The battle within

TONY Abbott may be subtly repackaging himself as an election nears - but have those contradictions at his core really gone away?

The Abbotts at home in Forestville, Sydney, from left: Francis, Tony, Margie, Bridget Louise (and dog Maisie). Picture: James Elsby

THE leader of Her Majesty's loyal Opposition is gnawing a ballpoint pen as he is serially mocked by his opponents in Parliament. While he should be inured to these pitiless Question Time assaults, Tony Abbott stirs: from slumping indifference, he turns his back on his assailants, then settles on furious, cack-handed note-taking.

Nicola Roxon, who succeeded him as Health Minister, now has the call. She mimics Abbott’s responses from a radio interview in which he tried to dismiss claims he cut $1 billion from health spending. With pinpoint “ums” and “ahs”, Roxon reprises Abbott’s tentative explanations. “I did not rip a billion dollars out of health. Um, the rate of spending growth just slowed somewhat,” says Roxon, as Labor’s guttural baying drowns the Coalition’s protests.

If Abbott’s heart-rate is in synch with his hyper-jiggling left foot, it is most likely now running at 200 beats per minute. He swivels sullenly in his chair, rocks his head as if in a trance, before locking eyes with Roxon. Abbott has the countenance of a bull about to charge across the chamber to maul one or all of Labor’s front bench. Diminutive Roxon, a matador with a fringe and red lipstick, prods and teases.

“So this is straight-talking Tony for you. I think it must be special code for people who find economics boring - a cut here, a cut there - but I suppose it is all the same to the Liberal Party,” Roxon sneers, repeating his halting responses. Then she reaches for a sword and arches her back. “That is a billion dollars, it is this man’s legacy and he cannot be trusted to be Prime Minister.”

“Oh,” shrieks Abbott, writhing in his chair, “Stabbed! Stabbed!” And in that instant, you know she’s lanced him. His reaction is over the top, unseemly for a man who is trying to convince Australians he is composed, that he has mended his errant ways, that he has matured enough to be trusted to run the country. All that remains is for Speaker Harry Jenkins to present La Matadora with the bull’s ears.

Roxon has found the secret to wounding Abbott in a way mere picadors Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his deputy Julia Gillard apparently cannot, with their jibes of “phoney”, “extremist” and “risky”. It’s not so much Roxon’s cape work, but her visceral scorn. Abbott didn’t respect Roxon as his Health shadow (“A bit out of her depth”). But she has the gift to fluster him - even now, as he leads a resurgent Coalition to an election and tries to make a case that a “do-nothing” Rudd Government is out of touch, out of ideas and, so early in its life, out of time.

Energy and cunning
Abbott is more comfortable launching attacks than enduring them. Since becoming Liberal leader last December, he has got his side back into the political contest through energy, cunning and by uniting the Coalition forces. Still, he faces an almighty challenge. “History tells you that the Rudd Government will probably get a second term,” says former prime minister John Howard of Abbott’s chance of winning, which he rates as “possible”. “Tony understands the magnitude of the task. But if anybody is capable of getting under Rudd’s skin leading our side, it’s Tony. I think he has already done it. We’re certainly doing better. He’ll continue to do well.”

Howard believes the public is still getting to know the new Liberal leader, the third since he himself was vanquished in November 2007. If they knew Abbott at all, he argues, they knew the narrower version of Abbott, the moral crusader. But there’s a reassessment going on, says the man who is probably the closest political kin Abbott has ever had. “He’s not a fake,” says Howard. “He’s an authentic person. In political terms, he’s ‘a man in full’. There’s a lot to his life and what you see is what you get.”

The selling of Tony Abbott will naturally involve packaging, handling, discipline - all those dark arts you’d think work against the genuine article. How does the candidate feel about that? “That’s a good question,” he says in a raspy voice, the result of pushing himself too hard over four days in the Northern Territory earlier this month. “I’m certainly conscious of the fact I have sometimes been a bit of a sole trader in politics. You can’t be that anymore. Now, I think it should be possible to maintain that kind of level of colour, if you like, without being a maverick.”

