Tony Abbott’s surprising new chapter in life after politics
In a new history of Australia, the former prime minister has written a fresh perspective on the story of our great nation. Even his harshest critics are impressed.
When I meet Tony Abbott, on the first warm day of spring, he arrives a few minutes late to lunch, bouncing into the cool, sky-lit back room of a discreet trattoria-style joint at the edge of Sydney’s CBD. I’m already installed in a quiet corner of the restaurant, so I don’t see the reaction of guests as he walks through the door apart from a group of four businessmen, chatting boisterously near the front, who fall silent before an exuberant holler goes up: “Hey, Tony!” And in his characteristic way, he responds: “G’day fellas.”
At the back, smooth crooner music drifts through the restaurant speakers as Abbott greets me with a firm handshake and easy smile. “Good to see you, mate,” he says, slightly hunched, his feet anchored to the floor in their usual duck-splayed fashion. Dressed in a pale blue shirt and serge blazer, the former PM still cuts a lean and energetic figure, a mark of his lifelong passion for sport and exercise. These days his face appears wearier, more weather-beaten and leathery; deeper lines now trail out from the corners of his eyes, marking his passage from veteran political leader towards elder statesman. Next month he turns 68.
The reason for the lunch is to discuss the former PM’s new book, Australia: A History, a project he’s been working on for close to two years, and which concludes with the defeat of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament in October 2023. To my surprise, the book is hardly the withering polemic you might expect from a man who, for the best part of three decades, waged war against the political Left and burnished a reputation as one of the country’s fiercest ideological warriors.
It’s a thoughtful, almost elegiac account, written in the rich tradition of single-volume histories of Australia. And a glance at the book’s testimonials reveals a less tribal assortment of commendations than you might expect: one from former Labor leader Bill Shorten lavishes praise on his old rival for “channelling his inner Antipodean Winston Churchill”, while another from author and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons concedes it’s “not quite the ‘white armband’ version of Australian history” he’d anticipated.
Quite. For Australians of a certain vintage, the rise of Anthony John Abbott is usually associated with the murkier redoubts of political combat, where, as a young, pugnacious and occasionally pitiless political streetfighter, he was reared to higher office in the crucible of the Howard years. He was, by his own admission, the “junkyard dog savaging the other side”.
To people with only a passing interest in politics, Abbott is still thought of as the gaffe-prone, jug-eared, Speedo-clad PM who stopped the boats, bit into a raw onion and wanted to “shirt-front Mr Putin”; as the bruiser Opposition leader whom Julia Gillard denounced as a “misogynist”; as the ardent monarchist who shredded republican dreams in ’99 and restored knights and dames to the country’s honours system, precipitating his demise from the nation’s highest office some eight months later at the hands of Malcolm Turnbull.
And yet to a younger generation of Australians, who were children during Abbott’s time in office, he’s perhaps better recognised today as the self-styled “daggy dad” who occasionally pops into their social media feeds as a volunteer firefighter or surf lifesaver. Last month, footage uploaded to TikTok and Instagram showed the former PM in a shirt and tie holding up a faulty boom gate inside a busy Sydney car park, allowing motorists to exit. Is Tony Abbott now a meme? The comments varied from “A firie, a surf lifesaver and now a traffic cop? Truly a man of the people!” to “Bushfire CFA volunteer, surf lifesaver … he does a lot more civil service than most pollies”. Abbott himself entered the chat, posting the tongue-in-cheek response: “Finally found my calling.” “Wish he was still PM,” came a nostalgic comment on Instagram.
Days before our interview, I consult this newspaper’s editor-at-large, Paul Kelly, who has, it could be said, seen the full arc of Tony Abbott’s public life. They first met when Abbott wrote editorials at The Australian in the late 1980s – that was after he’d left St Patrick’s seminary and abandoned his plans to join the Jesuit priesthood. (Earlier in his life, Abbott had studied Economics and Law at the University of Sydney, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford.) I ask Kelly how he would describe the former member for Warringah. He tells me this: “People have no idea about Tony Abbott. He is a mass of contradictions. He is a journalist by nature. He is obsessed by history. He is a genuine intellectual and scholar. He is a romantic, in thrall to the great Australian project. But this identity remains concealed, hidden throughout his political career. On the one hand he is the former seminarian, the scholar-statesman; on the other he is the Blues boxer and the ultimate political brawler.”
