Eric Abetz said Australians were "fed up with some big business CEOs constantly trying to wave their PC credentials". Credit:Alex Ellinghausen The entrance to Abetz's office in Parliament House is dominated by two portraits of the Queen. In his electorate office in Hobart, where I first meet him, two large Australian flags in wooden stands lend solemnity to the decor. Abetz, in a dark suit and crisp white shirt, has the air of a man determined to maintain his good humour in extremely trying circumstances. What galls him, he admits, is the suggestion that Turnbull dispensed with his services because he had outlived his usefulness. "He had to get rid of 'dead wood'? Excuse me?" says Abetz, pointing out that at 58, he is three years the Prime Minister's junior. Anyway, "it's not how old or young you are. It's judgement, discernment and capacity to make the decisions." These are qualities Abetz is confident he has in spades. He can only conclude that members of the Tasmanian division of the Liberal Party think so, too, because they have endorsed him as their number one Senate candidate for the approaching federal election. "There was an overwhelming vote of over 80 per cent for me to lead the ticket again," he says. "When I was told the figures, I was genuinely touched that they were so strongly of the view that I still had a lot to contribute." His triumph surprised few observers of politics in the island state. Bob Cheek, a former Liberal opposition leader in the Tasmanian Parliament, says Abetz's personality and beliefs – "very religious and right-wing" – put him at odds with many party members. "There are a lot of people who hate him," Cheek says. Nevertheless, "he's always been very influential in the party, and still is. He can bring down premiers. He can install premiers ... He was the first person I went to see when I was encouraged to challenge for the [state Liberal] leadership because I knew that without him on side, I had no hope at all." After Turnbull dumped Abetz, Hobart's Mercury noted that the senator wasn't the kind to forgive and forget. "Even his friends sometimes have a nervous chuckle at the zeal with which he pursues an opponent," the newspaper said, adding that Turnbull might have been wiser to keep him inside the tent – "because an exiled Abetz with time on his hands is a dangerous proposition for the more progressive political faction led by the new PM".

Eric Abetz (right) has offered some advice on savings to Malcolm Turnbull (left). Credit:Andrew Meares As a cabinet member, Abetz was disciplined and discreet. He toed the party line. As a backbencher, he hasn't gone rogue, exactly, but is certainly behaving as if let off a leash. An unofficial spokesman for disaffected conservatives and Abbott loyalists, he has put forward views contrary to Turnbull's on everything from the deployment of more Australian troops to the Middle East (Abetz argued in favour) to the legalisation of same-sex marriage (vehemently against). As we drink tea in Hobart, he decides to go further. He feels like getting a couple of things off his chest. "I shouldn't indulge in this way," he tells me, "but I will." John Howard, Eric Abetz and Tony Abbott in 2015. 'The notorious Godwin Grech matter'

IT WAS ONE of the odder episodes in recent Australian political history, and both Turnbull and Abetz were at the centre of it. The "notorious Godwin Grech matter", as Abetz refers to it, marked the beginning of the end of Turnbull's first attempt to become prime minister. His credibility damaged, the then federal opposition leader was defeated by Abbott in a party-room ballot in December 2009. Abetz's reputation took a hit, too – unfairly so, he has always felt. Now he is ready to give his side of the story. "Malcolm was the one who rang me to say, 'Come to Sydney. Got to introduce you to a fellow,' " he begins. Abetz with Peter Cosgrove in 2000. Credit:Courtesy of Eric Abetz Godwin Grech was the federal Treasury official in charge of OzCar, a scheme introduced by Kevin Rudd's Labor government to help car dealers survive the global credit crunch. Abetz describes attending a clandestine meeting with Grech and Turnbull ("it was all Secret Squirrel stuff, quite bizarre") at which Grech told them of an email from a Rudd staffer seeking preferential treatment for a dealer friend of Rudd's. Turnbull, who thought both Rudd and his treasurer Wayne Swan could be brought down by information in Grech's possession, entrusted Abetz to draw explosive testimony from the senior public servant at a Senate inquiry. "If I might say, it was nearly faultless," Abetz says of his questioning of Grech. "Most people thought it was exceptional, and Malcolm was full of praise for my capacities and abilities, etcetera."

