This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Tony Abbott has used a book launch to unveil a sweeping conservative manifesto for the next federal election, declaring the Coalition needs to cut immigration, slash the renewable energy target, abolish the Human Rights Commission, and gut the capacity of the Senate to be a roadblock to the government’s agenda.

In a provocative speech that contains several pot shots at his successor, Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott warns the government won’t win the next election unless it wins back the conservative base, and he declares “politics can’t be just a contest of toxic egos or someone’s vanity project.”

“Our challenge is to be worth voting for,” Abbott said in Sydney on Thursday evening at the launch of the book, Making Australia Right.

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Distilling his pitch to voters, Abbott says: “In short, why not say to the people of Australia: we’ll cut the RET, to help with your power bills; we’ll cut immigration to make housing more affordable; we’ll scrap the Human Rights Commission to stop official bullying; we’ll stop all new spending to end ripping off our grandkids; and we’ll reform the Senate to have government, not gridlock.”

During a separate appearance on Thursday night on Andrew Bolt’s program on Sky News, Abbott doubled down on his argument that the Coalition was at risk of losing the next election because of the fracturing of rightwing politics, and the allure of “grievance” parties like One Nation.

Abbott said if voters wanted good government, they had to continue to back the Coalition “but plainly there are lots of people who are concerned about our our direction.”

He said there was a risk the government would “drift to defeat”.

In his speech at the book launch in Sydney, Abbott also delivered a caustic takedown of the government’s recent pivot to coal-fired power, which is a core component of its political strategy on energy prices and energy security for the new year.

“The government is now talking about using the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to subsidise a new coal-fired power station; creating, if you like, a base-load target to supplement the renewable target.

“We subsidise wind to make coal uneconomic so now we are proposing to subsidise coal to keep the lights on? Go figure.

“Wouldn’t it be better to abolish subsidies for new renewable generation and let ordinary market forces do the rest?”

Abbott also contends in the speech that the government should take a proposal to change section 57 of the constitution to the next election. The change would allow legislation that’s been rejected twice in the Senate three months apart to go to a joint sitting without the need for a double dissolution election.

He says the change was flagged by John Howard in the past, but Howard didn’t proceed because the Coalition “fluked four out of six senators in Queensland in 2004 and, for one term, more or less controlled the Senate.”

“But it’s now high time to reconsider the Howard proposal. The government should consider taking this reform to the people simultaneously with the next election,” Abbott says. “Let’s make the next election about government versus gridlock.

“That way, if it’s carried, the government will be able to reduce spending, as well as to raise it; to cut taxes, as well as to increase them; and to limit the size of government, as well as to boost it.

“That way, the next election will be about the kind of country that we want: one where the government tells you what it’s going to do and does it; or tells you what it’s going to do but doesn’t because the Senate won’t let it.”

Abbott has in recent months has been a regular critic of Turnbull’s and the government’s direction, intervening on a range of sensitive issues within the Coalition to both express his personal view, and to run political interference against his successor.

Cory Bernardi, who recently split with the Liberals to form his own conservative political party, recently expressed frustration that Abbott was using his departure as an opportunity to engage in proxy warring around the leadership.

Thursday’s night’s speech in Sydney is Abbott’s most provocative insurgency yet.

On the Bolt Report, recorded before the book launch, Abbott was asked by his host whether the foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop, and the immigration minister Peter Dutton, were now jockeying openly for the Liberal party leadership.

Abbott dead batted, saying nothing about Bishop, and supplying a character reference for Dutton, observing “He’s a very good bloke, he’s someone you can rely on.”

He explained his own public interventions as exercising a backbencher’s right to speak out, when the backbencher in question was a former party leader. He suggested his role on the Coalition was to make sure the government remained on track.

In his speech at the book launch, Abbott steps around the fact that his own government resolved to maintain the federal renewable energy target after months of internal brawling about winding it back – brawling that triggered an investment drought.

He says his government managed to reduce the renewable energy target from 28% to 23%, and suggests he would have gone harder if there had been support in the Senate. “It wasn’t enough but it was a step in the right direction and it was the best we could get through the Senate at the time.”

Abbott says in the speech that he is “all in favour of renewables, provided they’re economic and provided they don’t jeopardise security of supply; but, at the moment, we have a policy-driven disaster because you just can’t rely on renewable power”.

“In the absence of better storage, the renewable energy target should be called the intermittent energy target or the unreliable energy target because when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, the power won’t flow.

“But it’s not Labor’s even more disastrous 50% renewable target that’s caused the problem – it’s the existing renewable target which the government has no plans to change.

“Indeed, under the government’s plans, wind generation is supposed to double in the next three years at a capital cost to you, the consumer, of $10bn.”

The former prime minister acknowledges that the book he is launching contains essays critical of his government, but he makes a distinction between disappointment and despair.

“A sense of disappointment and disillusionment pervades these essays: disappointment with the Abbott government and perhaps even despair about the Turnbull government; but what saves it from being a curmudgeon’s lament is the palpable sense, in every contribution, that our party and our country can be better,” Abbott says.

“It’s a cri de coeur from people who think that Labor is moving to the green left and that the Coalition has become Labor lite.”



He says unless the government heeds the message of people like the contributors to the book – right-aligned commentators – then “a book like this can become the thinking person’s justification for voting One Nation”.

The book contains essays from conservative commentators including Judith Sloan, Brendan O’Neill, Gary Johns, Jim Molan, Roger Franklin, Rebecca Weisser and Alan Moran.

Abbott makes the case that the current drift from the government to One Nation is attributable to the lack of a muscular conservative agenda.

“At last year’s election, 24% voted for minor parties and independents, 5% spoiled their ballot papers and 9% didn’t even turn up to vote.”

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“That’s nearly 40% of the electorate that couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either of the two parties that have governed us for 100 years.

“And it’s worse now. In Queensland, polls have the Coalition vote eight percentage points down since the election and One Nation 12 percentage points up.

“It’s easy enough to see why.”

The opening Newspoll of the political year indicated the Coalition’s primary vote fell four points over the summer to 35%, and support for independents and minor parties increased from 15 to 19% on the primary vote – with One Nation at 8%, two points behind the Greens.