Note: Labor MP Richard Marles and Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella are among our favourite contributors to The Punch, and we have asked them to write a piece every Friday during this five-week election campaign giving their take on events.
On Tony Abbott’s ascension to the Liberal Party leadership, conservatives across the country breathed a sigh of relief that their Party had been returned having been on loan for two years to two leaders who’d grown up wanting to be Labor politicians.
Tony Abbott has always wanted to be seen as a conviction politician.
And he’s delighted in putting his beliefs on show. He has told us that workplace reform was one of the greatest achievements of the Howard Government and only the phrase workchoices is dead not its intent. He has reassured us that a bad boss is a bit like a bad husband – he tends to do more good than harm. And he has emphatically declared that climate change is crap.
Liberal Party HQ fashioned their man as being firm in his beliefs with the courage to act on his convictions: real action.
The one problem with this plan is that Tony Abbott’s convictions are just too extreme. They may be sincerely held. They may be passionately argued. But they simply do not represent the views of mainstream Australia.
And for the Liberal Party that’s the rub.
Enter Tony Abbott the politician. The man who says that Workchoices is dead and buried. The man who signs a contract to that very effect.
Tony the politician is prepared to spend more than $3billion on his direct action plan on climate change when he doesn’t for a minute believe that climate change is happening. Has any leader ever spent so much money in contradiction of his own beliefs?
Tony the politician is also the man who, despite a lifetime of voting against stem-cell research, now attends a lunch sponsored by a stem-cell research company.
Yet in turn the problem for Tony the politician is that he is starting to really annoy Tony the ideologue who appears to have no interest in taking these eleventh hour conversions lying down. You get the impression that Tony the ideologue thinks there’s only room for one Tony inside Tony Abbott.
Choosing an extreme ideologue to lead a mainstream party was always going to be interesting. But the internal battle it has unleashed inside Tony Abbott’s brain is nothing short of spectacular.
Thomas Jefferson most famously described the internal contest that can occur between the head and the heart. How he would be captivated, were he alive today, by the extraordinary contest which is being waged inside Tony Abbott.
In the last few days Tony Abbott’s internal dilemma has become almost compulsory viewing.
Be it the way he speaks, or the way he squirms when interviewers invite him to support the worker, every time he goes on TV with a view to denying Workchoices he enlivens it and animates it brighter than ever.
When Tony Abbott declared on day one of the campaign that he would give Labor’s Fair Work Act a fair go it was Tony the politician speaking. Yet his utter refusal to rule out changes beyond the next three years was the work of Tony the ideologue.
While Tony the politician is desperately seeking to kill Workchoices, Tony the ideologue follows right behind resuscitating it every time.
And that is why the issue of Workchoices in this election campaign just keeps on keeping on.
Workchoices refuses to die as an issue for the Opposition because despite his head Tony Abbott’s heart just won’t let it.
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