Let’s Revisit The Last Glorious Weeks Of Tony Abbott’s Short And Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign

This is an edited extract from The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott by Andrew P Street, which is out now through Allen & Unwin.

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At the end of August this year, as the government rounded upon its second anniversary in power, Tony Abbott spent his now traditional week in an Aboriginal community, this time in Cape York and the Torres Strait. There were numerous photos of the PM mucking in to hammer nails into school cubby houses but precious little suggestion of concrete policy.

By early September, the tone of the questions regarding Abbott’s future had changed. Now there were fewer conversations about whether or not a leadership challenge would occur. The question now was ‘when?’ The Prime Minister had passed his self-imposed six month deadline to turn things around with no sign of any improvement in policy, popularity or polling — the Fairfax-Ipsos poll was predicting an eight per cent deficit to Labor, a trend confirmed by Newspoll.

Labor did not miss the opportunity to mark the occasion, with the member for Blaxland, Jason Clare, delivering a savage burn in Parliament on 9 September.

“It’s a big day today,” he began. “Today the Abbott government turns two, and what a terrific two years it has been. The deficit is up, debt’s up, unemployment’s up, taxes are up, the number of flags at press conferences is up. They’ve cut $50 billion from our hospitals, $30 billion from our schools, last year they tried to cut the pension … They’ve declared war on wind farms and the ABC, and they’ve even doubled the cost of their second-rate version of the NBN.

“This isn’t the best of it. The Attorney-General George Brandis told us that people have a right to be bigots, the Treasurer told us that poor people don’t drive cars, the Minister for Agriculture Barnaby Joyce threatened to kill Johnny Depp’s dogs, Prince Philip got a knighthood, the Speaker got a helicopter and the Prime Minister ate an onion or two. What a cracking government we’ve got here!”

Admittedly, Clare delivered his sarcasm bomb on a Monday night to an almost entirely empty chamber, which may have lessened the impact at the time, but that comforting fact for Abbott was soon overshadowed by the 90-second clip going viral on YouTube.

Surprisingly, this came just before the brief, shining moment when it appeared that the government’s position on refugees had softened, after the photograph of drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee Aylan Kurdi shocked the world into noticing the five-year civil war. Public demonstrations demanding immediate action to deal with the growing  refugee crisis sprang up around the country, and the PM made an unexpectedly swift humanitarian decision: that Australia would accept 12,000 refugees from the region. However, even this genuinely positive decision was tangled in gaffes and previous mistakes and thus what could have been a brief moment of national unity was much briefer and less unified than one might have hoped.

No sooner had the announcement been made than Abbott was struggling to convince the country that there was no contradiction between this plan and Australia’s current detention policies, insisting that there was a “world of difference” between the Syrian refugees who were languishing in the camps in Turkey and Jordan, and the Syrian refugees languishing on Nauru and Manus Island. There was further confusion as various members of the government declared that Christians would be given priority over Muslims, which gave matters an unpleasantly bigoted sheen. Some hard-right parliamentarians — most notably Cory Bernardi — openly questioned the need to do anything at all.

But most significantly, this moment of Abbott empathy was accompanied by the announcement that Australia would join the US in bombing missions over Syria, making the intake look less like a humanitarian action and more like a way of justifying Australia’s military involvement. After all, it’s tricky to argue these people are selfish economic migrants determined to take Australian jobs at the same time RAAF fighters were on the way to the Middle East to actively bomb their villages.

While things were clearly going south for the government — and there was little hope of arresting the slide on the horizon — it seemed unlikely that there would be a leadership challenge until closer to the end of the year, not least because an election would need to be called by March at the latest to avoid delivering what could be an unpopular pre-election budget. There also seemed little sense in a spill motion ahead of the 19 September by-election for the West Australian seat of Canning necessitated by the unexpected death of Don Randall. After that Parliament wouldn’t sit for another three weeks, making a spill all but impossible until it returned.

And maybe things would have been left in a holding pattern were it not for two troubling events.

