Tony Abbott loyal to a fault: why Philip was knighted

Awarding Prince Philip an Australian knighthood was the worst mistake of Tony Abbott’s tenure in office.

It was a combination of personal loyalty and the unique standing of Queen Elizabeth that led to Tony Abbott’s worst mistake as prime minister.

History will be much kinder to the Abbott prime ministership than today’s analysis would suggest. Some of his achievements — especially stopping the asylum-seeker boats — could probably not have been brought to book by any other prime minister. And they will continue to benefit Australia for many years to come.

The crisis engulfing Europe would have engulfed Australia had Abbott not been prime minister. That is a massive, historic achievement.

But many of Abbott’s signal achievements emerged from the same personality characteristics that led to his biggest missteps. The Australian knighthood for Prince Philip is the classic case. Awarding Philip an Australian knighthood was the worst mistake of Abbott’s tenure in office.

Although in a sense a matter of no real consequence in itself, it was devastating for Abbott personally and for the Liberal Party.

It was announced on Australia Day this year, just a few days ­before the Queensland election. Many Liberals think it changed the result. It made Abbott look ­absurdly antique and out of touch, reinforcing every negative stereotype about him. And, except for a few diehard enthusiastic monarchists, it cruelled the morale of the Liberal Party.

The inside story of the knighthood has not been revealed before and this information does not come from Abbott. But Abbott gave Philip a knighthood because he learned the Queen wanted her husband to have one.

The Queen’s son, Prince Charles, had a number of Australian honours but Philip had not been so richly rewarded by Australia.

The Queen is immensely well regarded in Australia, and rightly so. Prince Philip, like Prince Charles, is much less popular.

Abbott is a constitutional monarchist, the position a majority of Australians endorsed when the republic was put to a referendum in 1999. But most Australians are at best small-m monarchists like John Howard. They don’t want Australia to march backwards to old-style titles and regal pomp and circumstance.

That Abbott unilaterally ­restored knighthoods at all is an example of how poor his tactical judgment on political management sometimes was as prime minister.

But for Queen to make a ­request of Abbott meant that all that was honourable and generous in Abbott — loyalty, chivalry, romance — was lined up against the pragmatic political judgment that should have guided him.

Not only did Abbott endure enormous personal damage ­because of his loyalty to the Queen, he never leaked the ­exculpatory explanation, which does not excuse his error in judgment but gives it context, humanises it and may have made it a less toxic political issue.

Abbott’s government fell mainly because of questions of image and style and tactical political management. His successor, Malcolm Turnbull, in a sense,­acknowledged that the substance of the Abbott government was good by essentially endorsing all the Abbott positions when he took over as Prime Minister.

Abbott’s greatest achievement lies in stopping the boats. Howard yesterday revealed he did not think Abbott would be able to do this. Howard had turned back boats only with Indonesia’s quiet agreement.

That Abbott pushed this through successfully, with no loss of life at sea, no serious breach in relations with Indonesia — ­certainly nothing compared with the trouble that would have come had the boats kept arriving — and against the certain conviction of every commentator and many ­analysts even within government, is an enormous tribute to his courage, strength of will and acumen in matters where he had most control.

Generally in foreign policy, Abbott’s record is outstanding.

On economic policy, Abbott also racked up significant achievements. He was right to abolish the carbon tax and the mining tax. They were bad taxes. They penalised the Australian economy. They were anti-competitive. Abbott promised he would abolish them and he did so.

Despite routine Senate ­obstructionism, Abbott also ­improved the budget position compared with what it would have been under Labor.

Nonetheless, the Abbott government suffered mortal political blows from its first budget. This is partly the fault of our increasingly dysfunctional and unworkable political culture, and partly the ­result of Abbott government misjudgments.

No one was prepared for the spending cuts in the first budget, or that is to say the electorate was not prepared for them. In truth, it was a mild enough budget with most of the notional savings ­occurring several years down the track. But Labor, in an act of deliberate national economic sabotage, had baked spending increases into the budget just beyond its own forward estimates in its last year of government.

That meant that many of these expenditures came on to the books in Abbott’s first budget.

Many of the specific budget measures, such as the Medicare co-payments, had not been flagged by Abbott in opposition, nor had Treasurer Joe Hockey prepared the electorate for them.

