Abbott drives home the wedge

THE symbolism was stark - on the same day a beleaguered republican Prime Minister Julia Gillard was in London for the royal wedding, Tony Abbott, the conservative pro-marriage monarchist, was sitting in the dirt with some of the nation's most damaged communities at Alice Springs.

The contrast is unfair. After all, Gillard was merely doing her duty as Australia's leader. But Abbott was also at work on his principal mission - tightening his massive political wedge on the Labor government. It now runs into multiple dimensions.

Since the August 2010 election the "smart" Labor brief on Abbott is that the public won't elect him, he's too negative, too conservative, too limited and too alienated from women. And for many this spin is still persuasive.

Yet Abbott is throttling the political lifeblood from Labor in a relentless campaign that has seen Labor's primary vote fall to 32 per cent, heading further south, a campaign no alternative Liberal leader could have mounted.

Abbott grasps Labor's vulnerability and has the ruthlessness to wedge it. Eight months after losing out to Gillard on minority government Abbott has his second Labor PM to the brink of political ruin. He sank Kevin Rudd and now Gillard is half submerged.

Abbott, in effect, wages a sustained political crusade to destroy the Labor base vote. It is the most elemental feature of Australian politics today yet there is a deep reluctance to identify and analyse what is actually happening.

The reason is obvious - most of the influential progressive political class loathes Abbott and cannot believe he will prevail to become prime minister. In short, it is in denial. Abbott's deepest offence is to repudiate the orthodoxy of the progressive class on nearly every issue from climate change to boatpeople to Aboriginal policy to religion. Its response is pathetic - to depict him as a Tea Party-type extremist when, for most Australians, this sort of abstraction doesn't work.

Whether Gillard can halt and reverse Abbott's momentum is doubtful.

This week offered the perfect demonstration of the Abbott technique. He visited Christmas Island to campaign on asylum-seekers, Whyalla to turn unionists against the carbon tax and Alice Springs to put Gillard under pressure over social dislocation in indigenous communities.

Each issue folds into Abbott's central narrative: that Labor's policies are failing and constitute a betrayal of ordinary people.

For Abbott, it is the idea of Labor betrayal that counts.

Yesterday morning at Alice Springs, Abbott said that if Labor hero Ben Chifley were alive today he would be voting Liberal.

Many people will dismiss this as a cheap shot. But that misses the point. The point is betrayal.

Chifley was an old-style Labor man, decent, conservative, dedicated to the interests of the workers, and Abbott's message is that Labor is no longer in Chifley's tradition.

Would Chifley have welcomed the boats or would he have called out the troops? Would Chifley have imposed a carbon tax on industry? Would Chifley have intervened to improve the daily lives of indigenous peoples in the Northern Territory?

In a literal sense, such questions are absurd. But in the symbolism of the culture war that shapes Australian politics today they have meaning.

Abbott hails from the pro-Democratic Labor Party wing of the Liberal Party. The DLP was not just right-wing, it was also Labor. In his DLP spiritual ties, his masculine ethos, his Catholicism (once the religion of the Labor Party) and in his working-class populism, Abbott is far closer to the old-fashioned Labor Party than many can conceive or credit.

The idea of Abbott stealing the base Labor vote, far from being a fantastic notion, is utterly feasible. Indeed, it is happening.

Given the decisive split in politics today between insiders and outsiders, Abbott is a natural at mobilising outsider sentiment. This week he was at home drinking with workers in the Christmas Island pub, talking to steel industry unionists at Whyalla, working out at 5.30am with Australian Federal Police and sitting on the ground at Alice Springs with indigenous elders.

Indeed, the week offered a template of the threat he poses to Labor. Gillard was being the responsible insider, visiting Japan, South Korea, China and London in a successful trip as Prime Minister while Abbott was playing outsider politics, turning grassroots sentiment further against Labor at its own base.

"This is a Labor Party that has walked away from its own heartland," Abbott told Focus yesterday.

"When you have a new government there's a sense of excitement, the idea of a new beginning. But talking to the public now there is just a profound disappointment about the Labor Party and what has happened."

