Tony Abbott warns Liberals against giving into political correctness amid election loss

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has revealed what the Liberals need to do to recover from the devastating election loss it suffered.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has warned the Liberals against panicking in the wake of its devastating election loss, saying the party should not give into political correctness.

In an opinion column published in The Daily Telegraph, Mr Abbott said the Coalition didn’t deserve to be bundled out of office, based on its record, and former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, who had navigated the country so well through the pandemic, should never have lost his seat.

“Defeat always prompts anxieties that our party might somehow be out-of-step with popular feeling on climate change, for instance, or on identity issues,” Mr Abbott wrote.

“And in the seats we lost on the weekend, perhaps we were.

“Yet between the Coalition and the ALP, this wasn’t actually a climate change election. Those that were – in 2010, 2013 and 2019 – had a very different outcome.

“The question is: do we win so-called teal seats back by trying to be even more zealous on climate or by finding other issues on which to ­appeal?”

Mr Abbott, who supported controversial Liberal candidate Katherine Deves during the campaign in his old seat of Warringah, which he lost to Independent Zali Steggall in 2019, said the loss of once blue-ribbon Liberal seats was just a “dramatic illustration of the long-term trend of better-off people to vote left”.

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Tony Abbott with controversial Liberal candidate for Warringah Katherine Deves. Picture: Jeremy Piper

But also noted the declining margins for Labor in “struggle street”.

“Before leaping to the conclusion that the Libs should move further left, it’s also worth noting that the National Party held all its seats and that the Coalition did best in Queensland and Tasmania, where the state party has tended to be least ‘woke’,” he wrote.

“My instinct is that the teal seats will return to the Liberal fold when a Labor government is seriously mismanaging the economy, not when the Liberal Party goes green.”

Mr Abbott said the focus should be on the new Albanese government, which will inevitably make plenty of mistakes.

“The job of new oppositions is to oppose, not everything, but anything that’s seriously against the ­national interest, because politics always involves a contest,” he wrote.

“It should start as it means to continue bynot giving-in to political correctness in a bid to appease those who are unlikely ever to vote for us.”