Tony Abbott’s Awful Month

They promised they wouldn’t do it. After years of Labor Party tumult – the brutal ouster of a first-term prime minister, a concerted program to remove his successor, and then her own eventual replacement – the conservative Liberal Party promised that its Coalition government would represent a period of stability. After all, it was disgust with the Labor Party theatrics that gave the Liberals a thumping victory in the 2013 elections.

From the start, though, the Liberal Party had a problem: its leader, and prime minister, Tony Abbott. A former boxer who once studied to be a priest, Abbott brought to the leadership a pugilistic political style and an ideology that placed him far to the right of most Australians. In opposition, he proved surprisingly effective, albeit aided mightily by the Labor Party’s self-immolation. In government, however, Abbott has appeared politically tone deaf.

The problems began with his first budget last year. After proclaiming a fiscal crisis, attributed to Labor’s spendthrift ways, the prime minister and his treasurer, Joe Hockey, were determined to introduce a dose of austerity. Instead, they shocked voters with a budget that left the rich largely unscathed but broke election promises and hit lower and middle income earners in health, education and pensions. The government spent months grappling with the Senate over the budget legislation, while taking flak about its content.

Although the budget debacle dominated political reporting in 2014, the Abbott government scored some impressive achievements, especially in the foreign policy realm. Under Abbott, Australia was able to conclude free trade agreements with three of its largest trading partners, China, Japan and South Korea. It enjoyed a successful tenure as an elected member of the UN Security Council, with a particularly deft response to the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17 over Ukraine.

But even the successes were often blighted by Abbott missteps. A well-run G-20 summit in Brisbane, for instance, is remembered in Australia for Abbott’s petulant speech and his humiliation over climate change. Never a popular leader at the best of times, Abbott looked increasingly out of touch. Heavy losses in state elections helped focus the minds of Liberal Party members.

All was brought to a head on Australia Day in January, when Abbott announced that he had taken the astonishing decision to award a knighthood to Prince Philip, the gaffe-prone husband of the Queen of England. Most Australians were bemused in March last year when the Australian prime minister reintroduced the quaint tradition of knights and dames to a country where many are ambivalent about their continued links with British royalty. But even for an avowed monarchist like Abbott, knighting a British royal seemed a particularly ridiculous decision. The response was swift and brutal, with even Abbott’s own cabinet ministers rapidly distancing themselves from the decision.

At this point, party room discontent about Abbott’s leadership began to make its way into the media. Speculation about a challenge mounted. Few were surprised when two Western Australian backbenchers did call for a spill motion – a vote to declare the party leadership vacant; effectively a party-room vote of no confidence in the leader – when members returned for the next sitting of parliament on February 9. The motion quickly found support from other party members.

But if Abbott was ousted, who would replace him? The two leading candidates were Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop. Turnbull, a suave moderate from Sydney, who had made his name as a barrister and his money as an investment banker, in fact led the Liberal Party in opposition before losing (by a single vote) to Abbott in a late 2009 challenge. With his centrist, cross-over appeal, Turnbull was popular with the electorate, but less so among his more conservative colleagues, who remembered also his fumbles during his tenure as Opposition leader. Western Australian Julie Bishop meanwhile was the revelation of Abbott’s cabinet, widely seen as an effective foreign minister and deputy leader. Both Bishop and Turnbull were in awkward spots – as members of the cabinet, they had to remain publicly loyal to their leader. Neither wanted the stigma that was attached to former Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who as deputy prime minister was part of the plot that removed Kevin Rudd.

In the end, the spill motion was voted down, 61 votes to 39. However, conservative and progressive pundits alike were quick to call the result a disaster for Abbott. Given that more than half of those voting against the motion were presumably ministers, assistant ministers, and parliamentary secretaries who owed their positions to Abbott, it meant that the majority of the backbench no longer supported their leader. It would take a miraculous comeback for Abbott to lead the party into the next federal elections, due next year.

The signs have not been promising. If anything, Abbott has doubled-down, unceremoniously dumping his venerable party whip, ill-advisedly using the term “Holocaust” in a jobs debate, irking Australia’s neighbor Indonesia in comments over the impending execution of two Australians convicted of heroin smuggling, and most recently getting caught up in controversy over a report on asylum-seeker children in detention.

The ongoing spats are sorely testing the patience of Abbott’s supporters. Turnbull and Bishop, who both handled the spill motion skillfully and emerged with their reputations very much intact, are looking ever more attractive. Some of those Liberal party politicians who claim to have voted against the spill motion have quietly let it be known that they won’t back Abbott a second time. At the time of writing, political insiders were telling reporters that another challenge was a matter of when, not if.

It seems astounding that Australia, one of the best-performing OECD economies in the last quarter century, could soon have its fifth prime minister in five years, a revolving door more commonly associated with Italy or Japan. By contrast, when Kevin Rudd was elected prime minister in 2007, he was the fifth prime minister in 24 years. Certainly, each fall can be explained by individual circumstances – Rudd had fatal management issues, his successor Julia Gillard carried the stigma from Rudd’s ouster, Abbott was always too conservative for the electorate – and even now it is probably premature to draw conclusions about the stability of Australia’s political system. It may well be that the reinstatement of a smoother moderate like Turnbull will end the drama. Or it may be that politics has profoundly changed in the instant echo chamber age of social media, YouTube, and online pundits. Either way, it appears likely we are soon to find out.