Tony Abbott on formative influences, being fair dinkum, and having respect for self and culture

Little explanation is necessary for the following excerpt from Tony Abbot's Battlelines. Those who have observed him closely and do not fall prey to the calumny and ridicule that is assiduously propagated by his ideological enemies will recognise here the real Tony Abbott, at once idealistic, proud of his influences, but also realistic about his shortcomings. No leader can be truly a statesman without recognising his fallible nature.

Most politicians are a mix of idealism and ambition. The highly driven and the deeply idealistic individuals who enter public life all have a personal story. That story helps to explain the positions they adopt and the decisions they take. Understandably, people want to know whether the person seeking their vote is fair dinkum. Their personal histories nearly always cast light on their public life. All of us are the product of the people, institutions and cultures that we have lived among. We aren't 'programmed' by experience, but we're certainly shaped by it.

In an essay for Quadrant, the British conservative thinker Roger Scruton says that our own self-respect requires us to respect our culture and its institutions. This, he says, 'is the first maxim of conservative politics: self-respect requires respect for institutions; to the extent that we learn a habit of mockery towards our inheritance, to that extent do we mock ourselves'. The second task of the conservative, he says, is to 'give up this breast-beating, guilt-ridden desire to throw away our inheritance'. Indeed, I have often pondered the psychology of people who seem uncomfortable with the society that has formed them. There is much about Australia that I would like to change, but not its fundamentals. How could I, given the extent to which it's made me what I am?

My parents had two messages for their children: first, 'be as good as you can be at whatever you do', and, second, 'we love you whatever happens'. Of course, there was not too much 'kids will be kids' tolerance when, for instance, some devilry drove me and the neighbouring children, as eight-year-olds, to carve our names into the duco of the cars in the street. Still, while I was growing up I never had the impression that my parents were mad at me rather than about my (fairly frequent) misdeeds.

For several years of my childhood, every weekday, I walked the couple of kilometres or so from home to Chatswood railway station with my dad before the train ride to school. I can only remember the odd snatch of conversation, which, I'm sure, would have been about trivia as well as the things that were going on in my life. I do very clearly recall, though, Dad's insistence that it was better to be a good man than a successful one. Later, when I felt 'out of it' at a new high school, I vividly remember him consoling me with the advice that if I learned to like others they would eventually find something to like in me.

Both my parents taught by example. From Mum, I learned that the ideal home welcomes people and makes them feel part of the family. From Dad, I learned that you should always look for the best in others and try to be for them what you would have them be for you. That doesn't mean that life in the Abbott household was a re-run of 'The Brady Bunch'. It seems to be the nature of the parent-child relationship that there's always so much more that ought to be said. Still, I could not have asked for a better start and for more ongoing encouragement. Mum and Dad were the best type of parents, nearly always thinking well of their children, sometimes to the point of imagining that we're better than we really are.

As best I can remember, my interest in public life first stirred as a child reading the Ladybird books that my Mum brought home. These usually turned out to be about great figures in history: Julius Caesar, Francis Drake and Henry V are three that I seem to recall. The lesson, invariably, was that duty and honour carried the day. They were caricatures, of course, as I was to discover over time, but uplifting ones. In the real world, good doesn't always triumph and justice doesn't always prevail. Even the best turn out to have their flaws. Despite that, ideals don't cease to matter because they're never perfectly achieved or because their adherents are compromised.

In those days, the mid-1960s, 'history' started with the Greeks and the Romans before focusing on the story of England and Britain's influence on the world. Not surprisingly, I became an admirer of parliamentary democracy, freedom under the law, and liberal institutions. As these were largely made in England (although often improved elsewhere), I also became an incorrigible Anglophile.

I was born in London while my father was studying for a specialist qualification, then not available in Australia. When I eventually went back to England as a student, I didn't feel that I was visiting a foreign country, despite the passport queues at Heathrow airport. As I flew over the city of London, it felt like more than a homecoming. The metropolis was not just the inspiration for a Monopoly board but the chief source of the language I spoke, the centre of the system of law I lived under and the fountain of the democracy I cherished. It belonged to me as much as to any Briton. ‘Beating the Poms’ is as important to me as to any other Australian, but it’s like wanting New South Wales to beat Queensland in the rugby league state of origin series. Only on the sports field are the British an alien tribe. Indeed, it would be a very rare Australian, I suspect, who feels like a stranger in any English-speaking country regardless of disagreements that might exist between governments or about policy.

Tony Abbott, Battlelines, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 6/8

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com