What Does He See in Himself?
- David Free
Battlelines, by Tony Abbott.
Melbourne University Press. $Au 34.99.
There is a phrase in the Book of Job – and Tony Abbott must surely approve of Job, who was not just a staunch family man but a battler, a struggler, a prehistoric pioneer of the art (since perfected in Australia) of doing it tough. Smote with boils, seated in ashes, Job might even be viewed as a charred but admirably open-minded trailblazer for the sceptical approach to global warming, scraping off his roasted skin while waiting patiently for the evidence to come in. At any rate, the line of Job’s I am thinking of is this: “O that mine adversary had written a book!” Biblical scholars will tell you this is a mistranslation, and therefore doesn’t mean quite what it appears to mean. But I have always liked the misreading. One wants people like Tony Abbott to write books. It’s always nice to be able to shore up one’s antipathy to a contemptible public figure. In Abbott’s case, mind you, not much shoring up is required. There is already a lot of material to be getting on with: the stuttering, thuggish soundbites; the leering, chimp-gone-to-seed features, so unfortunate in a man still publicly tossing up about the truth-claims of Darwinian theory; the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to hasten the heat-death of the planet for his own base political gain; the chronic inability to keep his religious views to himself, where they decidedly belong; the unwarranted swagger; the instinct for downmarket rabble-rousing, already sufficient to start making John Howard look like Don Dunstan; the whole persona somehow dreadfully summed up in the passion for road-cycling, that presumptuous blend of exercise and exhibitionism in which terrible men grant themselves permission to shave their legs, sheathe their trunks in particoloured lycra, and hold up long lines of normally-dressed motorists who – unlike the sweating, prawn-hatted dandies of the road shoulder – have places to get to, and important things to do when they arrive. These items are, as I say, plenty to be going on with. But it’s a nice bonus when a figure like Tony Abbott takes the time to showcase his awfulness at book length.
It was in a state of near-perfect objectivity, then, that I sat down to read Abbott’s Battlelines. And the book starts off in promising fashion, with an account of the “24-hour media frenzy” that Abbott endured in 2005, when it was revealed that he had a long-lost illegitimate son. It later turned out that the child wasn’t really Abbott’s, but the facts of the case remain instructive. The conception, so Abbott believed, had occurred in 1976, when he was nineteen, during a period when “a part of me said that I should join the priesthood,” but when a less pious portion of him disagreed. Accordingly, Abbott and his then girlfriend were in the habit of playing “what used to be called Vatican roulette.” (The girlfriend, interviewed in 2005, said that the young Abbott actually favoured “withdrawal.” This is not the same thing as Vatican roulette, as Abbott must surely know.)
I call this a promising start because I was foolish enough to believe, for a page or two, that Abbott was revisiting the whole mess in a spirit of serious self-examination. I thought he might feel a duty to tell us exactly why, having gone through all that, he still considers religion to be a force for good. Because to the untrained eye, Abbott’s experiences look like a terrible advertisement for Catholicism. Consider the facts. Two red-blooded nineteen-year-olds wish to have sex with each other. Neither of them wants a child, but cheap and convenient means of birth control are available to them. But wait: Abbott’s faith stipulates that every non-half-arsed method of contraception must be taken off the table. The wicked rubber, the sinful pill, must be spurned. On the other hand, he isn’t quite devout enough to obey Catholic doctrine strictly – i.e. in any way that might seriously put him out. He’s not ready to abstain from sex altogether, or to marry the girl first, or to incur the cutting-down of his sexual schedule demanded by proper Vatican roulette. So the act proceeds, but in a semi-Catholic form that seems designed to make nobody happy: compromised, guilt-ridden, crowned by an end-game variation favoured by such renowned paragons of chastity as Tommy Lee and Johnny Wadd. A pregnancy nevertheless ensues. Believing the child to be his, Abbott decides against marriage. “I was too young and, frankly, too confused for that responsibility.” (Like many a politician, Abbott thinks using the word “frankly” a lot is an acceptable substitute for actual frankness.) Frankly, he shoots through, and the baby is adopted out, and Abbott spends the next thirty years suffering a burden of needless guilt that you wouldn’t wish on anybody, even him. Then the son surfaces, and at least four private lives are disgustingly invaded, and for a period of several weeks an entirely innocent young Australian has to reckon with the prospect that Tony Abbott is his blood father.
None of this would be any of our business, if it weren’t for the intolerable fact that Abbott continues to speak as if his status as a “person of faith” gives him special insight into what does and does not constitute moral behaviour. He still thinks, in the 21st century, that the teachings of the Church’s sex-obsessed witchdoctors remain relevant and useful: not just for him, but for the rest of us too. So there he was on TV a couple of weeks ago, counselling the nation’s young women to abstain from sex before marriage. He genuinely seems to detect no irony in his position. He seems to live in a world beyond hypocrisy.