As leader, Abbott is strong on policy principle and weak on policy detail. He is steeped neither in economic nor foreign policy and has a history of media stumbles.

Yet Abbott has the natural skills for an Opposition Leader relying on a set of policy principles that invest him with a strong profile. People feel he stands for something when they are unsure what Labor stands for. Abbott's principles resonate with mainstream Australia - that the boats should be stopped, asylum-seekers who commit criminal acts should not be accepted into this country, indigenous parents must send their children to school and be punished if they refuse, passive welfare is a malaise that must be tackled and pricing carbon short of comparable action by other nations is irresponsible.

Frankly, no opposition leader has been so under-estimated. From his election as leader in December 2009 Labor's key players were privately scathing of Abbott. They saw him as intellectually third rate, arguing that of the three contenders, Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey and Abbott, the Liberals had taken their worst option.

Yet Labor's culture renders it paralysed to the Abbott threat. It keeps repeating the same blunders, as though in a horror movie with the reel stuck. Labor was surprised by Abbott's intimidation of Kevin Rudd over climate change and the mining tax. Sure that its transition to Gillard was a master stroke, Labor was shocked at Abbott's disciplined campaign that denied Gillard a majority.

Confident that Gillard's negotiation of minority government had checked Abbott, Labor has been stunned at the ongoing attrition of its primary vote and the fading of Gillard's authority before Abbott's onslaught.

Labor says the voters aren't inspired by Abbott. That's right, but politics is relative. His only task is to beat Gillard. In fact, Abbott's political strategy has been much sharper and more consistent than those of Rudd or Gillard.

Following in Howard's path, Abbott's plan was to steal back the Labor battlers, once known as the Howard battlers. This is his organising principle. Abbott is tactically flexible in pursuit of this strategy. So he pledges to halt the boats like Howard but reversed Howard's support for carbon pricing. Again, Abbott's organising theme is his pitch to what Howard called "the mainstream mob". Labor's mistake after Rudd's triumph was to think Howard had become an irrelevancy. The extent of this blunder was huge because Howard's game plan remains relevant and has been reinvigorated by Abbott.

The key to Abbott's strategy is his belief that Labor is undergoing a profound crisis of political identity. The progressive class, of course, refuses to concede any such problem since that puts its own policies and position in peril.

Yet Abbott is convinced Labor cannot reconcile the conflict between, on one hand, its traditional working-class and lower-middle-class base and, on the other, its more contemporary social, environmental and cultural progressives who support the carbon tax, asylum-seekers, symbolic reconciliation and much of the political agenda run by the green, gay, feminist and ethnic lobbies.

The course of events is beginning to validate Abbott's judgment. "I think this split has become a fundamental conflict for the Labor Party," Abbott says. "It is virtually impossible for the current Labor leadership to reconcile these two constituencies."

Only a certain type of a Liberal leader can mount this crusade and Abbott is such a type. The point, however, is that in virtually every policy area Labor is trapped between trying to satisfy its constituencies. It is both tough and soft on the boats. It wants to price carbon but not hurt any workers. It has an alliance with the Greens but calls them extremists.

It backed the Northern Territory intervention but softened its hard edges. It believes in markets but mounts huge government interventions justified by market failures.

In short, Labor looks weak trying to reconcile the divergence between its constituencies. Abbott is now mobilising outside opinion against the orthodoxies of inside opinion to which Labor clings, sometimes half-heartedly.

"Ordinary Australians feel this isn't a standard Labor government but a Labor-Greens government," Abbott says. Slamming Labor on boatpeople, he says that "the public now think they're being played for mugs by foreigners".

Abbott, however, is moving to broaden his image. His high profile on mental health and Aboriginal affairs testifies to this strategy.

This week in central Australia he spent time with female elders, Bess Price from Yuendumu and Alison Anderson, from the Territory Assembly, who broke from the Labor Party over its indigenous policies. "I've called for a new Northern Territory intervention," Abbott says. "If this is going to happen, it must be bipartisan and I want to make a common cause with Julia Gillard on this."

Yes, that's about the need to look positive. It shows, above all, Abbott's ability as Opposition Leader to set the agenda and this is where Labor has so seriously misread him.