When I test this appraisal with Abbott, saying only that it came from a colleague, he concurs. “I think your colleague has accurately discerned different aspects of me,” he replies. “Most significant people are a mixture of things, and different personae can coexist within the same individual. Now, I guess different circumstances bring out different aspects of their character and personality.
“As a journalist, I was a frustrated politician. As a politician, I was a frustrated journalist … In the end, if you’ve got a passion for public life, it’s got to be about making a difference. And sure, you make a difference as a legislator, as a policy maker, as part of an executive government – but you also make a difference by telling what you think are the important stories, making what you think are the important arguments. Because, as Keynes famously said, practical men are the slaves of long-forgotten economists.”
Lunch with Tony Abbott? It’s a funny thing, telling people you’re about to interview Australia’s 28th prime minister. The first response you get is a mixture of surprise and bewilderment. “What else is there left to say about him?” asks one bemused colleague. “What does he actually do these days?” inquires another, genuinely curious.
I ask Abbott about his post-politics life. Surely a posting to London or Washington might have been options in the decade since he was PM – why the apparent lack of interest? “That’s because I’m a very undiplomatic person,” he replies, almost before I’ve finished the question.
And yet, something almost as unlikely has happened, at least for a former prime minister. Abbott has written a history – albeit predominantly a political history – complete with a pastoral painting by colonial artist George Edwards Peacock on the cover. There’s a documentary in the works, too, and of course our interview, conducted over shared courses of seafood stew, yellowbelly flounder and pork sausage.
A photoshoot will follow later at Curl Curl beach at sunset, when Abbott will immerse himself in water that’s still winter-frigid – all in the service of promoting his book, and the national project known as Australia.
Today, almost a week to the decade since he was deposed as PM, we’re at Vin-Cenzo’s, not far from Darlinghurst’s little Italy. Despite the punny name, there will be no wine at this lunch; from the outset it’s clear Abbott is focused on the book and doesn’t want any diversions. “I want the book to stand alone as a work of history,” he explains cautiously. “I don’t want this book just to be an excuse for Tony Abbott to pontificate on contemporary problems … I don’t want people to judge it too much in terms of their judgments of me as a politician.”
The reason for writing the book, he says, is to arrest the alarming decline in historical literacy across the country and rebalance it towards a more generous appraisal of Australia’s past. Of course, this counts as radical optimism today. And in Australia it seems to be an inherently fraught proposition. Abbott’s view is that it shouldn’t be, and we probably can’t move forward until it’s not.
Says Abbott in his book: “As this account has also endeavoured to show, individuals do make a difference. For better or worse, the world changes person by person. Australia is a land built by heroes, both known and unknown. Each generation’s challenge is to be worthy of them and to build on their mighty legacy so that our best days as a nation might still be ahead.”
There is a duality at play here, a shifting back and forth in tone. If the book is circumspect and at times remorseful, in person Abbott’s zeal for the project is often in sharp relief. “What Geoffrey Blainey called the ‘black armband view’ back in the early ’90s is, if anything, much worse today,” he says. “Now the general tenor of public debate is that we have far more to be ashamed of than proud; that our country has been marked by dispossession, racism, even genocide … I’m not saying we’re perfect, and I’m not saying our history is without blemishes, but on balance it is such a good story.”
It’s a sentiment we’ve partly heard before: Abbott has long railed against what he sees as political interference in the nation’s history curriculum, chiding the academic Left for its vandalistic attempts to reduce the country’s past – particularly its colonial past – into a grim conspectus dominated by acts of violence and prejudice. Instead, he finds much to admire in the Australian story. His book is dotted with vivid portraits of heroes and heroines. He lauds the benevolence of the early governors and their refusal to embrace military dictatorship. He salutes the anti-authoritarian spirit of the early convicts and emancipationists – a view, he says, that’s unusual for a conservative – and venerates the intellectual dynamism of the founding fathers, who hammered out the path towards Federation.
“If one tries to take a panoramic view of Australian history, the first 100 years were incredibly successful,” Abbott says, relaxing into conversation. “I mean absolutely, almost incandescently, brilliant.
