Often when politicians are removed from positions of power, they soften. After the inevitable brooding period of watching Yes Minister reruns and trying to remember what they did when they last had time off in the early 2000s, an air of freedom envelopes them. Stripped of the suffocation and isolation of leadership, party lines, expectations and responsibilities, they become themselves again.
It's ironic that this post responsibility/post politics transformation has generally made them more appealing to the public and, in fact, better able to express their views. Leaving cabinet and/or leaving politics, at least in the eyes of the public, makes you better at the job you used to have.
We've seen it countless times, most recently with the current Prime Minister. Malcolm Turnbull was not a popular opposition leader. After Brendan Nelson (yes, remember Brendan Nelson) was removed by Turnbull, there was the suggestion that Kevin Rudd's frenetic populism had met its match. This did not eventuate. A combination of arrogant leadership, liaisons with a treacherous cockroach named Godwin Grech and a failure to get his own party on board with an ETS policy caused his demise within one year. He failed to connect with the public and Abbott ascended. Yet during those many dark days of the Abbott leadership, old Malcolm dug out his leather jacket, bought an iPhone and went on Q and A, a lot.
The public loved it and for the years of horrific drudgery that followed, much of which was catalogued on this blog (along the destruction of my sense of hope), Turnbull was the leader a large number of people wished we had.
Similar turnarounds have occurred before; Paul Keating was largely reviled by the time he left office, now many would love to see him back. Even John Winston Howard, once the bane of my goddamn existence, seems preferable to the horrifying politics of the last 5 years. However, I'm going to go out on a limb. This will not happen to Tony Abbott.
It just won't, because the man is not salvageable. He may become more himself but, you may be surprised to realise, for the last couple of years he's actually been holding himself back. What he says over the next couple of years will leave historians baffled at the collective psychosis that saw him elected. Seriously, he and Mark Latham would not be out of place occupying balcony seats at the theatre, heckling the show from above. It would be like the Muppets, but less funny and more socially damaging.
Tone's recent speech at the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London is a window into his unrestrained and simplistic vision of the world. Tony used the occasion to return to the only policy area where he has any claim to success: refugees and how refugees are bad. His advice to the Europeans was this: by letting these people in you are leading Europe 'into catastrophic error.' His reasoning: such 'misplaced altruism' will cause Europe to 'fundamentally weaken itself.' His solution: 'turning boats around' and that it will 'require some force.'
Feeling proud yet?
Abbott is advising that global refugee policy be revised down to the moral choices facing survivors in an apocalyptic zombie film.
You know those incredibly dangerous inflatable rafts floating around the Mediterranean with hundreds of people, and children, on them? Turn them around. Where to? Um….the first country they got to after Syria.
This is so ridiculous I am at a loss. Firstly, those rafts for the most part are not actually moving under their own steam. They are adrift. Turning them around would mean they would merely be facing the other direction. So what, you are going to tow them back to the Middle East? All of them?
Does he not understand the concept of numbers? If everyone fleeing a conflict just stopped in the first country they got to, that is, the one next door, what would that look like? How would that work? How many would die? What is unspoken here is that Abbott believes that should not enter the calculation. Such a suggestion would not make sense otherwise.
Abbott argues that Europe should study Australia as an example of how to deal with the refugee problem. This is the most backward thing I have ever heard. How European nations, like Germany, have dealt with this crisis should shame us.
Abbott, as I've always suspected, has no shame.
