Ten things you should know about Australia’s next prime minister, Tony Abbott

By Tim Montgomerie in Sydney
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I’m jumping the gun a bit. Australia doesn’t even vote until tomorrow but it’ll be one of the biggest shocks in the country’s electoral history if the incumbent Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, survives.

Here are ten things you should know about Tony Abbott, leader of the Conservative Party’s sister party in Australia.

1. He will defeat a government that has enjoyed good economic times: In the last year Australia has grown by 2.6% (easily enough to put a smile on George Osborne’s face). That’s the 22^nd successive year of growth. Australia isn’t even close to losing its triple A status from ratings agencies. All governments get ejected eventually but, six years ago, Kevin Rudd led Labor to power as one of Australia’s most popular ever leaders. Rudd then boasted he was the prime minister who saved his country from the global recession and this resource-rich country did escape negative growth. But, according to every poll, Labor loses tomorrow’s general election and it will lose badly.

2. He’s a model Leader of the Opposition: Do you remember when David Cameron promised to end Punch and Judy politics? Even before he became leader of Australia’s Liberal Party (the Tories’ sister party, led by John Howard until ’07), Abbott embraced Punch’s pugilism. He ousted Malcolm Turnbull, his Liberal predecessor, who was preparing to back Rudd’s climate change agenda. Since becoming Leader of the Opposition in 2009 he has opposed Labor’s expensive carbon policies and its failure to control immigration. Labor became incredibly unpopular – first dumping Rudd for Gillard and then, hilariously, Gillard for Rudd. 

3. His four-fold message has focused on immigration, tax, infrastructure and above all, the carbon tax: Most politicians get bored with repeating the same message. Pundits needing to fill their pages or broadcast slots with ‘new news’ certainly do. Abbott doesn’t get bored. A man famous for his physical fitness he has the stamina to conquer arduous bike journeys and marathons. Knowing that voters only start to hear a message when politicians are sick to death of hearing themselves repeat it for the squillionth time he has stuck relentlessly to four big themes: Scrap the carbon tax; Stop the boats (via which illegal immigrants enter Australia); Cut taxes; and, more recently, Build new roads.

It turns out that Kevin Rudd is not Australian Labor's messiah

By Tim Montgomerie in Melbourne
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Kevin Rudd first became Australia’s prime minister in 2007 after a presidential campaign built almost entirely around his then stratospheric popularity. He enjoyed approval ratings of over seventy per cent but the public acclaim went to his head. He started running his country’s government and his Labor party in a dictatorial style. His colleagues came to detest him and three years ago Julia Gillard toppled him and became Australia’s first female leader.

In a play about this political assassination Ms Gillard is portrayed as a brutal killer. She stabs her victim repeatedly in a determination to ensure he can never live to fight another day. At the end of the drama Rudd is laying at the centre of the stage. As the curtain falls the audience sees the bloodied body twitch. Rudd was not so dead after all and earlier this year, on 27th June, he turned the tables on Ms Gillard and toppled her.

Yesterday, at a Brisbane campaign launch (Times £ report), a very lively Mr Rudd presented himself as the comeback kid. ''I have been in tougher spots before,” he said, “and come back from behind.'' Gillard was not at the event. She has hardly said a word since Rudd got his revenge. Her allies won’t stay silent if, as every opinion poll and pundit predicts, Rudd loses.

Abbott is gambling that Rudd will continue to flounder in the run-up to Australia's polling day

By Mark Wallace
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For a nation famous for bullish straight-talking, Australia's election campaign is proving to be a surprisingly tentative affair. 

As Paul reported last week, Tony Abbott has the air of a man playing it safe. His coalition has maintained a poll lead for a long time, and neither Rudd's return nor Abbott's poor personal approval ratings have so far affected that headline voting intention.

It's a measure of what kind of campaign this is that one of the few sources of controversy is a proposal to buy up old fishing boats in Indonesia in order to prevent them being used by asylum seekers. This has not been a titanic clash of radical ideas (though it's worth noting that, unlike us, Australian politicians are able to seriously proposing a return to government surpluses during the next few years).

Abbott's Liberals "on track comfortably" to win Australia's election

By Paul Goodman
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Polling day is two weeks away, but the Liberal Party's Tony Abbott would make it over the finishing line were the election held today, according to two separate polls.  One was of the four most marginal sears held by the two main parties, published in the Australian Financial Review, which found that the partt would take at least five seats off Labour.  The other, published in the Sydney Morning Herald, found that Labor would lose two other seats in New South Wales.

