A conservative stalwart, Tony Abbott has been a high-profile figure in Australian politics for decades.
Never shy to take principled positions on issues like immigration, climate change or same-sex marriage, he led Australia’s Liberal Party for almost six years and had the honour of serving as Prime Minister for two of them before being unceremoniously ousted as party leader by a more progressive alternative.
He is now enjoying an active political retirement. ‘Australia: A History,’ published in October, is one of the fruits of this, and unlike most books authored by politicians, it was written for the best of reasons.
As with the United States, there has always been a discussion about the circumstances of Australia’s foundation and the impact which European settlement had on the indigenous communities there.
In recent decades, this has intensified. Self-loathing figures on the Australian Left routinely present an overwhelmingly negative picture of their own country’s history.
Abbott makes no bones about his pride in being an Australian, and he willingly takes aim at the ‘black armband view of history,’ while emphasising that even in the convict era, the Australian story was marked by redemption and opportunity.
For Abbott, the widespread interest in familial history should be accompanied by a corresponding interest in national history.
“Indeed,” he writes, “most of us would regard individuals who know little of their personal past as not only somewhat strange but as unmoored, even adrift. Yet there is not currently a comparable interest in our country’s history, even though it’s hard to understand the present or to plan effectively for the future, without a sound knowledge of what’s gone before.”
Regardless of the great geographic distance between our countries, Australia will always be close to the hearts of many here.
Almost 10% of Australians have Irish blood. There are more than 100,000 Irish-born people living there – a figure which has almost doubled in the last 20 years.
Only part of this can be explained by the 2008 crash. The first of the Irish to sail to Australia travelled in chains, but the patriotic rebels and convicted criminals transported on penal ships are dwarfed by the Irish who chose to go for a better life.
This continues today, to the detriment of this country’s future, as Australia actively recruits teachers, Gardaí and other skilled Irish professionals.
When explaining the upward economic mobility which has long existed in his country, Abbott quotes the great Michael Davitt, who wrote after his 1895 tour that the colonies “give better all-round conditions of existence to the average man than any of the European countries I am acquainted with.”
The author describes how convicts in Australia became involved in the economic system very quickly, and after serving their sentences, many prospered handsomely.
As the British-Irish settlements developed further, the discovery of gold in the mid-19th century changed Australia and helped put an end to the penal transportation era.
Even today, mining accounts for more than 10% of Australia’s economy and a large part of the country’s exports.
This is one of the key reasons why Australia remains a country where good-quality jobs exist for those without a university degree.
One of the sharpest debates during Abbott’s time as Leader of the Opposition and then Prime Minister related to mining, when he defied environmental critics by scrapping a mining tax introduced by the previous Labor government.
Unlike virtually all mainstream politicians in the advanced democracies, Tony Abbott has consistently refused to bend the knee towards leftist dogmas, including those expounded by the climate zealots.
He continues his courageous fight for sanity here, reminding the reader that climate change predates modern industrialisation while attacking the view that “human-produced carbon dioxide’s threat to the planet justifies an end to the use of fossil fuels, however impractical…”
What a sharp contrast to his successors at the helm of Australia’s government, or indeed the Irish political establishment.
Like Australia, Ireland’s social and economic model requires fossil fuels and the cheap and abundant energy derived from them. We need air and ship transportation to travel and trade, our dispersed population makes private car transportation essential and the tech sector will require vastly more power-hungry data centres in the coming years as Artificial Intelligence develops.
Unlike Abbott, weak men like Micheál Martin spout the Green lunacies while refusing to acknowledge the trade-offs, even to the point of slapping down a senior civil servant who stated the blindingly obvious.
Immigration is another area where Abbott shows his value as an observer with first-hand experience. Australia is built on large-scale inward migration, and much of the left-wing self-loathing there is fuelled by the legacy of the ‘White Australia’ policies which barred many potential immigrants.
Abbott places this and the mistreatment of the Aboriginal people in context throughout, acknowledging the errors while emphasising the positives and the social context as it existed previously.
Racial prejudice (or to label it more benignly, ethnic preference) ensured that what started as a British outpost in the 18th century remained firmly British until very recently.
Following the horrific losses in both world wars, Australian governments devoted considerable efforts to attracting British emigrants (it is worth noting that Abbott himself was born in London and emigrated with his family to Australia while still a toddler).
After World War Two, the promise of the government was that 90% of immigrants would be British. A cautious opening up to non-British Europeans in this period was followed in later decades by a greater openness to immigration from Asia and elsewhere, just as the country was taking steps to bring about reconciliation with the Aboriginal people.
This has been mostly successful, but as with climate policy, Abbott and those like him have needed to take steps to retain public support.
During the Howard governments of 1996-2007, Abbott writes that the limiting of legal immigration to around 100,000 newcomers per annum helped to stem anti-immigration sentiment being promoted by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party.
He highlights the benefits of offshore processing of asylum seekers in Nauru (which even the Australian Labor Party has had to eventually support) and is critical of the post-Covid upsurge in annual immigration.
This has seen annual net overseas migration reach almost 500,000 – with the same predictable consequences for public opinion as we have seen elsewhere.
Irish readers of a conservative disposition often see right-of-centre or nationalist figures elsewhere and mourn the absence of like-minded equivalents in Leinster House.
In Australia though, the debate over national identity is interwoven with questions of British heritage and the monarchy, where Abbott is one of the keenest advocates of preserving the historic link to the Crown and all that goes with it.
The situation is somewhat similar to Ireland, with a left-wing republicanism being alienated from all things Anglophile.
Abbott writes of how Australia’s people entered the Great War enthusiastically (with 400,000 serving out of a population of less than five million), recognising the choice between “British freedom or German militarism.”This small country considered its interests best served by supporting a British-led global order, and when America took on this global leadership role, Australia followed it into conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, and bled heavily as a result.
This strategy for external affairs can surely be questioned and is: Australia’s ‘Waltzing Matilda’ expresses the same mournful scepticism as Ireland’s ‘Green Fields of France.’
It is at least a considered strategy however, in contrast to Ireland’s reckless policy of unarmed neutrality combined with lazy Europhilia.
For all the differences, Australia’s story and choices are similar to our own. Abbott, a former seminarian, worries about how his country has become “materially rich but spiritually poor” as the influence of Christianity recedes.
He worries about the elevation of identity politics and the promotion of catastrophist climate policies, and above all he worries that young Australians no longer seem to want to know about their country’s past, or why they should feel gratitude for having the privilege to be born there.
This is a serious work about a serious country, written by a serious man.
What a contrast there is here between this Aussie maverick and our own recent leaders. Whereas Leo Varadkar and others can only summon the enthusiasm to write books about themselves, Tony Abbott has channelled his energy into this thoughtful argument about why Australians should think more about their nation’s past and future as well.