“Then, of course, there’s the depression of the 1890s, and that decade knocked the stuffing out of us. The Federation Drought was a real problem. The Great War was psychologically devastating, even though we came out of it with a burnished national story. The 1920s and ’30s were depressed decades. And I think the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s were a period of recovery and revival.”
Breaking his flow, a waitress arrives at our table. We’re yet to consult the menu – which tempts with such delicacies as mortadella stuffed agnolotti in brodo – and she waits patiently before recommending the restaurant’s main sharing dishes. “That’ll be great, thank you,” replies Abbott, focus unwavering.
What emerges from the book is no whitewash, but rather a sense of the triumph of liberalism on the long road to Federation. A passage about Aboriginal disenfranchisement and dispossession in the lead-up to and the first decade after Federation culminates in the words: “This crushing of human dignity in the name of ‘protection’ only began to change with the liberal revival after the Second World War.”
I’m keen to press the former PM on his passages about Indigenous Australians, specifically his assessment of settler violence on the frontier – Abbott devotes considerable space to the massacres of Indigenous Australians, including detailed accounts of Myall Creek and Coniston, which he describes to me as “the nearest thing to a serious blot on our national escutcheon”.
“What can’t be denied,” he writes early in the book, “is that frontier life was brutal and dangerous, and that Aboriginal people suffered grievously.” Indigenous Affairs formed a significant part of his political career ever since he first travelled to Alice Springs in the mid-1990s as a junior minister in the Howard Government. When I suggest that frontier violence is a subject he goes out of his way to “highlight” in the book, he interjects: “Well, to examine.”
“This is what the critics turn to and this is what is so much emphasised in the study of Australian history today,” he continues. “And look, it was very real. There was considerable violence on the frontier, but that’s not the whole story, and it was never official policy. That’s why it’s quite wrong to talk about ‘frontier wars’, because the concept of a war involves deliberate prosecution. There was never any deliberate prosecution of systematic violence against Aboriginal people.”
Does he think the public has misunderstood his commitment to Aboriginal Australians because of his plainspoken views on contemporary Indigenous affairs, or perhaps his strong opposition to the Voice referendum?
His response is measured. “Look, I take a pretty tough line on these things,” he says, with a little more edge to his voice. “As Noel Pearson always used to say, if Indigenous people are to flourish they have to be capable of operating in modern Australia. And, yes, that should not mean sacrificing their Aboriginality or forgetting the high culture of their clans. But they’ve got to have a decent education; they’ve got to develop a work culture.”
As we negotiate the shared dishes, now spread across the lunch table, I’m curious to know how Abbott handled the potentially fraught transition within the book. That is, from a dispassionate historian, observing the past at a distance, to a writer seeking to narrate more recent events, often ones in which he’s been a decisive player. In some respects, it’s the closest thing to a memoir of his prime ministership.
“The difference between this and anything else I’ve written is that everything else I’ve written has essentially been a piece of advocacy,” says Abbott. “I try to be dispassionate, even in the last chapter, although it’s probably obvious I have some strong views about things.”
The Gillard speech is there: “Gillard … had a rhetorical triumph with her ‘misogyny’ speech directed at me, in the parliament, in October 2012, which went ‘viral’ even though it was clearly an attempt to deflect an attack on her handpicked parliamentary speaker’s sexual harassment of a staffer.”
And Turnbull, of course. “In September 2015, harnessing backbench anxiety about poor polls, claiming that there’d been too many ‘captain’s calls’, playing on concerns about ‘climate denial’ and offering several junior ministers promotion to cabinet, he persuaded a majority of the Liberal party room to inflict on itself the same destructive political cannibalism it had earlier witnessed on the other side.”
But ultimately, he devotes fewer than two pages to his own prime ministership. “I’m under no illusions about my own place in history, mate,” he tells me. “I mean the 28th prime minister is always going to be the 28th. In terms of making a difference, Hawke and Howard made a huge difference … I certainly don’t regard myself as having anything like their place in our public life.”
I ask whether he struggled to articulate the vision of Australia he sets out in the book while he was PM. “When you are at the pinnacle of the executive government, there are a whole lot of things you just have to deal with, and often they’re insignificant things in the great sweep of history, which nevertheless dominate the day. There might be a scandal. It might be something as silly as, you know, knighting Prince Philip, and so the background noise can often obscure the overall objective or the intent.”
