A mad king is only part of the problem
The madness of King Tony is a tale that now needs little introduction. Or, for that matter, any positive proof. Claims in the Australian on 21 February that Tony Abbott proposed the unilateral deployment of 3,500 troops to single-handedly take on ISIS were damning not because they were verifiable, but because they were plausible.
When the Sir Prince Philip fiasco broke in January, news editors screamed for fact checkers, convinced the knighthood must be a hoax. This time around, it was the denials by Abbott and his ever shrinking band of loyalists that sounded unlikely.
We are a wiser nation now, braced to believe the worst. An all-Australian invasion of Iraq seems just the kind of batshit crazy thing Abbott would come up with.
There is something transfixing about the death throes of a mad king. But as is often the case, the spectacular implosion of the Abbott prime ministership has much deeper roots than the particular oddities of the monarch in question.
What we are witnessing is the disintegration of the entire framework that has animated right wing politics in Australia since the mid-1990s.
The old tricks aren’t working any more. In the wake of the budget carnage last year, Abbott saddled up old-faithful and galloped off on a crusade against Islamic terrorism.
He even convinced the Daily Telegraph to help pull the Liberals’ favourite talking points together with a priceless “Jihad bludgers” front page. It didn’t help. “We stopped the boats”, said Tony. Again. And again. Still nothing.
The pugnacious repetition of Tea Party-esque talking points, which have for years been the go-to solution for any and all of the Liberals’ problems, now only makes them seem more ludicrous. It’s as if the entitled douchebags of the Young Liberals have been running the government all this time, and suddenly everyone has noticed.
It’s not that social attitudes on issues like terrorism, immigration or refugees have particularly changed for the better. It’s just that they don’t lead people to support the Liberals any more. For a demonstration of the dynamic, look at Tasmanian senator Jacquie Lambie. On the hot button social issues that drive the right, she is evangelical. Lock up the refugees. Ban sharia law. Stop the invasion of the Islamic hordes. On the face of it, she is a classic “Howard battler”. Yet Lambie has been a most intransigent opponent of budget attacks on education, social security and Medicare, which she (accurately) portrays as a savage assault on working class people by a government of toffs.
This dynamic indicates life won’t necessarily be smooth sailing for Malcolm Turnbull when he inevitably takes over. Turnbull might talk in sentences, believe science is real and subscribe to any number of other heresies that upset the Liberal base. But the reason hating Tony Abbott has become a national sport is not fundamentally about any of that.
What drives the anger is hostility to the Liberals’ rule-for-the-rich economic agenda and savage attacks on the basic elements of social welfare. And on that, the millionaire merchant banker from Point Piper is in lock step with Abbott and Hockey. Turnbull argues that the government just needs to explain its policies better. The problem he has is that most people understand the policies perfectly well – and hate them.
If history is any guide, being erudite and urbane doesn’t necessarily help you sell right wing policies. The last PM who tried that was Paul Keating. In the end neither his republicanism nor his Italian suits saved him from the baseball bats of voters, who were so incensed with his economic rationalist agenda that they kicked Labor out of office for more than a decade.