Those results would take Abbott over the 76 seat-threshold which he needs to win the election outright.  The Liberals currently have 72 seats and Labor 71.  The latter has been propped up by the Greens and by independents since the 2010 election, and Christian Kerr wrote an entertaining account on this site recently of how Kevin Rudd, Labour's Prime Minister, was first outed by Julia Gillard and then ousted her in turn.  Kerr clocked his relative popularity: "Abbott has never been hugely liked. But Rudd – or as ordinary voters greet him, Kevin, is a different matter."

Bloomberg quotes Penny Wong, the Finance Minister, as saying: “There’s no doubt we’re still the underdog, and there’s no doubt that Tony Abbott, if the election was held on the day it was announced would be the prime minister." Voice of Australia reports that Abbott "is on track to comfortably win", and that Labor's support has fallen "to its lowest level since Kevin Rudd's return as Prime Minister". "In two-party terms, the Coalition enjoys a 54-46 per cent lead and, if repeated across the board on election day, Labor would lose 14 seats," it reports.

Abbott is what my Canadian friends and others closer to home would call a "movement Conservative", but I see that according to ABC he has just announced a planned tax rise which wasn't cleared by his party - namely, new paid parental leave provisions to be funded by "big business", as he puts it: that's to say, a 1.5 per cent levy on the 3000 largest firms in Australia.  (The Liberal Leader also proposes a 1.5 per cent company tax cut and budget savings, including $2 billion from abolishing existing leave provisions.)

Parallels between one Anglosphere country and another can mislead, but part-funding a tax cut for smaller businesses through a tax rise on larger ones has echoes on the debate here about where any Tory tax cuts would fall - and to what degree the Party should put itself "on the side" of "strivers".  Two weeks out, the election looks like Abbott's to lose.  I enclose a clip of his opening remarks at the recent election debate with Rudd, reportedly an indecisive affair, in which the opposition leader is clearly playing it safe.

Downunder, Tony Abbott champions a more muscular conservatism

By Tim Montgomerie
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Tony Abbott, leader of Australia's Liberals, has been in London this week and has met a range of UK politicians including Iain Duncan Smith, Michael Gove, William Hague and, more surprisingly, Chris Huhne. I write more surprising because Abbott is no Liberal in the Liberal Democrat sense. The socially and economically conservative Abbott is riding high in Australian opinion polls by strongly opposing the Labor government's carbon tax. Abbott has also promised to cut taxes, take a tough line on immigration by "stopping the boats", and introduce more competition into the Australian economy. His full programme for government can be read here.

Abbott isn't just a more conventional conservative than David Cameron in policy terms. They are oceans apart in style, too. Cameron's approach is more consensual while Tony Abbott stakes out ground and fights for it. Cameron spent much time in opposition wooing the metropolitan vote and placed very regular OpEds in The Guardian and Observer. Abbott's focus is the "respectable" blue collar vote and he spends a lot of time on his country's talk radio stations. There's an urbane sophistication to David Cameron whereas Abbott is the blunt speaking sports fanatic.

After taking control of the party from Malcolm Turnbull - a politician very much in Cameron's image - Abbott has transformed his party's standing. Labor is only one by-election away from losing office and Abbott is on constant election alert. If he becomes Australia's next PM many UK conservatives will have renewed questions about the wisdom of Cameron's liberal conservatism.

Patrick Cusworth: Thomson credit card scandal gets worse for Australian PM Julia Gillard

Patrick Cusworth is a consultant adviser on science, research and energy policy, and a member of Brentford and Isleworth Conservative Association. He tweets at @Patriccus.

Life just doesn’t seem to get any better for Julia Gillard. Almost a year to the day from Australia’s last Federal Election, the latest crisis to engulf the Labor Prime Minister threatens to bring down her fragile coalition Government.

Following recent allegations that Australian Labor Party (ALP) MP Craig Thomson used trade union funds to hire a prostitute, Julia Gillard’s Labor-Green coalition Government – which has a majority of just one over Tony Abbott’s Liberal-National Opposition – further developments appear to cast doubt on his claims of innocence. Court documents published by the Sydney Morning Herald have confirmed that Mr. Thomson’s union credit card was used to pay $2,475 to an escort agency on April 8, 2005. Equally damaging, the mobile phone used to call the escort agency in question was also used to call political and union contacts from the ALP on April 7, 2005. The publication of these documents pours doubt on Thomson’s initial claim that someone else had used his credit card to pay the agency.

