Former prime minister and Rhodes Scholar Tony Abbott condemned the movement to take down statues of Cecil Rhodes, the British imperialist who bequeathed one of the English-speaking world's great university scholarships.

Mr Abbott, who attended Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship in the early 1980s, said it would be arrogant to assume that all current views are superior to those held by people such as Rhodes, who built a business empire based on the colonisation of South Africa in the 1850s.