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On the same night Jason Clare was laying out the government’s failings in House of Reps, Abbott was offering an unexpected olive branch to the lefty lynch mob at the ABC by appearing on 7.30 from Canberra before heading off to Port Moresby, where he was to attend the Pacific Island Forum. Host Leigh Sales asked Abbott about the humanitarian intake, why asylum seekers in detention would not be considered for release, and why Australia was contributing to the problem (giving Abbott another welcome opportunity to rail against the “Daesh death cult”). That was all to be expected.

And then she asked about the economy. “When Labor left office, unemployment was 5.8 per cent; it’s now 6.3 per cent. Growth was 2.5 per cent; it’s now two per cent. The Australian dollar was 92 cents; it’s now around 70 cents. The budget deficit was $30 billion when you took office and now it’s $48 billion.

“How do you explain to the Australian people that you were elected promising, in your words, to fix the budget emergency, yet in fact, Australia’s economic position has worsened under your leadership?”

Abbott knew the talking points, and he was sticking to them. “Well, I don’t accept that,” he inauspiciously began. “The boats have stopped. The carbon tax has…”

“We’re talking about the economy,” Sales interrupted. Abbott didn’t miss a beat. “The boats have stopped, the carbon tax has gone, the mining tax has gone.”

Multiple attempts by Sales to get back onto the question at hand were waved away as Abbott outlined his ‘achievements’.

When Sales disputed his claims about presiding over rising employment given that the unemployment rate was steadily increasing in the weakening economy, the PM’s tone turned to admonishment that she should sully his rosy narrative with her base, negative facts.

“Leigh, I refuse to talk our country down,” he chided.

“I refuse to talk our country down and I hope the national broadcaster might join me in looking for the good and boosting our country, which has so much potential.”

Sales didn’t blink. “I wonder what you would’ve done if I’d helped Wayne Swan and Julia Gillard look for the good.”

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While commentators and Twitter snarked about Abbott’s all-purpose Stop The Boats response to unrelated questions, the PM was also drawing ire at the Pacific Island Forum.

As regional leaders gathered in Port Moresby, Abbott and New Zealand PM John Key patiently listened to the likes of President Anote Tong of the tiny island nation of Kiribati talk about how rising sea levels and increasingly strong and frequent cyclones would force entire populations to flee. They responded by refusing to sign off on any increase in emission reduction targets or a target that would limit global temperature change to 1.5 degrees.

Abbott was castigated for the decision, but it was hardly a huge surprise: he’d made clear that Australia was not going to budge on the issue. The PM was feeling pretty content with his performance when, back in Canberra on Friday 11 September, together with Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, he met with community groups about the Syrian refugee intake. These groups were taking a little longer than the trio would have wished, so they indulged in a bit of small talk as the media busied itself setting up cameras and, inconveniently, microphones — including a boom microphone that was just above Dutton’s head.

“It’s like Cape York time,” Dutton quipped to Abbott, in what sounded awfully like a dig at the punctuality of the communities they’d visited just over a week earlier.

“We had that a bit up in Port Moresby,” Abbott smirked in reply, all on camera. “Anyway, it was a good meeting. It was a good meeting.”

And then Dutton lined up his zinger. “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to be, you know, have water lapping at your door.”

The PM brayed loudly at this bon mot and Dutton looked proud as proud could be — right up until Morrison leaned in and muttered, “There’s a boom there”.

And an expression passed across Dutton’s face, almost as though he realised that he was about to star one of the fastest trending internet videos in Australia.

Among those who very much took offence at what Dutton justified as a “private conversation” and a “lighthearted discussion” was Gerhardt Pearson, one of the traditional owners of Cape York, who didn’t much care for the insinuation that his people were lazy.

He described Dutton’s language as filled with “soft bigotry and low expectations”, harking back to when “white Superintendents ran our lives, dressed in their safari jackets and white helmets … and how they would look down at my hard-working grandfather, mother or brother, as though they were his slaves.”

Another was the exasperated Anote Tong, who was understandably irked by watching Australian politicians refuse to help address the terrifying consequences of rising sea levels one day and then see them making jokes about it the next.

“What kind of a person is he?”, Tong rhetorically asked one journalist of Dutton. “It shows a sense of moral irresponsibility quite unbecoming of leadership in any capacity.”

It looked like another in the long line of government missteps, but by this stage some hard decisions had been made.

A mutiny was coming. And this time, there would be a challenger.