In his foreword to the book, historian Geoffrey Blainey notes the unexpected pluralism within, writing: “In his reading list are many books written by authors who, being of another political colour to Abbott, will be surprised to find themselves quoted. Further, some political opponents at times are patted on the head rather than punched on the nose: Abbott when young was a boxer. For instance, high praise is offered to Kim Beazley, who happened to lead the Labor Party when Abbott was a political apprentice in Canberra. Paul Keating is praised as a strong debater, though less as a policymaker.”
Continuing the theme of former PMs, I take the opportunity to ask Abbott who was better, Curtin or Hawke? Hawke, no question. Menzies or Howard? “I’d say Howard,” he replies. “I think Howard was more counter-cultural than Menzies. There’s no doubt Menzies was an extraordinary, towering figure. I can’t imagine anyone will ever be prime minister again for 16 continuous years, but Howard was a long-serving and successful prime minister in the teeth of fierce opposition, whereas Menzies was lucky in that the times were more benign, and the Labor split basically gave him 10 years that he probably wouldn’t otherwise.”
Howard, for his part, describes the book as “balanced” and praises his erstwhile parliamentary attack dog as “a wordsmith” in the book’s testimonials – the first of 11, which also include praise from “the best PM there never was” Kim Beazley, Liberal backbencher Jacinta Price, federal Independent MP Dai Le and former international cricketer Brett Lee.
Throughout our lunch Abbott is friendly and self-deprecating, unafraid to send himself up. He talks passionately about the writing of his history. At times, though, especially when discussing his own party’s catastrophic election defeat this year, he appears resigned, a touch deflated; in other moments he leans forward in his chair, buzzing with a sort of condensed energy. When he speaks he does so slowly, often nodding along in a gentle staccato, his chin tilted slightly upwards. Occasionally he raises his hands, almost like a conductor, tentatively marking his words. Lugubrious introspection does not suit his personality. Despite his deep anxieties for the nation, he presents as a reluctant optimist.
His book’s dedication reads: “To my grandchildren, Ernest, Romona and Angus, and the new generation that should take our country forward.”
Abbott, who was born in London to an Australian mother and a father from northern England, and who moved to Australia when he was two, in a sense embodies the Australia he depicts; his values spring from almost every page. He casts the Australian story as a synthesis of three elements: an Indigenous heritage, a British foundation and an immigrant character. His belief in the British Empire and Anglosphere is well known – an arrangement he thinks is eminently preferable to any of today’s supranational institutions, such as the European Union or the United Nations.
“The British Empire was a collection of independent dominions under the crown with common values and largely common interests,” Abbott tells me. “Now that’s a wonderful thing to be part of … But this idea that we should submit ourselves to some kind of supranational entity, I think, is incredibly unappealing. As far as the principal players in the EU are concerned, it was always a political project. And the interesting thing is that the one major European country that has nothing to be ashamed of in its 20th-century history is Britain. The French effectively lost two wars, and then there was the whole Pétain thing [a reference to France’s wartime collaborationist Vichy regime]. The Italians had fascism, the Germans had Nazism and the Spanish had Francoism. So for all of the major countries of Europe, the EU was, in a sense, an act of atonement. It was burying their national identity as a way of expunging the past and kind of exorcising the demons. That’s why Britain was never well suited to the EU and is so much better off out of the joint.”
Given he’s written a book titled Australia, I feel compelled to ask Abbott about the future of the nation state. Can he imagine a future in which a stable country like Australia could splinter into national crisis? The answer suggests a divided nation. “I think the vast majority of Australians still have a strong sense of Australia and have a deep affection for Australia. I think the official class is very ambivalent.”
And what about in a time of conflict – does he think young Australians would fight for the country? “It’s a very good question. I think when the chips are down, yes, but so much would depend upon leadership. For instance, Ukraine was a torn country, or was supposed to be a torn country. It’s become a whole country, but that’s essentially because of the leadership of Zelensky. Imagine if Zelensky had got into a helicopter and pissed off? It would have been a totally different story.
“When I talk to young Australians I am invariably surprised at how unaffected by the national angst they are, and I come away enthused and more optimistic for the future. So I suspect the coming generation will do better than my generation in terms of nation building.”
