‘Traumatic’: Peta Credlin unleashes after ABC expose Nemesis

Peta Credlin has unleashed on the ABC and the political docuseries Nemesis declaring it was “traumatic” to watch it.

Peta Credlin has unleashed on the ABC and the political docuseries Nemesis declaring the public broadcaster “failed to put the record straight” and left many of Malcolm Turnbull’s criticisms unchallenged.

Nemesis tells the inside story of the Coalition’s nine years in power and the leadership battles between Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison.

Ms Credlin was Mr Abbott’s high-profile chief of staff when he was opposition leader and later prime minister from 2013 to 2015.

Notably, Ms Credlin and Mr Abbott did not participate in the docuseries which aired on Monday night.

Mr Abbott has maintained he would not be watching the three-part series and when the first episode dropped on Monday he instead hosted his own ‘back to work’ drinks at his Sydney office with some big name players in conservative politics.

Mr Abbott and Ms Credlin on the campaign trail in 2013. Picture: Gary Ramage

One revelation from Nemesis was that Mr Abbott considered sending “a large military deployment” to Ukraine in response to the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 by Russia-backed forces.

Mr Turnbull, who was interviewed for the docuseries, described it as a “genuinely crazy idea”.

“To send armed personnel … no-one would’ve welcomed it, and particularly our Western allies would not have welcomed it,” he said.

“It showed, if you like, the elements of Tony that started to make me feel that we had a very dangerous prime minister.”

The docuseries also claimed that Mr Abbott responded badly to criticism of his decision to only name one woman – Julie Bishop – in his first cabinet of 20 ministers.

“Somebody did raise the issue about only one woman, Julie Bishop, being in the cabinet and Tony Abbott as the new prime minister he took badly, badly to being given that advice,” former minister Christopher Pyne said.

Liberal senator Linda Reynolds commented: “I think it said to all of us that women weren’t really valued enough to be selected into the ministry, and in particular into cabinet.”

Then minister Simon Birmingham claimed the absence of women in Mr Abbott’s cabinet was “a symptom of problems that were to come to dog us more fundamentally in an electoral sense in years to come, and to this very day”.

Both Mr Turnbull and Mr Morrison appeared on the program.

Among Mr Turnbull’s criticisms of Mr Abbott were that he was “dangerous” and that he repeatedly told him to “f**k off” when he conducted a welfare check on him after he lost the leadership in 2015.

“He generally told me to f**k off. He had quite a few variations on that,” Mr Turnbull said.

Of Ms Credlin, Mr Turnbull said: “I’ve never known a person in a leadership position as dominated by another as Tony Abbott was by Peta Credlin.”

Ms Credlin claims Julie Bishop never reached out to her.

Mr Abbott declined to comment to news.com.au about the criticisms but this morning Ms Credlin used her weekly column in The Australian to hit back at those that attacked her and her former boss.

Ms Credlin said she could not decide whether watching Nemesis was more “traumatic or cathartic”.

She said the ABC “largely ignored the good that was done in favour of dramatising the politics of personal destruction” such as the Abbott government stopping the boats, finalising trade deals that had languished for a decade, scrapping the carbon and mining tax and beginning an infrastructure catch-up.

Over months of filming and 60 on-camera interviews for the ABC's landmark political docuseries Nemesis, the free character assessments between former Coalition colleagues fly thick and fast. https://t.co/BnzdJYXprx

— ABC News (@abcnews) January 27, 2024

As for Mr Turnbull’s claim that Mr Abbott was a “dangerous” prime minister who ran a “terrible” government, she questioned why he didn’t resign.

“A minister with honour could always have resigned,” she said, arguing it was only because of Mr Abbott’s landslide victory that Mr Turnbull “narrowly survived his one and only electoral test as leader when he sacrificed 14 of the 25 seats that Abbott had won from Labor over two elections”.

Ms Credlin said it was “utterly implausible” that Mr Abbott was both anti-woman but then somehow “overly dependent” on her.

“Some days, I honestly don’t know how I managed to survive,” she lamented.

“I mean literally; a big part of what kept my head together was never wanting the haters to succeed.”

Ms Credlin said that “everything” was used against her including her battle to have children and questioned whether a man would have been subject to such treatment.

She said she would never forget the “humanity” showed by Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese who both “quietly reached out to me to express their disgust at my treatment” while senior women such as Julia Gillard and Julie Bishop did not.