Tony Abbott is fading fast. Within days of his fall he’s looking like a prime minister we once had a long time ago. The drama of his execution this week was muted by the lingering disbelief that he was ever there. His government has slipped easily into the past. He is gone and barely missed.



“The beauty of being leader is you are freer to be yourself,” he remarked five years ago after becoming leader of the opposition. But that self proved, in the end, not made for the politics of today.

Abbott was a brawling politician of great skill but he was also – and fatally – still in many ways the cold war kid who rode out with Bob Santamaria’s forces in the late 1970s to confront the zeitgeist and save western civilisation.

Along the way, Abbott would abandon nearly every policy Santa stood for but he never lost the old man’s fear of the future and the belief that his God-given mission was to save us from enemies we don’t even realise are there.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Labor benches taunt Tony Abbott with the Herald Sun headline ‘Bowser bandit’ during question time in October last year. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

In Abbott’s political imagination danger lurks everywhere. Whether it’s the death cult abroad or the ABC at home, there is always more at stake than meets the eye. Ruin is at hand. Combat is imperative. Hyperbole is the order of the day.

In the end, that didn’t wash with Australia.

Abbott used to talk of himself as a mutt chasing a car. What happens, he used to wonder, when the dog catches the vehicle? The answer when he became prime minister turned out to be: not much.

It’s not that he didn’t have ideas. Opinion pieces were his strength in his early career as a journalist. Even as minister for health – and he was a good minister – he liked to lock himself away for days at a time to write newspaper pieces in which he threw around big, bold ideas.

But missing from these tens of thousands of words was much about strategy. Abbott does not have the profoundly professional imagination of John Howard, whose mind focused instinctively on the task of getting where he wanted to go.

Without his superb talent for political conflict, he would never have brought his party in from opposition. True, he wrecked the joint to get there, but the victory of 2013 can never be taken away from him.

That’s when his troubles began. He found he had little to carry him forward when he came to power except his instinct for brawling. There was no strategy. Persuasion was at a minimum. He picked fights everywhere. Like the worst of world war one’s generals, he led his government straight at the machine guns.

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In opposition he had built up a great political asset: trust in his word. That he was caught out so often ducking and weaving didn’t matter. Abbott convinced Australia that he was the truth teller and his opponent, Julia Gillard, the liar.

This political gold was squandered in his first budget. From that strategic error, Abbott never really recovered. That the budget picked so many fights he couldn’t win only compounded a fundamental miscalculation that reduced Abbott to the ranks of ordinary politicians.

His devotion to the crown was comic yet it didn’t bring him undone – though even his supporters regard his knighting of Prince Philip as one of the silliest political gestures in living memory.

Nor was it a bar to his survival that Abbott was a John Paul II brand of Catholic warrior. His defence of marriage as an honourable estate fit only for heterosexuals was one of the few times in his career Abbott tried to force his religious beliefs on the nation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Abbott during a seemingly spiritual moment at Parliament House. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

These old loyalties gave a sepia wash to his leadership but were not the cause of his downfall. Abbott was only Santa-lite but in the end he failed in the same way Santamaria failed half a century ago: we didn’t buy his vision of a nation in peril. We don’t see ourselves that way.

He is a unique man. His was a unique failure. And he was true to himself all the way out. In his last appearance in the prime minister’s courtyard he lectured the media in grandiose terms: “Refuse to connive at dishonour by acting as the assassin’s knife.” He sees himself as he always has: surrounded, indeed white-anted, by enemies.

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By that point, of course, he wasn’t entirely wrong.

He leaves behind a band of ultra conservatives distraught at his fall. For a time they had a champion. It seemed under Abbott they might yet fend off the future. They imagined an Australia free of everything from wind turbines to lesbian offspring. But this has all been plucked away from them.

The leaders of this band are Eric Abetz, Cory Bernardi and Kevin Andrews, who scored a remarkable 30 votes in the contest for deputy leader early this week. They are for Malcolm Turnbull to deal with now.

Whatever else happens this will be the defining task of Turnbull’s time as prime minister. He spoke of changing the discourse on economics. But he must know the discourse has to change across the board.

The bounce he enjoyed in the polls this week has been modest. He’s on notice that Australia wants much more than the leadership to change.