Has there ever been an alternative prime minister who has put so much of himself out there, over such a long period of time, as Anthony John Abbott? In articles, speeches and books since his student days three decades ago, Abbott has had a prodigious output, expounding his knowledge, prejudices and quirks on public policy, theology, philosophy, political history, culture and heroes. Words clearly count for Abbott, but so do actions.

The 52-year-old, Jesuit-educated Abbott may have Cardinal George Pell as his personal confessor, but there’s been a fair bit of Oprah and Home and Away in his life as well. His crises have been shared in public - from why he left the seminary to how he had (then didn’t have) a child born out of wedlock when he was 19; from the income cut and “mortgage stress” he faced after the last election to his bouts of foul language and misdirected jokes.

To people with only a passing interest in politics, Abbott is best known for his successful advocacy on behalf of the monarchists’ “no” case in the 1999 referendum on a republic and his anti-abortion stand when MPs had a free vote on banning the abortion pill RU486. Perhaps they also know him as the “Mad Monk”; that he apparently lives in red Speedos; and that when asked about sex before marriage by a women’s magazine recently, he said: “I would say to my daughters, if they were to ask me this question, I would say … it is the greatest gift that you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving and don’t give it to someone lightly.”

Abbott once criticised the late asbestosis campaigner Bernie Banton (“I know Bernie is very sick but just because a person is very sick doesn’t necessarily mean that he is pure of heart in all things”) and made a horrid allusion to John Brogden a day after he attempted suicide (“If we did that, we would be as dead as the former Liberal leader’s political prospects”). In the most memorable encounter of the 2007 election campaign, after arriving half an hour late to the National Press Club for a televised debate with Roxon, Abbott was heard to say to her when they shook hands: “That’s bullshit. You’re being deliberately unpleasant. I suppose you can’t help yourself, can you?”

Just who can’t help themselves? The spotlight on him now is brighter. Everything Abbott says or does is amplified, accentuated; every gaffe is multiplied, each small act of kindness deserving a medallion in the highly charged partisanship of an election year. Naturally, he is being compared to Rudd at every turn. To sharpen policy differences, to unnerve his opponents, Abbott will take dangerous, unpredictable leaps, as Labor’s Mark Latham did in 2004.

The summer image blitz of Abbott as surf lifesaver, volunteer firefighter, cyclist and bushman bloke is all true - and also superficial. At heart, the man is contemplative, selfless, humble, sensitive and decent. And, at various times, he’s displayed the opposite of all these noble qualities.

At war with himself
In June 1984, a few months after he entered St Patrick’s Seminary in Manly to train for the priesthood, Abbott gave a revealing interview to The Australian’s Helen Trinca. With a fierce reputation won in student politics, a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford behind him, a boxing blue and rugby honours, Abbott was perhaps the most prominent seminarian ever in this country.

What had turned the budding politician or academic into a candidate for God, Trinca asked. “As time went by it seemed to me the real issues were not so much political but spiritual; the important arena was not Parliament, the economy or the strategic balance but the human heart; the great qualities were not ambition, ability or eloquence but love,” said the then 26-year-old.

“It’s been said I have a martyr complex, that I like to rush off and engage in heroic struggles for lost causes. I hope that’s not true. We humans have something very deep in us which is repelled by the idea of God. I think that’s our pride and the Christian is in a sense constantly at war with the world and often at war with himself.”

For Abbott, the greater game has been the human struggle. Like all of us, he confronts the world, drawing on the gifts he has been given, taking the many opportunities and lucky breaks that have come his way. Chance has played a starring role in his career - winning the leadership by just one vote, for instance. Yet there is also the battle he has with his ambition and pride; between duty and desire, his appetites and self-control, instinct and thought. Abbott versus Abbott is a gripping main event.

“Every human being is constantly challenged to be a better person and every human being has got to be regularly self-critical along the lines, ‘Am I doing this for the right reasons? Is this really the right thing to do?’” Abbott says. “And sometimes, if we are fair dinkum, the answer will be, ‘I’m not really doing it for the right reasons, maybe it isn’t the right thing to do’.”