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By early afternoon on Monday September 14, Abbott was back in Canberra for Question Time, which had been preceded by an unexpected conversation with his deputy Julie Bishop who told him that a leadership challenge was coming and that he no longer had the numbers to see it off. The meeting, according to Bishop later that week, did not go well.

When Question Time wrapped up just after 3 pm, Malcolm Turnbull bailed up the PM and they had a short meeting in which Abbott was reportedly offered an ultimatum: step down as leader, or face a challenge. Abbott, predictably, refused.

And thus, at 4 pm, Turnbull announced he was challenging Abbott for the leadership of the Liberal Party. And he didn’t mince words either.

“Ultimately, the Prime Minister has not been capable of providing the economic leadership our nation needs,” he declared. “He has not been capable of providing the economic confidence that business needs … We need a style of leadership that explains those challenges and opportunities … that respects the people’s intelligence, that explains these complex issues and then sets out the course of action we believe we should take and makes a case for it. We need advocacy, not slogans.”

Abbott returned service at 6.15 pm, declaring he would be a candidate in the spill ballot that very evening for both the leadership and deputy leadership of the party, “and I expect to win”.

Looking more annoyed than scared, he continued. “You can trust me to deliver a stronger economy and a safer community. The prime ministership of this country is not a prize or a plaything to be demanded. It should be something which is earned by a vote of the Australian people.”

It was not known at the time that Bishop had indicated to Abbott that he no longer had her support, nor that Christopher Pyne had also thrown his lot in with Turnbull. Scott Morrison, too, kept his mouth shut — although it was later discovered that he’d turned down the chance of standing as Abbott’s deputy while indicating that he’d vote for the current leader in a clever bit of options-management. He was also, it seems, offered the Treasury portfolio by both sides, indicating that Hockey was out of luck regardless of the outcome.

Other members of the parliamentary party were not so demure about their loyalties, and rapidly slotted into two broad categories: the hopeful and the scared.

The party room went into lockdown at 9.15 pm, and the results were announced at 9.50 pm: Bishop had predictably won as deputy, but Turnbull had beaten Abbott 54 votes to 44.

And with that, after two-thirds of a term in office, Australia had its 29th prime minister.

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The next twenty-four hours were not among Abbott’s most triumphant, suggesting either a degree of deliberate and petulant heel-dragging or that he’d been genuinely blind-sided by losing a contest he had honestly assumed he’d comfortably win.

Turnbull and Bishop appeared at 11.10 that evening to deliver their victory speech, having given Abbott an opportunity to front the media first as per Hawke, Rudd and Gillard during their own leadership defeats — but the dethroned PM chose not to speak. This was to become something of a theme in the following days.

Abbott didn’t come to Parliament House to address his colleagues on Tuesday morning, much less the joint party room meeting with the Nationals thereafter, amid rumours that his car had left the Australian Federal Police barracks where he stayed when in Canberra and was seemingly cruising the suburbs of Canberra.

Parliament wasn’t all that he was avoiding. It later came to light that he’d also neglected to visit the Governor General to offer his resignation, as per convention, and had instead sent Peter Cosgrove a fax. Anyone who has had to send an official legal document would know that fax is not an uncommon tool for transmitting important papers, but the sheer tech-adverse appropriateness of the act coming from the man who also downgraded the NBN was lost on few observers — not to mention the poetry of seeing the prime minister who endorsed coal-fired power, paternalistic policies for the unemployed and the continued denial of civil rights to gay Australians occupying his final minutes in the role using yet another tool long since superseded by superior alternatives.

While Turnbull prepared to be sworn in, Abbott’s final act as PM was to deliver his concession speech. And, in his defence, it was at least representative of the man and his government: self-serving, filled with demonstrable falsehoods and quick to assign blame elsewhere.

While Abbott didn’t appear in Parliament during theweek, he did subsequently confirm that he wasn’t planning to step down as member for Warringah, meaning that he’d be remaining on the backbench for the foreseeable future.

So perhaps the story of Captain Abbott hasn’t ended just yet.

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The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott is out now through Allen & Unwin.

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Andrew P Street is a journalist, editor, critic and columnist, regularly writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, and Time Out.