Abbott’s ‘knightmare’

TO paraphrase Oscar Wilde, losing two prime ministers within a span of five years may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose three looks like carelessness.

Australia came precipitously close to carelessness this week as Tony Abbott, less than 18 months into his prime ministership, survived a revolt within his Liberal Party. Almost nobody believes this will be the end of the matter.

Abbott has never been a particularly popular figure, and his personal ratings this week stood at a record low of 24pc.

That’s considerably lower than his standing among the Liberals but the fact that nearly 40pc of the party’s parliamentarians deemed it prudent, in a secret ballot, to effectively demand a change of leadership cannot lightly be dismissed. Barring a dramatic reversal of fortune, further attempts to dislodge Abbott can more or less be guaranteed ahead of next year’s election — not least in view of opinion polls suggesting that substantially more voters would be inclined to endorse a Liberal Party led by Malcolm Turnbull or Julie Bishop, respectively the current communications and foreign ministers.

Turnbull is the relatively suave billionaire whom Abbott dislodged from the party leadership in 2009 by a single vote. Turnbull was also a former head of the Australian Republican Movement, which makes it particularly ironic that speculation about Abbott’s impending downfall went viral shortly after his bizarre decision last month to include in the usually uncontroversial Australia Day honours a knighthood for Prince Philip.

Rather than the beginning of his troubles, this was in effect the proverbial last straw. The prime minister presumably realised that his choice would be ridiculed by the left side of politics. The vehemence of the reaction from the right may have taken him by surprise.

A key factor in the barrage of criticism that pushed Abbott to the brink of disendorsement by his own party was an eviscerating Tweet from Rupert Murdoch, the US-based media tycoon who owns the vast majority of Australia’s daily newspapers. It was the cue for his minions, most of whom had hitherto been broadly supportive of the deeply reactionary prime minister, to go into critical overdrive.

Murdoch’s Twitter-attack didn’t stop with a relatively reasonable diatribe against the Anglo-Australian honours system. He went on to demand that the prime minister’s chief of staff, Peta Credlin, should quit in the national interest.

There is no clear connection between the two issues; it’s unclear whether Credlin played any role in the disastrous Philip decision. But Credlin has been at the receiving end of plenty of ire from Abbott’s conservative colleagues by virtue of being seen as a control-freak gatekeeper to the office of the prime minister, prone to reprimanding his cabinet ministers at will.

Abbott reputedly refers to Credlin as ‘the chief’, but, unlike before, she has been conspicuously absent from his public appearances of late. A firing or even a voluntary resignation would be seen now as transparently taking dictation from Murdoch. On the other hand, the prospect of being savaged every day by Murdoch’s attack dogs is hardly a pleasant prospect either.

There is strong possibility an Australia without Abbott at the helm would be a less uncongenial place, but in order to grasp that one must look beyond the Philip absurdity to a whole raft of retrogressive policies and broken promises. Apart from matters such as raising the cost of ‘free’ medical care and permitting universities to extract whatever fees whatever they choose from students the outstanding sore on Australia’s face is a policy towards refugees that strikingly inhumane even by general Western standards.

Unfortunately, there are few credible policy alternatives on offer from the opposition Labor Party, which is counting on the unpopularity of the Abbott Liberals to pave its path back to power next year. Largely trapped within the miasma of neoliberal imperatives, it seems incapable of setting its sights on a distinctive course that would more than vaguely resonate with its relatively progressive past.

This is pretty much the Western norm nowadays, and there is no prospect for the moment of the emergence of the kind of breakaway trend epitomised by movements such as Syriza in Greece or Pegida in Spain.

Abbott has, meanwhile, also been jolted by the discomfiture of first-term Liberal-led governments in Victoria and Queensland, and the prospect of a similar fate in New South Wales, which votes next month. Social media and the 24/7 news cycle have widely been cited as primary causes for the political volatility of recent years, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

Abbott’s fate may be sealed within months, if not sooner. His trajectory, though, could be symptomatic of crucial ruptures in the post-Cold War Western mode of governance. It would be a mistake to underestimate the resilience of capitalist power structures, but the road ahead could turn out to be very rocky indeed.

mahir.dawn@gmail.com

Published in Dawn February 11th , 2015