The Jesuit formation, with its motto of “Men for others”, remains strong in Abbott, a product of both Sydney’s St Aloysius (Milsons Point) and St Ignatius (Riverview). Fellow seminarian and friend Anthony Percy, now rector of Sydney’s Good Shepherd Seminary, says the Jesuits implanted the tendency to feel the consolations and desolations of God. “He’s grasped that whole teaching. God is within - not out there. Tony has that self-knowledge, he really does know about introspection.”

But it’s Abbott’s experience of being both “saint and sinner”, says Father Percy, that gives him an ability to reach out to people. Abbott’s not sure there’s been much sanctity but he does think he’s become less black-and-white in his thinking. In policy terms, he says the biggest changes of mind he’s had are on multiculturalism and paid maternity leave. He says: “One of the things that you realise as life goes on is that there are far more shades of grey; and life ... always has the capacity to surprise.”

Father Emmet Costello detected an “insatiable ambition” in Abbott for leadership and success when he first met him at Riverview. “Tony wanted to achieve his maximum potential and that aroused great jealousy,” he says. School friends confirm Abbott’s striving. In politics, he won the Sydney seat of Warringah at a by-election in 1994.

His long-term colleagues detect a hard-headedness in socialising and in policy-making. “He is a man of conviction, for sure,” says a senior Liberal figure. “But he can also be quite ruthless. You can see right now, as he is putting together his policy framework, what is sellable policy and what is not.”

“It’s not that Tony is any different to the rest of us,” says a close colleague and friend. “Politicians are a selfish bunch. But nothing gets in the way of the really ambitious and successful ones. Tony’s only been associated with people who are going somewhere. Unless everything is calculated and you figure out who matters, you get nowhere. There are people in our party who would be happy to see him fail. So, in the end, it’s just you and you. It’s a brutal and destructive existence.”

One of the tensions in Abbott’s life has been between the home front and the demands of his political career. Unlike the House of Howard, for instance, the Abbott clan of Margie and daughters Louise, 20, Frances, 18, and Bridget, 17, are not imbued with politics. Abbott concedes he would have been a better husband and father if he’d been doing something else. He’s attended few parent-teacher meetings and sporting events, and did not play enough with the girls when they were younger. “My kids, to their credit and their mother’s credit, seem to have grown up as really good kids, given the deficiencies of attention from me,” he says. “And they don’t seem to resent it especially. It’s been tougher on Margie.” The couple met when he was a journ¬alist on The Bulletin. She told him early in his career as an MP that she’d become a sole parent.

“The girls know their father and his values and what he is hoping to achieve,” says Margie Abbott, who runs a childcare centre. “He understands where I am coming from. We have a balanced and solid marriage. I don’t need to be there with him all the time. I have a job which is very important to me. There’s no pressure on me, I don’t feel like I have to perform as a political wife and for that I respect him.”

When Howard lost the election, Abbott fell into a deep funk. Some colleagues likened this to “going off the rails” or having an enormous sulk. “He ate too much, he drank too much, he mucked around and he did not do the necessary policy work,” says a senior Liberal about the immediate aftermath of defeat, when Brendan Nelson won the leadership. “He’d go missing from Shadow Cabinet on his little adventures,” says another long-time friend and colleague. “Often, nobody knew where he was. It was like that in government as well.”

Margie Abbott says her husband did not “go off the rails”. “He’s always trying to take leaps forward and he asked himself, ‘Where does one go from here?’” she says. “Sure, there was a period of introspection, self-analysis and asking what could have been done better. He was quieter and there wasn’t the same level of energy, but it didn’t mean he wasn’t on the job. The writing of his book [Battlelines], those 12-18 months, was quite a cathartic experience. He had to decide what he was on about. I think that was a very important time for him and he came to the conclusion that he is a man who wishes to serve others.” It sometimes leaves her grumpy, but Margie knows how important those solo early morning surfs or runs are to her self-contained, sometime loner husband.

For Abbott, a mainstay of Howardism, losing power was like a bereavement. “The more passionately and emotionally you were involved in a government role, the harder it is to lose it,” he says, adding that among his senior colleagues Howard coped best, “because he knew his career had not long to run anyway”, while Peter Costello was the most affected person, followed by himself. “I think I spent most of 2008 just ‘being with’ that feeling of loss,” he says. “Inevitably, as part of the post-election period I was contemplating whether politics was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and writing the book was a good way of rediscovering a sense of vocation,” he says. “Eventually the passage of time tends to heal this stuff so that by the middle of last year I was well and truly back to normal.”

