The consistency of Tony Abbott's political principles

The mode of political action of a true conservative is to apply a set of enduring consistent principles to changing circumstances and a variety of circumstances. Edmund Burke, the founder of modern conservatism, set the standard more than two hundred years. He was often accused of inconsistency or (to use the modern term) back-flipping. No serious commentator on Burke's writings and speeches would now make those accusations. The conservative's mode of political action is in strict opposition to that of the political rationalist whose mode is to ram circumstances into a template of rigid ideology no matter what. It is instructive to go back to Abbott's speech for the pre-selection for the federal seat of Warringah.

I wasn’t expected to win the pre-selection for Warringah, a safe-ish seat that the long-serving sitting member vacated in January 1994. A good speech, though, enabled me to ‘come through the middle’ of a crowded field. The notes for that speech included what were to some recurrent themes:

All my life, I have tried to stand up for the causes I believed in… As a journalist, I never began an article with the assumption that there was something fundamentally wrong with our country and I tried to find the good in the people and institutions I covered… In the Leader of the Opposition’s office, I tried to be a reminder that politics is about inspiration as much as policy and that we have to like people as well as lecture to them – to reach out to them and give them hope in our country and in themselves…

I’m a Liberal because I believe that government’s role is to give people a hand up, not a handout. I believe in limited government and unlimited opportunity, because for getting things done free enterprise beats red tape every time… I’m a Liberal because our party has always stood for the decent, the humane and usually for the practical… We know that without honesty there is no trust and without trust there is no fairness and without fairness civil society cannot long survive.

We should give ourselves more credit for our achievements. It was Bob Menzies and not John Curtin who first called Asia our Near North. 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…

Australia’s new poor are families with children… It’s time that we looked seriously at a tax system which recognises people’s responsibilities and not just their incomes… Life in Warringah is great, until you need to go somewhere. I know transport is a state issue, but that wouldn’t stop me from pressing the state government to support a solution and, if needs be, seeking federal government help too…

In the end, politics is about values as much as policies. The only lasting solution to unemployment is self-reliance and the best cure for out-of-control welfare spending is keeping families together. If there is one contribution that I would most like to make to our national life it would be stop knocking our country… To this end, I set out to defend the constitution of our country…and to make a cause that was all but finished intellectually respectable again. And that cause, the monarchy, happened to be the first plank of the foundation platform of the Liberal Party… [Now I want] to work for an even better cause: reclaiming our political culture and helping Australia to achieve the greatness that we all know is within our grasp…

Fifteen years later, I am still talking about what it means to be a Liberal, the financial predicament of families with children, the dysfunctional federation and, above all, how to nurture a better Australia by building on our strengths. I still think that the job of government is to respond intelligently to the problems of the day and, in so doing, to help our country to reflect better its best values. I’m comfortable on the Liberal Party’s more conservative wing because conservatism is a pragmatic, eclectic creed, above all respectful of what’s stood the test of time. As John Howard once quipped, ‘a conservative is someone who doesn't think he’s morally superior to his grandfather’.

Tony Abbott, Battlelines, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2009, pp. 19/21

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com