Abbott’s cursory treatment of the pregnancy story is typical of his book as a whole. Not only does he seldom defend his views; he doesn’t even seem to see that they need defending. In Abbott’s world, “I was young and confused” qualifies as a rigorous mea culpa. This, we may speculate, is because he works and thrives in a political atmosphere in which the inane one-liner is the main unit of currency. This is a man, after all, who ascended to the Liberal leadership by dubbing the emissions trading scheme “Labor’s Great Big New Tax on Everything.” His latest apercu, which makes that first one look positively Wildean, is to refer to Kevin Rudd as “Prime Minister Blah Blah.”
When pitiful sallies like these can earn him a reputation as a master of political oratory, you can hardly blame Abbott if he’s not in the habit of trying very hard. As a writer he’s not quite as bad as that, at least not all the time. Nobody could be. But still, his standard of argument is generally pretty low. Consider the following passage, which Abbott proudly lifts from the speech that earned him pre-selection for the seat of Maroubra:
We [i.e. the Liberal party] should give ourselves more credit for our achievements … It was Bob Menzies and not Paul Keating who redirected our trade to Asia in the 1960s … It was Harold Holt and not Gough Whitlam who ended the White Australia policy and it was John Howard [as treasurer in the Fraser Government] and not Bob Hawke who began financial deregulation.
You see what Abbott means, and he might even have a point. But steeped as he is in the traditions of partisan hackery, he can’t make a modest point in favour of his own side without taking a crude reflexive jab at the other one, in terms that manifestly don’t make sense. In the 1960s Paul Keating wasn’t even an opposition backbencher, and was therefore in no good position to go round redirecting trade to Asia. If Holt really did “end” the White Australia policy – a debatable proposition – then Whitlam can scarcely be blamed for not re-ending it when he came to power. As for John Howard’s stint as Fraser’s treasurer, we should recall that Howard spent five years in the role, and that even Peter Costello has been known to poke fun at the do-nothing nature of his tenure. To praise him for having merely begun financial deregulation is a brazen move, even in a room full of Tories.
But twenty or so pages later, Abbott is at it again, sounding the same bizarre note:
Financial deregulation, tariff cuts and privatisation, even where implemented by Labor, were Howard ideas first.
If Abbott had a sense of humour, as distinct from a propensity to grin boorishly while saying unfunny things, you might think he was having a sly go at his former mentor here. But apparently he’s serious. He really does want to suggest that Howard’s ability to think up reforms without actually implementing them when he had the chance was somehow a point in his favour, a mark of the little man’s pluck. Sometimes you get the haunting sense that Abbott will say just about anything.
You could, of course, make a case that Howard was a better treasurer than most people believe – or you could try. But Abbott has honed his rhetorical skills, if “honed” is the right word (it isn’t, by the way) in a political age in which the ability to build a reasoned case is surplus to requirements. Who has time to listen to arguments any more? Abbott knows that no matter what he says, about forty per cent of people will vote for him and about forty per cent won’t. His only job is to bombard the remaining twenty per cent – who don’t always listen very hard – with a series of extremely simple messages. To get these messages across, he must repeat them loudly and often. Indeed he must do his best, when the cameras are on him, to speak in nothing but slogans, so that the evening news, if it wants to show footage of him talking, will have no choice but to show him saying what he wants people to hear. Once in a blue moon he will allow a good journalist – a Kerry O’Brien, let’s say – to query a few of his more baseless pronouncements. But even when that happens, a certain ritual will be followed, with results as predictable as the outcome of a pro wrestling match. O’Brien will try to pin Abbott a maximum of three times. Each time Abbott will wriggle out from under him, if necessary by the blatant expedient of simply repeating the same non-answer three times. And then O’Brien, out of sheer exasperation, will let the matter drop, and repeat the process with some fresh question.
Not even Tony Abbott, however, can write a whole book consisting of nothing but evasions. There are two chapters in Battlelines that can rightly be called substantial. One of them tackles the vexed question of whether one can be a liberal and a conservative at the same time. (I said it was substantial. I didn’t say it wasn’t supremely tedious.) The other is about Abbott’s view that Australia has one level of government too many. This part of the book is decently argued, and Abbott might well be onto something. But at moments like these we’re reminded that Battlelines, apart from a short afterword, was written when Abbott wasn’t party leader. Now that he is, we seem to be hearing a bit less about his appetite for radical constitutional reform.
The Australian political landscape is unforgiving. It’s littered with the carcasses of half-forgotten figures – Snedden, Hayden, Crean, Peacock, Nelson, Hewson, Latham, Downer, Beazley – who at one time or another were an election away from the prime ministership, but never wound up making it. With any luck Tony Abbott will soon join this motley band of also-rans. At that point we can start pondering his mitigating qualities. Maybe he’ll be fondly looked back on, once he’s safely out of the picture, as the last of the unboring politicians. But right now we’re still trapped inside the Abbott era, and from the inside it has a nasty feel, and there’s no way of knowing how it will end. The current polls suggest there’s a real chance he’ll be our next prime minister. That would be a good thing, as far as I can see, only in the sense that it would stop him writing books.
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David Free is a writer based on the far north coast of New South Wales. His strangely neglected novel, A Dancing Bear, can be read here.