It is Tony Abbott’s 93rd day as Leader of the Liberal Party and he’s being cheered as a hero. He’s just arrived at the Mosman RSL, one of the few affordable venues in the richest suburb on Sydney’s ultra-conservative North Shore, and the member for Warringah is not among friends but fanatics.
If Abbott is trying to argue that it’s a marathon not a sprint, and that the party has a lot of work to do ahead of polling day, tonight is not the night for such dispassionate political cliché. It feels like a dress rehearsal for a victory party.
Every single person that I speak to on the night not only believes that the Libs can win, many are saying they will win.
It’s been an unusual week. Buoyed by the humiliation of Kevin Rudd over the insulation scandal, the Opposition Leader headed bush on the last such trip he will take before the election, and what for one tragicomic moment looked like the last trip he would ever take anywhere as his party got lost for five hours in the middle of nowhere.
Friday has been more sedate, at least by Abbott’s standards. There were no quad bikes or out of control road trains, but he did start the day by walking 30km from Palm Beach to Balmoral to raise funds for charity. Now, he’s walking up the turquoise-carpeted stairs at the Mosman RSL, past the house band playing Dancing Queen, past a framed portrait of his beloved Queen Elizabeth, to deliver what’s called the Sir Robert Menzies oration at the 65th birthday celebrations for the Mosman Liberals, the oldest branch in the land.
Oldest in terms of longevity, and possibly also in the age of its membership. There are a couple of beehive hairdos here that put Bronnie Bishop to shame, and more pearls than in Broome. But the age profile has been lowered on the night by the presence of several tables of younger members from the Lindsay branch, from the western suburb of Penrith, where the Howard era started in triumph with Jackie Kelly’s thumping 1996 by-election victory and ended in farce with the fake Islamic pamphlet scandal just days before the 2007 poll.
One couple are so excited about what Abbott insists should not be described as the Abbott juggernaut – “Mate, mate, mate, please don’t call it that whatever you do” – that they’ve flown over from Perth just for the night.
But if Abbott is trying to talk things down he’s talking to the wrong people.
“Tony is doing a terrific job, you can just feel the energy,” says Ann Youl, an elegant retired lady who is straight out of North Shore central casting. Mrs Youl and her husband, a retired navy commodore, lived in India, Singapore and the UK before returning to Sydney where she joined the Mosman Liberals in 1990 “when the country was going to ruin under Mr Keating with massive unemployment and high interest rates”.
‘It’s terrible what Labor has done to Australia again,” Mrs Youl tells The Punch between sips of her champagne. “We were the envy of the world, we had weathered the economic problems which had befallen Asia, we had a booming surplus, we paid $96 billion off the debt, and in two years just look at what Mr Rudd has done.”
“I have no doubt that Tony can win. He’s a down to earth Aussie, he is having a go. But I must say I was a bit upset about that witchetty grub I saw him eating on television, and I told him that (his wife) Maggie wouldn’t kiss him when he got home.”
Mrs Youl’s friend Melanie Mattherson chips in: “People are responding to Tony because he’s a real person, he’s not a plastic person.”
Adding to this love-in atmosphere is a bloke by the name of John Winston Howard, glass of red in his hand, who’s being back-slapped by all-comers over his appointment as president of the International Cricket Council.
“I always thought being prime minister was the best job you could have, but I was wrong,” Howard jokes.
For a man who always cautioned against hubris in office – if ultimately succumbing to it by holding onto the prime ministership for so long – John Howard is having a bit of trouble containing his excitement at the speed at which his progeny has turned Liberal fortunes around.
“I don’t think Tony has put a foot wrong,” he tells The Punch. “He’s given real heart and hope to the Liberal Party.”
Mr Howard is even more effusive in his introductory remarks for the Leader. By this stage the crowd has been well whipped up and is in virtual victory mode. MC and Liberal Party member, John Mangos from Sky News, introduces Mosman branch President David McLean, who notes that dinner guests are arriving late after being “stuck in NSW Labor traffic”. McLean also describes NSW Opposition Deputy Leader Jillian Skinner as representing “the incoming Liberal State Government” even though the election won’t be held until next May.
When John Howard takes to the podium he gives a typically direct appraisal of what he sees as Tony Abbott’s three greatest strengths over Kevin Rudd. The first two are predictable enough. He says Mr Abbott is a man of high intelligence – “We could always rely on Tony to give an authentic middle-of-the-road point of view,” he deadpans about his boisterousness in Cabinet. He says Abbott is “possessed of great compassion,” citing his sitting in a filthy humpy with two impoverished Aboriginal men in the Territory last week with Abbott asking: “Do you sleep here every night?”