Some shadow ministerial colleagues remain resentful, particularly for his poor contribution to policy development - especially in his area of family and community services - first under Brendan Nelson, and then Malcolm Turnbull, who became leader in September 2008. “I had a conversation with Malcolm the day he announced a reshuffle promoting Joe [Hockey] and Christopher [Pyne] but not me. I was none too pleased, not to put too fine a point on it, about this reshuffle and I told Malcolm in the most extraordinarily blunt terms how disappointed and annoyed I was. He countered by telling me quite plainly that I’d been psychologically AWOL for much of the previous 15 months, or whatever it was, and after I reflected on that I thought perhaps there was some point to what he said. And I thought, ‘Yeah, I do need to move on’. Which I think I did pretty successfully from that point.”

There were also times during government when colleagues questioned his commitment and judgment. “He really got his teeth into employment services and industrial relations and he performed well,” recalls a senior Liberal. “But in health I never had the feeling that he was happy in that area.” A colleague from the Howard cabinet remembers his lack of financial acumen and his ideological zeal. “It always drove us crazy that he is not financially minded. He’d get an idea, which was always big and grand, and he tended to ignore everyone’s objections in the Expenditure Review Committee. It drove Costello crazy. ‘Why are we doing this?’ Costello would say.”

It’s due to such first-hand testimony, and reported statements Abbott made about being bored with the dismal science, and his various writings and now policy proposals on paid maternity leave, that there are question marks around his dedication to conservative economic orthodoxy: lower taxes, free markets, small government.
There’s a definite streak of DLP in the man, perhaps a yearning for the corporatist Santa-nomics of B.A. Santamaria, who he once called “the greatest living Australian”. Abbott is touchy about references to his weakness on economics, given that he studied it at university for three years. “At the end of it I was a little sceptical about economics as a science. I thought it was more art than science,” he says.

“I think, mate, that economics is incredibly important. You can’t run a decent society without a strong economic base. I’ve never been into making money for money’s sake and while I think it is important that the national government promote and develop a strong economy, it’s by no means the only or even, at every point, the main task of government.”

As well, some Liberals believe he was indulged by Howard: that Abbott had a special status in Cabinet, access to the leader and was on a looser leash. “We make allowances for the higher primates,” says one. “He was a contrarian, sometimes just for the sake of it,” says a former colleague of Abbott’s interventions during policy discussions, especially those outside his areas of expertise. “Those contributions were never silly, though, because he is a considered person and he often wanted to express a different point of view.”

Abbott doesn’t believe he was indulged by Howard, saying the former prime minister was always courteous and proper in taking soundings from the formal channels. “I don’t think a leader actually should rein in colleagues who are presenting a perspective on things as long as the perspective is not contrary to government policy,” says Abbott. “And as long as it is not causing a lot of unnecessary distraction from what the main game is. I don’t think what I did would fall into those categories.”

In the early ’90s, when Abbott was a media and political adviser to Liberal leader John Hewson, he had a bruising reputation. Senior members of the Canberra press gallery recall having robust exchanges with him during the era of the Fightback! policy package and the doomed 1993 election campaign. He was known to have physically bumped reporters and camera operators out of the way on occasion, a fact he tries to dismiss or forget. “I never did that, did I?” He did. “I am sure I was much brasher in the past than I am now.”

A few years later, he pursued Pauline Hanson and was able to orchestrate the financial demise of One Nation by facilitating court actions by former operatives. Some Liberals believe Abbott displayed poor judgment during the episode, a charge he rejects out of hand. “At the time it was vital to the survival of the Howard government that the Hanson juggernaut be stopped,” he says, adding it was also vital for social harmony.

One senior Liberal accepts that Abbott’s intentions were honourable, but wonders if he was “caught dissembling” when he told an ABC reporter in 1998 that he had not offered funds to litigant and former One Nation member Terry Sharples. Later, Abbott would say that “misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the Parliament as a political crime”. Abbott apologised for his flippancy. But the same senior Liberal believes the episode goes to the issue of credibility, how Abbott operates when he is under pressure, and it might be one that Labor reopens during the coming campaign.

