Emeritus Professor Ross Fitzgerald reviewed TONY ABBOTT AND THE TIMES OF REVOLUTION on his website. The review also appears in the latest edition of Quadrant.
History Repeating Itself
Decades before Tony Abbott, as our 28th prime minister, was challenging the zeitgeist by scrapping the carbon tax, stopping the boats and knighting Prince Philip, he’d been annoying the hell out of the campus left as a student leader, as this fascinating book revels in telling. In Tony Abbott and the Times of Revolution, Gerard Wilson sets out to do three things: to claim Abbott as Australia’s leading “Burkean conservative”; to analyse the university counter-culture that had developed by the mid-1970s; and to show the consistency of Abbott’s thinking over the past forty years.
What shines through in this rather wordy book is Abbott’s determination to make a difference, his political courage, and the constancy of his convictions. As well, there’s the relentlessness of the left’s campaign to get him, even as a campus politician, and the ambivalence towards him of careerists on his own side of the political landscape.