Reject woke culture and embrace ’Fightback’ agenda to survive, says former PM Abbott

The former PM issued a veiled rebuke of his own party and the Morrison government for an attack on personal freedoms during the pandemic.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott said the party needed to “get off the fence” and return to Liberal values. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

Tony Abbott has issued a veiled ­rebuke of his own party and the Morrison government for an ­attack on personal freedoms during the pandemic, while warning that the Liberals must tackle the woke movement head-on by rejecting any compromise if it were to have a chance at the next election.

The former prime minister, who was awarded lifetime membership of the Liberal Party at the weekend, told The Australian the party needed to “get off the fence” and return to Liberal values.

He said it would be a mistake to assume that society had lost its taste for self-reliance because of the pandemic and that the task ahead was to convince the electorate of the perils of “big government” and political correctness.

Claiming modern politics had become obsessed with “striking a pose” rather than making a difference, Mr Abbott told a meeting of party members on Friday that the party had reached a low ebb, but it could revive its electoral fortunes so long as it offered an alternative rather than an “echo”.

“Our challenge is to confront the whole woke agenda head-on – as I tried to do from 2009 to 2015 – not to compromise with it,” Mr Abbott said. “That doesn’t guarantee a win in 2025 but it gives us a fighting chance, and it well and truly establishes our credentials when all this climate and identity madness is ­finally seen for the ­destructive and vicious sham it is.”

In a speech to the Liberal Party’s federal council, he suggested the party needed to get back to first principles including a belief in individual freedoms, small government and a rejection of “political theology”.

“For parties with a preference for freedom, and for smaller ­government, the pandemic was an especially dispiriting time, as governments around the world ditched their own pandemic plans for the Wuhan plan of locking down and spending big,” he said.

“Yet it would be a pretty tepid Liberal, who therefore concluded, that voters have lost their taste for freedom and self-reliance; rather than resolved to persuade the electorate that societal timidity, and greater government control, was a panic-driven aberration, rather than the new normal.

“Likewise, it would be a pretty strange Liberal who accepted claims made in defiance of reality: that the world’s fairest societies are somehow inherently racist, or that gender is a social construct rather than a biological fact.  “Our job is not to be a slightly less politically correct, slightly less fiscally irresponsible, and slightly less overbearing version of the Labor Party; it’s to be a clear alternative; and if that’s currently not popular, to strive to change minds and hearts.”

While praising Peter Dutton for resisting pressures toward political correctness and his rejection of the proposed Indigenous voice to parliament, Mr Abbott also called for a new “Hewson-style” Fightback reform project that would seek to reshape the functions of government.

He offered unlikely praise for former Liberal leader John Hewson who, after admitting to being no longer a member of the party, became a vocal critic of the Abbott and Morrison governments over climate change.

Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Martin Ollman

But Mr Abbott said it was the principles of the Fightback agenda that needed to be revived. “That’s where our party and our country owes a debt, largely unacknowledged, to John Hewson … whose Fightback program comprehensively considered what government was doing badly, and should do better; what government was doing, but shouldn’t do at all; and what government wasn’t doing, but should, from a liberal-conservative standpoint,” he said.

“Something like the Hewson project is needed if the next Liberal government is to be better than the last.”

In receiving the lifetime membership, Mr Abbott praised his former chief of staff, now Sky News host Peta Credlin, as one of the “fiercest warriors” he had known and her husband, Brian Loughnane, who he said was one of the greatest political strategists the party had ever had.