Abbott was again partly the victim of wickedly unhelpful external circumstances. The weird business of needing to rerun the West Australian half-Senate election meant that for its first six months the government could not really prepare the electorate for a tough budget, because it was scared of losing at least one senator in Western Australia.

The budget involved broken promises.

It was a mistake for ­Abbott not to admit this, instead trying to make a legalistic argument on the basis of qualifying fine print in his pre-election promises. No political leader ever wins an argument on the basis of the fine print.

To have any chance of winning even a proportion of the first budget measures, Abbott had to be able to take the community with him.

He can rightly claim that the new media environment made this exceptionally difficult. Abbott this week talked of the avalanche of sour, bitter commentary which much modern media comprises. This is especially so in digital media, particularly Twitter, which is designed it seems solely for ­extreme and most anonymous personal abuse.

The politics of personal abuse have never been easier to practice.

Nonetheless, Abbott is not ­exempt from his own failures as a communicator. Intelligent politicians like Abbott learn from the past.

Politicians learn their most useful lessons from their mistakes. They learn the signals of when something is going wrong.

Paradoxically, politicians learn the most dangerous lessons from their successes. The lessons they learn from their successes can be crippling.

Abbott was an astonishingly successful opposition leader. He took the leadership by a single vote at a time when the Liberal Party was deeply riven and ­expected to lose many seats at the next election. Instead he united the party and took the Liberals to the brink of victory in 2010, and then won in 2013.

It is worth pausing to reflect how toxic our political culture has become when such a victory does not endow a new prime minister with any long-lasting authority.

But Abbott had learnt too well all the lessons of opposition. They were the wrong lessons for a prime minister.

The single new characteristic which Abbott displayed after 2009, which no one had really predicted, was intense political discipline and focus.

He has been vilified by the Left for many years and could never expect a fair shake from much of the media. He learnt as opposition leader that he could determine which grab of his daily words would end up on the evening news. He achieved this by simply repeating the grab he wanted aired over and again and not saying too much else.

After 2010 and the establishment of the Gillard minority government, he managed his party internally partly by convincing it that an election was always one minute away. He ran a tight, state- of-emergency-style office, with one key adviser, relentless message discipline, Opposition unity achieved in part through blanket opposition to the government of the day.

Because his Catholicism was so relentlessly and unreasonably ­attacked, he learnt to shut down about the personal side of his identity.

He addressed his support deficit with women partly through the wholly ill-conceived paid ­parental leave scheme, which he imposed on his party and which never had any meaningful Liberal Party support.

Towards the end of his time in opposition, he brought his wife into the public spotlight, along with his daughters, merely to achieve the minimum recognition in the electorate that he was a normal human being. All these calculations were devastatingly effective in the 2013 election.

But they should have all been swept away when he became prime minister. Everything that Abbott had learnt in leadership prepared him to make the critical wrong decision in his approach to the prime ministership.

He needed to become a ubiquitous and friendly presence in Australian life, to have an open an easy dialogue with the Australian people. He had the ­potential to be the Liberals’ Bob Hawke.

He had the same easy presence in a bar or at a community barbecue, the same mainstream Aussie bloke manner, along with a powerful ­intellect. I thought he would be a hit with the Howard battlers, ­labelled only far too late, and unsuccessfully, in his prime ministership as “Tony’s tradies”.

Friends tried to get him to ­participate in long-form TV interviews, to take the risks of showing Australia who he really was, and to become much more engaged in media discussion.

Abbott is without question a fine person. The basic human ingredients are of the highest order. But so often his virtues got him into trouble. And to end at the ­beginning, never more was this the case than on the question of loyalty.

Joe Hockey failed as Treasurer, but Abbott would not consider moving him when he was still strong enough to do so. Yet ­Abbott has known Hockey for so long.

When Abbott coached Sydney University’s rugby union second grade team he seldom picked Hockey in the starting line-up, and this always rankled with Hockey.

But Abbott just wasn’t sure that Hockey had the commitment, that he was ruthless enough.

And then the recent episode that did Abbott the most damage was Bronwyn Bishop’s deter­mination to hang on to the speakership when it was obvious to everyone but her that she should have gone almost immediately. Her wilful self-regard did her leader enormous damage.

He should have forced her out much sooner.

There is tragedy in all this but there is also, as Howard remarked, great achievement.

The Abbott prime ministership leaves more pluses than minuses.