track to lose the next election.
Nor should Turnbull’s post-office behaviour detract from the fact that he had more capacity to appeal to voters in the lost Liberal ancestral homelands that are now the property of the Teals than either Dutton or Scott Morrison and that until they can find a way to get that appeal back they have very little chance of regaining office.
Originally published as James Campbell: The 10-year anniversary of Tony Abbott’s overthrow will reopen Liberal Party wounds
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