In a pickle
Abbott walks like a duck, splaying his fireman’s heavy boots as he dodges prickly spinifex and bounds up steep boulders looking for caves and indigenous rock art. We are in the Northern Territory’s remote Haasts Bluff area west of Alice Springs, on a four-day trip to central Australia. He’s shorter than you’d expect, well-built but with slender arms; given it’s six hours into a meandering quad-bike expedition, the tight white T-shirt across his chest is dust-soiled and greasy with sweat and sunscreen.

We’ve run out of drinking water and local pastoralist Ian Conway, the leader of our 10-man adventure, has pointed us to where he’s sure we’ll find water and a visual treat of indigenous relics. Conway scoots off into the scrub in the opposite direction with Junior, son of traditional owner Anselem Impu, to search for a plant known as pitchuri, sometimes used as a narcotic. The day is mercifully mild. Still, after fanning out for an hour, we’ve had no luck. Abbott, one of the few lucky enough to have a hydration pack, sucks the last drops from the plastic bladder as we park our quad-bikes in a clearing to wait for the return of Conway and Junior. The few camel meat sandwiches we squeezed into our backpacks were eaten hours ago. For super-metabolic Abbott, “eating” is a relative term; it’s more like speed-ingesting. Same for drinking beer and wine. He’s a camp dog with a fork at meals and you have to watch him. “Do you want that piece of meat?” Chomp. “Thanks mate.”

My 250cc Kawasaki has been plagued by punctures. Abbott and Northern Territory Opposition leader Terry Mills get to work, hooking up the compressor. Abbott runs his fingers over the tyre and finds the leak; Anselem plugs it. It’s two hours since Conway and Junior left the group. What if they had an accident or can’t find their way back to us? Using Conway’s satellite phone Abbott tries, unsuccessfully, to call our camp at Kings Creek Station, more than 100km away. The only mobile number Abbott can remember is his media adviser’s. She’s in Canberra. The SMS message he writes won’t go through. Leaning back on our bikes, we often think we hear our erstwhile companions in the scrub. The low rumble becomes a roar as the pair come into view.

For the next three hours, mostly under dazzling moonlight, we dodge anthills and cheeky snakes, weave through tall grass, veer past fallen tree trunks, and feel our way across rugged, rocky terrain. At times, we are a wild pack of breakaway brumbies, galloping along at 40 clicks; mostly, we fall into a funereal single file, geriatrics on whirring mobility aids. Keeping up with Conway, who is riding a 360cc automatic quad, is not easy. We lose the trailblazers when Anselem Senior needs help with his headlights.

Then Abbott comes along at speed. “Wait here, I’ll catch up to Ian and tell him to stop.” He zooms off into the darkness, a menacing mass of trees, ruts and low obstacles, and succeeds. Two riders run out of fuel, so we ditch their quads. A couple are running on empty. Conway (his business card says: “The Adventure Never Ends”) eventually gets us home, five hours late, but Abbott was the guiding light. The next morning will bring a frenzy of “grave fears”, “missing” and “lost” in the national media, some ridicule and more questions about Abbott’s risky behaviour.

Unfashionable views
Even as a student, trainee priest and novice journalist, Abbott was a controversial figure. Some of his views - maybe all of them - were out of fashion. In the late ’80s, journalists around the country attended stop-work meetings to consider national action in support of wage claims. At one, the overwhelming mood at the Trades Hall in Sydney among the comrades at Fairfax was to accept the union’s recommendation to strike; News Ltd had some waverers.

After hearing from several speakers in support of the motion, Abbott, then an editorial writer at The Australian, rose to speak against it. “The bosses would love nothing ¬better than for us to go out on strike at this time,” he said, as the heckling began. “They’re rubbing their hands at the prospect of saving money over Christmas, when the papers are smaller. Tactically, now is not the time to act. We should keep our powder dry.” While he still had the floor, the calls got louder: “Sit down!”; “Rupert’s lackey!”; “Go back to church!”