“I think that was touching, it was genuine, and it resonated with the Australian people,” Howard says.
Thirdly, and most interestingly, Mr Howard cites Mr Abbott’s capacity for self-deprecation as his greatest political strength. He says that when he was PM, he would deliberately say that the two most important jobs in Australia were prime minister and captaining the national cricket team, as his way of telling the public that he didn’t have tickets on himself.
In a pointed sledge at Mr Rudd, Mr Howard says:
“Tony does not take himself too seriously, and I really don’t know who else I have in mind when I say that. I can’t possibly think of who I have in mind. Australians like their leaders to have a bit of self-deprecation. They want them to be dignified, they want them to be strong, but they want them to be able to relate to the man and woman on the street.”
Howard then notes that there has only been one one-term government since Federation – “Even Gough Whitlam lasted two terms” – but says there is a chance that the Rudd Government can become the second (after the Scullin Labor Government which was punted after just two years during the Depression.)
“Australians want someone at the top who really believes in something,” Howard says in closing.
By the time Abbott takes the stage, with a projected image of Robert Menzies as his backdrop, he looks almost embarrassed with the adulation, and possibly even unnerved by the optimism.
Perhaps as a result he gives a pretty dry speech, with more of an internal message in his well-established capacity as a chief spear-carrier for the party’s conservative faction, where he disputes the revisionist assessment of Menzies as a small-l liberal who may have baulked at aspects of the party’s modern ideology.
Abbott says this interpretation of Menzies stems from his quote that “we take the name Liberal because we are determined to be a progressive party.” Abbott suggests that Menzies had been verballed, noting that in the full version of the quote he concluded that he did not mean “small-l” liberal in the American sense of the word.
Abbott then draws a parallel between Menzies at the 1949 election where he was campaigning to stop bank nationalisation and to end petrol rationing, and the position the post-Turnbull Liberals have adopted against Kevin Rudd’s emissions trading scheme.
Sheepishly and with one eye on his mentor, he gets to the question of whether he can win.
“Well, John,” he says, “it would be a historic boilover for the Rudd Government to be only the second one-term government since Federation.
“But it just might happen.”
As the applause finally dies down, Abbott concludes by drawing on a Liberal Leader from the unheralded end of the party’s spectrum, Billy Snedden, who famously talked proudly of leading the Opposition to a magnificent loss.
“Most of all I want to say to you that I am playing to win,” he says.
“Ladies and gentlemen there is no such thing as a magnificent loss and I don’t intend to preside over one.”
After his speech Abbott tells The Punch that he is “having a great time” in the new job but that he doesn’t want to get ahead of himself and is taking it one day at a time. He asks about the traffic on his Punch piece on Friday about his Top End visit and is pleased to hear that it’s had a couple of hundred comments, even if much of it is abuse. He’s less pleased to hear that it got fewer comments than the shirts-off photo gallery comparing him to another political man of action, Vladimir Putin. “You should do a gallery comparing Rudd to Yeltsin,” he says, adding that at least Yeltsin was often pissed so he had an excuse.
Due to the crush of party faithful chatting to Abbott before his speech, and the presence of Howard who has been virtually mobbed by young Liberals and old ladies, the night has gone an hour over schedule.
The vote of thanks falls to Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey, a formal Turnbull loyalist who crashed and burned in last December’s leadership ballot only to watch Abbott skate through the middle by just one vote.
The briefest speech of the night is also the best. Despite being a believer in climate change Hockey succinctly explains why a pro-ETS Opposition was never going to make any inroads against a pro-ETS Government.
“We were effectively Kevin Rudd’s human shield,” Hockey says. “Those days are over.”
As the night ends with a fundraising auction for the Lindsay campaign – the framed signatures of John Howard and Robert Menzies fetch $3000 – it’s unclear whether Abbott’s obvious ability to energise the party’s base will also extend to swinging voters. Clearly it has started to turn around – the published polls show an average three-point reversal in Labor and Liberals vote over the past few months, with Abbott also gaining on Rudd as preferred PM.
The Libs could be looking at conservative re-run of 1998, where Kim Beazley clawed back so many traditional Labor voters that he won the popular vote but not enough seats.
They could also be looking at victory. As Abbott said – and has Kevin Rudd himself has warned Caucus – it just might happen.
The man who is most determined to keep a lid on things, and to make sure that the Libs don’t lapse into their time-honoured “natural party of government” cockiness, is the man who most wants to be our next PM.
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