An epiphany about Obama on team Abbott’s road to Washington

HALFWAY through Tony Abbott’s overseas tour this week, the tone towards Barack Obama shifted completely.

The Prime Minister’s office seemed deeply sceptical at first about the US President and his chances of achieving anything substantial during the final two years of his term.

By week’s end, however, Abbott was lauding the president and his “extraordinary personal gifts” while holding out the idea of building a personal friendship in their meeting in the White House.

Australian conservatives wouldn’t be the only ones who see Obama as the “lamest of lame ducks” right now even as they acknowledge his qualities as a leader.

Knowing Obama will leave office in January 2017, the Abbott office seemed to make the obvious calculation: a substantial outcome with the US President was unlikely this week and might not be possible beyond then.

The attitude has undercut the effort for a meeting with enormous influence over Abbott’s agenda — such as shaping the US position at the Group of 20 summit of world leaders in Brisbane in ­November, an event that could have a permanent impact, for good or ill, on the Prime Minister’s ­stature.

A clear agenda never emerged in the days leading up to Abbott’s flight into Washington yesterday. What the Prime Minister wanted from the meeting, or what he felt Australia could contribute to the US alliance, seemed a blur at times.

This sort of complacency is hardly unusual in politics, where leaders and their staff can be absolutely certain they are communicating a clear message, only to find that everything sounds muffled when they stand in the listener’s shoes.

With no schedule to speak of, it became easy to speculate that meetings were being cancelled out of political pettiness or Abbott’s supposed boredom with eco­nomics. News travels faster in a vacuum.

(The speculation certainly seemed to bemuse US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, who told The Australian yesterday, on the train to Washington, that there had never been any doubt he would be meeting Abbott.)

Comfortable with his own kind, Abbott seemed to thrive in Ottawa on Monday when he spent much of the day with his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, a fellow conservative.

Standing side by side at a press conference, they seemed to sharpen each other’s messages on climate change and economic policy.

But Abbott and Obama are so different that a meeting of minds is impossible. One is a conservative warrior, the other a liberal reformer.

In a search for common ground, the destination was obvious: national security and the need to confirm the “pivot” to Asia that Obama enunciated in an address to federal parliament in Canberra in 2011.

While the link between America and Asia has been a big theme of Abbott’s speeches and discussions this week, other issues have kept getting in the way.

Rather than finding common ground, Abbott has sometimes found himself on disputed territory.

The greatest rift is on climate change, where Obama clearly wants an emissions trading scheme or something similar.

“If there’s one thing I would like to see, it’d be for us to be able to price the cost of carbon emissions,” he said earlier this week.

Abbott argues that his Direct Action policy to pay polluters fits in with Obama’s new edict to cut emissions from coal-fired power stations by 30 per cent by 2030, but that claim crumbles under a moment’s scrutiny.

The President is not mandating how the states will enforce the cuts but there is no doubt he favours an ETS over the use of government payments.

So while Obama seeks to accelerate a global agreement, Abbott rejects the idea of trading schemes to fix the problem.

It is on national security, however, that the contrast between the two leaders is so intriguing.

Time and again during the past week, Abbott has lauded the Five Eyes intelligence agreement as a sign of Australia’s work with the US and others to fight terrorism. The partnership comprises the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Abbott’s message is that political leaders have nothing to feel ashamed of when leaks reveal that their agencies have spied on other governments or collected huge troves of personal data on their own civilians.

One year after the first leaks from Edward Snowden, the Prime Minister is pushing back firmly against the fear that the anglophone democracies are spying on their own people or taking surveillance too far in the world of international relations.

Abbott speaks as if slightly surprised at the naivety of those who think it remarkable that the Australian Signals Directorate might monitor the phone of the Indonesian President or talk to US spies about whether they can share information on Australian civilians.

“This Australian government will not be embarrassed or apologetic about doing what’s necessary to keep our country strong and safe,” he said on Monday in a prepared speech.

Alone among his fellow leaders, Abbott is trying to make his mark on the surveillance and security debate after a year when many of his counterparts seemed reluctant to be so up-front.

It is a reproof, in some way, to the position taken by Obama when he chose to apologise to German Chancellor Angela Merkel after it emerged US agencies had been tapping her phone.

Abbott has also urged the US to take a more assertive role in regional and global affairs. “My hope is that you Americans will have as much faith in yourselves as the rest of the world has in you,” he told a lunch in New York on Tuesday.

That exhortation seems to hint that the Prime Minister thinks America — or perhaps just Obama — is going soft.

By nature combative and by instinct partisan, Abbott may still be adjusting to the challenge of reaching out to leaders who are not like him.