Australia's minority Labor government will collapse if it loses one MP and one Labor MP has just been caught using his union credit card to rent a prostitute...

...allegedy. You'll enjoy this ten minute report...

Cameron backs Julia Gillard on carbon tax, embarrassing Australia's conservative opposition

By Tim Montgomerie
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British Toryism is out of step with Anglosphere conservatism in a number of key respects. Solidarity with Israel and a belief in the supply-side effects of lower taxation are two stand out examples. The biggest difference though is on climate change where conservatives in America, Canada and Australia are all opposed to unilateral* action on global warming that (i) accelerates deindustrialisation of the west but (ii) does so without reducing global emmisions, because it doesn't include the likes of fast growing China, India and Brazil.

Australian conservatives have revived on the back of opposition to a carbon tax that the minority Labor Prime Minister promised not to introduce. Watch this video in which Julia Gillard said there would no carbon tax under any government she led. She lied and Australian voters are furious. Our sister partry in Australia - the Liberals - led by Tony Abbott has championed this fury. The graph on the right shows the boost that the issue has given him and his party (Liberals in blue).

Not surprisingly Tony Blair endorsed Ms Gillard on a visit downunder last week. More surprisingly David Cameron has done the same. In a letter to Ms Gillard that is making waves in the Australian media Mr Cameron has said that "your announcement sends a strong and clear signal that Australia is determined to make its contribution to addressing this challenge." "It will," Cameron continued, "add momentum to those, in both the developed and developing world, who are serious about dealing with this urgent threat."

Massive defeat for Australian Labor in New South Wales

Tim Montgomerie

Six months after Labor received fewer first preference votes than the Liberals at Australia's general election but cobbled together a coalition of independents (Don't you just love AV?), sixteen years of Labor rule in the state of New South Wales has ended.

Labor wasn't just defeated in the populous state that includes Sydney, the party was routed. Current projections suggest Labor will fall from 50 to 17 and the Liberals will go from 37 to 62 seats.

For context:

"The fallout from the destruction of the Labor Party in NSW today will be almost nuclear. The once-mighty ALP has been smashed to bits in what was regarded as its home state, the place where it had held power for 52 of the past 70 years, the place from whence the NSW Right had dominated the party’s national factional landscape, making and breaking both premiers and prime ministers. Both the party and the faction have now been reduced almost to the status of a marginal fringe organisation."

The main reason for Labor's rejection in NSW was length of continuous office and the sleaze that came from thinking they were undefeatable. Nonetheless, a contributor factor was the national debate raging about Prime Minister Julia Gillard's u-turn on introducing a carbon tax.

The carbon tax row initially caused a big slump in Labor's support nationwide but there are now signs of recovery - perhaps, some say, because of the strident campaign against it from Liberal leader, Tony Abbott. Tune into 3 minutes and 35 seconds into this video for Tony Abbott's demolition of Julia Gillard's honesty, on climate change and other issues:

People can't afford left-wing governments in hard times

Tim Montgomerie

The Right has done well across the world since the economic crisis struck. The two exceptions were the USA and Australia. That's beginning to change. Earlier this month Obama suffered the worst mid-term result of any US President for seventy years. In Australia Labor became the first first-term government to lose its majority since WWII. It is now clinging to power on the basis of support from green and independent MPs.

  The Australian Liberals took another step forward at the weekend when they seized control of Victoria (on a very narrow 45 to 43 seat majority). Victoria was the part of the nation where Liberals under-performed at the general election but they ended eleven years of Labor rule in a surprise win. All polls point to the Liberals winning New South Wales in March. After being out of government in every part of Australia in 2007 they will then control three states (including Western Australia).

A top reason for Labor's unpopularity is that Julia Gillard, the Labor PM, has promised action on climate change to the Green Party that will mean higher energy prices. The ABC called it a cost-of-living election;

"Just look at where the big swings against Labor kicked in; in the south, the west, as well as the north and the east of Melbourne. These were uniformly the outer metropolitan seats neglected by Labor as they attempted to sandbag the regions and fight off the Greens in the inner city. The people in these seats, according to senior Liberal figures, were overwhelmingly preoccupied with crowded cost of living pressures that included sustained spikes in interest rates as well as water and electricity prices. They are the same voters whose opinion of Gillard is starting to harden in the negative."

Liberal leader Tony Abbott offered the same conclusion:

“I think that obviously, there’s a message here about cost of living. The public expects government not to add to cost of living pressures. There’s also a message here about waste. The public are sick and tired of governments, Labor governments, which look like they can’t be trusted with public money.”