The motion was carried, journalists being militant and herd-like then. But Abbott showed great courage and conviction. It couldn’t have been easy. “You’re nervous, wondering what you will say when you do get up there,” he now recalls. “It’s daunting. I still believe that strikes are futile, especially at newspapers, where the managers can so easily get the paper out.”

Abbott believes most people only have the “vaguest consciousness of politics outside of election times.” So there’s a chance to fill in the gaps? “I think so and look, mate, my plea is not for the public to get to know me better, because the public will get to know me as well as they want to,” he says. “My hope is that in a sense we will all get to know ourselves better and that we all, as deeply as we can, appreciate the national good, the national interest and how it might be advanced. I think that’s the real thing.”

Abbott admits he’s made mistakes, not necessarily the ones you might put to him, but he doesn’t think of himself as an angst-ridden person. “I feel, like most of us, that sometimes I’ve failed to maintain my own standards. Let myself down occasionally. I’m lucky in that I tend to think if I’ve made a mistake, learn from it and move on.” While torment does not feature in Abbott’s own narrative, nor public self-analysis, he’s had significant setbacks and his weaknesses have been exposed.

“I would be surprised and disappointed if I hadn’t grown somewhat in the job,” says Abbott. “I suspect there are far more continuities than discontinuities in my life. I’m not sure I could truthfully say that I am a vastly different or better man than I was. I hope I am wiser, I’m certainly more experienced. I hope my intuitions are deeper and more subtle than they were.”

Observing him closely in the Territory, seeing him in action over several weeks at staged events in Sydney and Canberra, you discern Abbott is a natural. John Howard sees someone in his own mould, a man who loves meeting people. Indeed, he is lucky to have a Howard-like recall for names; at tight range, you hear how often he drops a person’s name into conversation, so it settles in his memory and leaves the listener with a warm glow.
Abbott gets pulses racing in the conservative heartland; he is tactile and obliging. When a young intellectually handicapped man requests a hug and a photo at a high-powered Liberal forum, he goes along with it. At Alice Springs Airport a security guard says, “Mr Abbott, can you step this way – I’ll be checking you for traces of explosives.” Again, not even a sigh or shrug. Around the campfire, he’s good company, entertainingly indiscreet and doesn’t seek to dominate a group.

“In modern politics the risk is less that people will be themselves than that they will be unnaturally bland because that is what the ¬system promotes,” he says of his leadership style. “I don’t think I’m going to be one of those people who wants to micro-manage colleagues. I’m more likely to be saying to people, ‘Have a go. Chance your arm. Call the shots a bit.’ Now that doesn’t mean if they say things that are unhelpful I might not say, ‘Well, perhaps that was an ill-judged moment’.” He’ll be speaking from experience.

Howard hopes that the more people see of Abbott, “the narrow perceptions glide away”. Many Labor folk, and some Liberals, insist he’s unelectable. Even close supporters say it’s an open question whether Abbott would make a good PM. That Abbott has one shot - and it’s still a long one - at winning is generally agreed. As if he doesn’t have enough baggage already with the crusading moraliser tag, he’s carrying a millstone on women’s issues and his record on economic policy is extremely thin.

Already he’s taken the advice that he’ll have to downplay the “Captain Catholic” persona. “I’m the leader of a political party, I’m not the leader of a religious group, mate, and I’m hoping to become Prime Minister,” he says emphatically. “But a value-free society would be a real Brutopia,” he says. “I would like us to be more conscious of the higher things, but I would be disappointed if that was seen in a mechanistic orthodoxy.

“Everyone knows that religion has played a significant part in my ‘formation’ and I’ve always taken it seriously. I’ve never been particularly pious. I hope I’ve never been too preachy. I’ve never regarded myself as an exemplar of Christian virtue. I’m only too conscious of the many ways from which I depart from the ideal of Christian conduct.”

As leader, his colleagues have detected more gravitas in public – but it’s early days. When Abbott’s fighting Abbott, it’s only a stray soundbite away from slapstick. “When I feel confident, I have a tendency to become perhaps more exuberant than is good for me or is good for us and I’m going to have to be careful, particularly if and when things are going well, that I don’t overreact.” If the bull breaks free, the matadors and picadors will be waiting.