Aug 9th 2010
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Loading ...The cheshire leopard and his changing spots
Election media over the weekend was dominated by the Liberal election launch and the suddenly terrifyingly real prospect of a Prime Minister Abbott.
This is the man who knifed his party’s leader over an emissions trading scheme he’d called “common sense” just three weeks earlier, who called climate change “absolute crap” and now pledges billions in “direct action” climate policy. This is the Liberal party bovver boy who went to the barricades over the abortion pill, often has trouble getting words out of his mouth because its so filled with feet, and, as David Penberthy wrote in The Punch:
Three years ago, Abbott was wandering the streets of the 2007 campaign like an escaped prisoner, picking fights with frail old men who had oxygen tubes coming out of their nose, standing over female opponents and calling them bullshit artists, aggressively talking up the very policies which were about to cost the Coalition office. Once the Coalition was out of power, Abbott spent his first year in Opposition moaning about his savage paycut from minister to backbencher, and likening the loss of office to a death in the family.
Peter Hartcher at the Sydney Morning Herald called the Abbott ascendency the new normal, with the coalition winning the Neilsen poll two weeks in a row. Yet yesterday at the Coalition’s policy launch, Abbott looked “statesmanlike” as he welcomed a supposedly unified Liberal Party to launch almost no policies – not a single dollar in campaign promises – but a promise to give Australia back a “grown up Government”.
Abbott has managed to do this by ruthlessly suppressing who he is: a gaffe prone mad monk whose instincts are so conservative he’d have women at home, gays in jail and the mentally ill washing dishes in exchange for food vouchers.If this seems harsh, that’s only because we have the memory of a goldfish:
Ironic, isn’t it, that while Julia Gillard declares its time for the “real Julia” to emerge from the advisers and spin doctors, the Liberal Party is keen to keep the real Abbott as deeply under wraps as possible. But Tony has been as good at changing his tone and modifying the things that come out of his mouth as Julia has been bad at campaigning.
Julia has done this to herself. Labor’s campaign has been shockingly inept, with its new leader leapfrogging from one badly conceived policy to another, dodging brawling former leaders at every turn, tiptoeing around the exceedingly sensitive issue of her own ascendency to power, and completely unable to land a blow on an opposition that is thin on talent and ideas but long on criticism and sniping from the sidelines.
This is a Government that is internationally recognised as having taken a textbook approach to managing the country through the worst global financial crisis in 70 years, and yet has managed to let the opposition mount a campaign based on its supposed incompetance, the “worst Government in Australia’s history”.
If the ability to run an election campaign reflects in any way the ability to run the country, at this stage, you’d have to give it to the mad monk turned statesman. The question is whether the virulently right wing leopard has managed to really change its spots, or if after the election the real Tony Abbott will stand up. No prizes for guessing what really lies behind the cheshire leopard’s grin.
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