Tony Abbott’s message mission a fight to the end

TONY Abbott’s speech revealed his fighting instincts as a political warrior. There will be no resignation, no surrender, no U-turn.

Abbott’s message is that, des­pite select acts of contrition, he ­believes in his mission, in the policies he has championed and in his quest to prevent Australia becoming “a second rate country living off its luck”.

Ever the good Catholic ready to confess his sins and seek forgiveness, Abbott conceded only minimal mistakes. He has belatedly taken his expensive paid parental leave scheme “off the table” and says future honours will be decided by the Order of Australia Council. Concessions on these fronts were essential.

But, in the teeth of demoralising opinion polls, the devastating Queensland election result and the threat to his position, Abbott has declined to retreat or drastic­ally recast his agenda or priorities. He will fight or die on his feet.

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Abbott’s speech will probably buy his leadership more time. Yet it will only polarise the Liberal Party ever further.

His supporters will beat their drums, but his opponents last night were saying it proved Abbott cannot change and cannot reinvent himself.

The truth is Abbott sees no need to reinvent himself. Consulting and engaging more is worthwhile and essential. But this pledge does not reinvent a leader.

­Perhaps his most telling line was to say his government faced difficulties not because it was on the wrong track, but because “we made the right calls”.

Abbott repeated his refrain: he came into politics not to be popular, but to make a difference. He was careful not to invoke Churchill, but his speech was cast in the Churchill tradition. It is a foreign language in today’s Australia.

­Abbott went so far as to say that under Labor the nation had ­become “self-indulgent”, its living standards were financed by ­borrowing and the budget that he pledges to correct is founded on “intergenerational theft”.

Abbott’s problem is he cannot find a polite way of sending this message and he cannot escape the dilemma: fixing the fiscal problem requires unpopular measures and there is little sign he has the rapport with the public to persuade them. The gulf between his mission and the nation’s mood, as reflected in recent election results, look ominous.

While signalling a series of 2015 initiatives, he offered few details: a families package focused on childcare; a small-business jobs package that pivots on a July 1 company tax cut; a tougher stand against ­Islamist extremism; and better ­enforcement of foreign purchase rules covering existing homes.

These steps make sense, ­depending upon the detail.

But Abbott made clear he will not retreat from the ideological conflict that plagues Australia. He was explicit: the budget problem was driven by high spending, not low taxes; the ­current generation was sacrificing the next generation; only a Liberal government could fix Labor’s fiscal inheritance.

On a series of explosive elect­oral issues, Abbott purchased caution. There will be no attack on the minimum wage. There will be no GST without the support of Labor and the Premiers. Beyond this, he offered scant definition of his government’s approach to industrial relations and tax reform.

Abbott is proud of his record and will champion it. Stopping the boats and fighting any resurrection of the carbon tax are high on this list. It is significant with Malcolm Turnbull one of his rivals that Abbott repeated the cry that delivered him the leadership five years ago: “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.”

He was powerful on the leadership. he issued a warning to the party — don’t usurp the privileges of the people. The people hired and fired prime ministers. His message was clear: it would be an act of folly and dubious legitimacy for the party room to repeat Labor’s 2010 blunder and assume that the party, not the people, owned the office of prime minister.

Once again, this will probably buy Abbott some time at the cost of polarising the party. His speech neither saved nor doomed his leadership. It was never going to be a “make or break” moment.

Abbott has pledged to be a better leader, listen more and consult more. But Abbott is still ­Abbott, in his strengths and flaws.