Tony Abbott’s vacillations leave him at risk of permanent irrelevance

Tony Abbott in the House of Representatives Chamber. Picture: Kym Smith.

The cheek of the man.

Having presided over the most brutal emasculation of the Westminster system since Federation, Tony Abbott is now busy singing the praises of Western civilisation.

In the pages of The Australian yesterday the former prime minister waxed heroic about the liberal tradition: the rule of law; representative democracy; freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and religion. The hurly burly of the free market.

The occasion was the opening of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilization, an academic centre dedicated to teaching the Western canon and funded from the estate of healthcare magnate Paul Ramsay, but for Abbott it was familiar territory.

The decline of the West and the need to defend it against its many enemies is a staple theme of the former prime minister.

In May Abbott gave a speech lamenting what he described as the “pervasive ambivalence verging on hostility’’ toward Australia and its values as well as the “cultural cowardice’’ enfeebling our institutions.

“We are part of a civilisation which has exported scientific learning, material prosperity, and concepts of democracy, justice and freedom to the entire world,” Abbott said. ‘’The modern world is unimaginable without this legacy of Western civilisation.’’

Back in 2015 he was on similar turf, this time riffing on the legacy of the late Margaret Thatcher. “Parliamentary democracy and the rule of law; freedom broadening slowly down from precedent to precedent; the notion of civilisation as a trust between the living, the dead and the yet-to-be-born — this was the heritage she’d been elected to preserve and strengthen.”

Strong stuff — and dead on the money, too. The steady erosion of cultural self-confidence is a real and debilitating trend, a by-product of decades of relativist drivel inside our institutions and throughout our politics.

The spectacle of angry mobs attacking statues on the grounds that the men they depict didn’t measure up to the modish standards of the day is proof positive that in our rush to understand other people’s cultures, we no longer understand our own.

So all power to the Ramsay Centre and those who travel with it.

But Abbott as a guardian of our political inheritance?

Please.

It was Abbott, who along with other conservative MPs, foisted the same-sex marriage plebiscite on this country. Plebiscites are grimy, divisive affairs, beloved by tyrants as a means of mobilising one group in society against another. They are kryptonite to a Westminster democracy, which holds the parliament as the supreme source of moral authority. It is through parliamentary debate that the raw passions of the day are filtered and distilled, resulting more often than not in a compromised outcome that allows all participants to walk away feeling they have gained something. If Abbott truly valued our Western inheritance he’d have played no role in the humiliation of one of its cornerstone institutions. It’s hard to imagine Thatcher behaving in such a way. This was the Iron Lady in 1975: “Perhaps the late Lord Attlee was right when he said that the referendum was a device of dictators and demagogues”.

What about religious freedom? Wasn’t it Abbott who fought to the wire for the right of priests and celebrants to refuse to solemnise gay marriages? Indeed it was. But where was Abbott when Pauline Hanson walked into the Senate chamber in a full length burqa? Hanson’s stunt was surely a greater insult to the principle of religious freedom than Liberal Senator Dean Smith’s mild contention that florists and cake-makers not be allowed to discriminate against gay couples by refusing them service.

Did Abbott rise up in defence of Australia’s 600,000 Muslims? Did he call a press conference and condemn Hanson for her attack on the hard-won right to free worship? Did he issue a statement, on Ramsay Centre letterhead perhaps, pointing out that there was a straight line between Martin Luther’s 95 theses and the right of a Muslim woman to walk down the main street of Lakemba wearing whatever she likes?

Like hell. Here was Abbott a few days after Hanson’s grubby photo op: “I understand the point she was trying to make.”

As for free speech, the sine qua non of all democratic life, Abbott’s record is none too flash. He flirted with the idea of banning Hizb ut Tahrir, a militant Islamic group whose anti-Western bluster is offensive, but otherwise harmless. As prime minister he squibbed a chance to amend Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, leaving the real battle against legalised intolerance to his successor.

He has since called for the entire abolition of the Human Rights Commission, a consequence-free act of political posturing that does nothing to remove one of the country’s most illiberal laws, one his government left encoded in our statutes.

There was a time when Tony Abbott was one of the most compelling intellectual figures in the federal parliament: principled, brave, reflective, frequently contrary.

Alas, his frequent vacillations have left him, like the Western canon itself, at risk of permanent irrelevance.