Still, it’s evident the former PM thinks the country is in a bad way. When I ask him to select another era from Australian history that most resembles our own, he suggests the post-WWI era of the 1920s, a period he describes in a chapter titled “A Funereal decade”.
More recently, he’s blamed the national insouciance on a weakening sense of cultural self-confidence and a failure of political leadership. Across newspaper columns, television, podcasts, a busy international speaking schedule and the online media platform Substack, he remains a familiar and influential figure of the Right. He currently serves on the board of Fox Corporation and is a director at The Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.
A waiter arrives to take our plates and conversation turns to immigration – the third branch of our national identity – and the recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country. “I think the people marching across the bridge included lots of Australians whose ancestry in this country stretches back many generations, as well as lots of recent migrants. But I think they misunderstand what Australia is on about, and we’re not on about religious fanaticism. We’re not on about cultures that discriminate on the basis of gender and race and ethnicity.”
What does he think when he sees placards at demonstrations inscribed with “Death to Australia” and describing Australia as a fascist and colonial state? Abbott laughs that distinctive crow and then turns serious. “Well, plainly they’re false. No one who understands what fascism is, or who has ever lived in a fascist state, would accuse us of being a fascist state. And we were lucky in that we were a product of the most benign empire that ever existed. My anxiety is that empires might not all be a thing of the past, and that any future empire that might extend its tentacles to us would be nothing like the benign one under which we began.”
It’s a recurrent theme laced throughout Abbott’s history, beginning with the anti-Chinese immigration restrictions of the mid-to-late 19th century. Of the waves of postwar immigration to Australia, he writes that today “Australians take for granted living in a multi-ethnic society, something that would have been unthinkable almost everywhere a century ago”.
“I don’t think we have anything like the same clear sense of immigration today,” he continues. “To the extent there is an official rationale for it, I don’t think the public are as confident as they were then. Officially, they would say of immigration, ‘Look, every migrant makes us economically stronger. Every migrant makes us culturally richer.’ That may be true in many cases, but I don’t think the public thinks it’s true in every case today, and that’s part of the current national despondency.”
There’s no question he has grown increasingly pessimistic about the immigration program, advocating for a much smaller intake. Last month, as Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price faced public scrutiny over her comments on Indian migrants, Abbott wrote an opinion piece in The Australian saying no citizen should feel restricted discussing immigration policy. “In all the Anglosphere countries,” he argued, “recent migrants are filling the entry-level jobs that locals are reluctant to do. As well, in all of them, immigration is substituting for the children that the native-born seem reluctant to have.”
Abbott tells me: “Australia can absolutely flourish as a multi-ethnic society, but only if we emphasise that very strong civic patriotism which unites people around, I suppose, values and institutions … this is what America did very well until recently, and we’ve done very well up till now. The multiculturalism project could easily go way off the rails.”
Coffee arrives. He has definitely ruled out a diplomatic career post-politics, but what about business? Unlike other Liberal politicians of the same era, including Joe Hockey, Josh Frydenberg, Scott Morrison and Christopher Pyne, Abbott appears entirely uninterested. “I’m more than happy to accept speaking fees so long as they’re not from Communist Chinese sources!” he says, with his trademark laugh.
Still, it’s hard to believe someone like Abbott does not harbour ambitions of a return to politics. For all the thoughtful, considered analysis in his book, our interview shows one thing – Tony Abbott’s values are as sharply drawn as ever, in thrall, as Kelly says, to “the great Australian project”. Now he’s just looking for new ways to express them.
Says Abbott: “I always said that at some point in time I would end up back as a writer. And I guess that’s what I am these days, a sort of writer and speaker.” Will his late-career shift to public intellectual be successful? As with most things, it will probably fall to the next generation to judge.
He leaves with a cheery wave, and as I settle the bill a waitress in her early twenties confesses that she had recognised Abbott, though she couldn’t quite place him. “I said, ‘Nice to see you again’,” she confides. “I thought he was a regular I’d seen before. Then I realised I knew him from TV.”
Australia: A History by Tony Abbott (Harper Collins) is out on October 13
Australia: A History premieres October 13-15 at 7.30pm AEDT on Sky News Australia. Stream at SkyNews.com.au or download the Sky News Australia app
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