No left turn: Tony Abbott urges conservatives to hold their line

Tony Abbott has warned centre-right parties against moving to the left to pick up voters, saying that climate and immigration had become modern-day ‘litmus issues’ for working people.

Former PM Tony Abbott: ‘If it can’t control immigration and if it succumbs to the climate cult, any votes a conservative party might pick up on the left will be more than matched by the votes it will haemorrhage on the right.’ Picture: WireImage

Tony Abbott has warned centre-right parties against moving to the left in order to pick up votes in an address exploring a modern political formula to “unite the Right.”

In his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in Budapest this week, the former Liberal prime minister said the conservative fusion of “freedom, family and nation” was still contentious in the Anglosphere, but this was not the case in Hungary.

He said immigration and climate change had increasingly become modern-day “litmus issues” because most working people felt the political establishment – on both sides – had ripped them off.

Supporting high immigration with more or less open borders was “toxic to conservatives’ working-class constituencies”, while “equally toxic is obsessing over emissions and making false claims that renewable energy is cheap”.

“These days, if it can’t control immigration and if it succumbs to the climate cult, any votes a conservative party might pick up on the left will be more than matched by the votes it will haemorrhage on the right,” he said. “(Donald) Trump gets that. In the end (Boris) Johnson didn’t. And if Rishi Sunak understands it, he hasn’t yet acted on it.”

Mr Abbott warned that centre-right parties were increasingly searching for a way to defuse the “civil war” between their conservative and progressive wings.

“This internal struggle is not, as often claimed, between conservatives and liberals, but between conviction and opportunism,” he said. “Because it’s not really liberalism that’s now at war with conservatism; it’s progressivism – manifested inside centre-right political parties via the notion that electoral success means moving to the left in order to pick up centre-left votes.”

Mr Abbott advised against this approach and warned it would infuriate older supporters who tended to “feel betrayed by a party that no longer knows what it stands for and can opt out of politics altogether or support minor-party disrupters”.

He also argued that a major transformation was under way that had created “quite a different political contest” from the traditional contest of previous eras.

As free countries had become richer, Mr Abbott said there had been a slow yet seismic shift in which working people had “been voting more right” while well-to-do people “have been voting more left”.

“If working people are voting more right: as in Australia in 2013 (my election), America in 2016 (Trump’s election), Britain in 2019 (Boris Johnson’s Brexit election), and in Hungary for the past decade, the main party of the right needs to adjust to become more economically pragmatic; more focused on the social fabric, more targeted towards people’s living standards, and more concerned to uphold its own country’s interests over ‘global’ ones,” he said.

“If richer people are voting more left, as in the teal phenomenon in Australia in 2022; the Tory wipeout in London in 2019; and (Joe) Biden’s sweep of all the big US cities in 2020, the main party of the left will change too, to focus less on cost of living, and more on ‘First World problems’ like climate and identity, and be vulnerable once more to losing the old ‘blue-collar Tories’ and the ‘Reagan Democrats’.”

Mr Abbott said this meant that, for conservative parties, sensible economics would become less an end in itself and more a means to other outcomes such as a better health system, a more rigorous education system, a social security system that strengthens the family and a strong national defence.

Difficulties arose when the party leadership failed to adjust to the new voting reality, with Mr Abbott arguing that former UK prime minister Boris Johnson was “in tune with the ‘red wall’ on Brexit, but not on emissions reduction – which working people see as an economic issue, with renewable energy driving up their power bills.”

Mr Abbott said conservative parties should be “stronger than ever, provided they have decent leaders with the courage, the conviction, and the vigour to articulate clear positions in opposition and to pursue them relentlessly in government”.