Abetz (top right) in 1978, with fellow Young Liberals and then PM Malcolm Fraser (front row, centre). But intense embarrassment was to follow. A day after Turnbull called for Rudd's and Swan's resignations, a police investigation found the email was fake. Abetz says he had tried to warn Turnbull and other senior Liberals of this possibility, but they didn't want to listen. "I was laughed at," he says. "Laughed at, and ridiculed. There's a little scoop for you! Once again, it comes back to discernment, to judgement." He emphasises that it was he, not Turnbull, who made a public apology when the truth came out. "I apologised to suck up the public odium, to protect the leader." Abetz can think of other occasions when, having done the right thing, he has felt let down by his colleagues' lack of moral fibre. "All I will say is that politics is a test of character," he says grimly. "And people's characters become exposed through the fullness of time." Abetz's flyer for the University of Tasmania student elections. Credit:Courtesy of Eric Abetz 'Everything is a political point to be scored'

​THE NEAREST PLANET outside our solar system potentially capable of supporting life is Gliese 581d, some 20 light-years away. During National Science Week in 2009, while the OzCar imbroglio was still making headlines, Abetz was invited to compose a message to be transmitted to the planet from the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. Labor's science minister, Kim Carr, had written: "Hello from Australia on the planet we call Earth. These messages express our people's dreams for the future. We want to share those dreams with you." Abetz wrote: "The Coalition dreams that by the time you receive this message in 2029 Australia will be free of Labor debt. Sadly we're not holding our breath." To anyone who knew Abetz, it was entirely in character. "Everything is a political point to be scored," says Hobart barrister and former Liberal staffer Greg Barns. "It is always combative." Barns was selected in 2002 to stand for the party in the federal Tasmanian seat of Denison, only to be disendorsed after publicly criticising Liberal asylum-seeker policy. According to Bob Cheek, who was then the party's state parliamentary leader, Barns' outspokenness infuriated Abetz, then special minister of state in John Howard's Coalition government. "Eric was the bloke pulling all the strings to get rid of Barns as a candidate," Cheek says. It seems to economist Saul Eslake, a former Young Liberals president and long-time acquaintance of Abetz, to be ironic that a person who once brooked no dissent in party ranks now feels entitled to speak his mind on a range of contentious issues. "He is exercising rights that, in the Tasmanian context, he has probably done more than anyone else to extinguish," Eslake says.

One person encouraging Abetz all the way is Lyle Shelton, managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby. "We've been very thankful for his advocacy in the Parliament for a number of issues which we obviously hold very dear," Shelton says. Abetz is an active member of the Christian Reformed Church (which holds that everything in the Bible is true, and that Jesus Christ will one day personally return to judge the living and the dead). Like Shelton, he is opposed to abortion, voluntary euthanasia and same-sex marriage. Explaining his strong feelings about the latter, he tells me that children are known to benefit from being raised by both biological parents in traditional heterosexual partnerships. Research suggests "very strongly" that this is "the best format for the socialisation of the next generation", he says. On the federal government's Australian Institute of Family Studies website, I read that research here and overseas has found children in same-sex parented families "do as well emotionally, socially and educationally as their peers from heterosexual couple families". I am reminded of Abetz's claim on Channel Ten's The Project in 2014 that studies dating from the 1950s suggested a link between abortion and breast cancer. As was pointed out by the Australian Medical Association president, Professor Brian Owler, any such connection had been conclusively debunked. To Abetz, it is plain that some of his critics take issue with him on ideological grounds: "If you're a conservative, especially a Christian conservative, no matter what you say, it's wrong." Sometimes he feels like a member of a persecuted minority. "We have the media gushing over indigenous spirituality, or the Greens over the spirituality of the wilderness, but when you talk about Christian spirituality, it's as though you can't revere it." Defiance, he thinks, may be the best response: "I don't mind saying that my world-view is based on Judeo-Christian beliefs. If you want to trash them, fine!" Does he believe his world view to be better than, say, a Muslim one? Absolutely, he replies. "Excuse me, why aren't people fleeing the Western countries based on Judeo-Christian ethics to the Muslim countries? There is a difference. We do treat our women differently, for example. We do have a different sense of democracy, we do have a sense of the rule of law. The Judeo-Christian ethic has the sense of forgiveness and rehabilitation. We don't believe in chopping off people's hands if they've been caught stealing, or stoning a woman if she's been raped."

'I suspect that he was born a conservative warrior' SOME POLITICIANS ALLOW themselves to relax a little between election campaigns. Abetz, however, is permanently on a war-footing. Calling for reform of the NSW Liberal Party, he describes overhauling the division as "mission-critical". Though courteous, he does not waste time on meaningless pleasantries: when he leaves phone messages, they begin, "Purpose of call ..." His drive and energy never cease to amaze his former staffer, Jonathon Duniam, now deputy chief of staff to Tasmania's Liberal Premier, Will Hodgman. "He's a bloke who's up at the crack of dawn thinking about what he's got to do," Duniam says. Tony Abbott, who has known Abetz since their student days, tells me he hasn't changed much. "I suspect that he was born a conservative warrior," Abbott says. The youngest of six children, Abetz was three when his family migrated from Germany to Australia in 1961. His father, Walter, a radio technician, who had lost a leg on the Russian front during World War II, worked for the Tasmanian government's Hydro-Electric Commission. (Abetz's great-uncle, Otto Abetz, was a convicted Nazi war criminal.) In Hobart, where Abetz started kindergarten without a word of English, the family eventually settled on a four-hectare hobby farm. Abetz and his parents occupied the two-bedroom cottage while his siblings shared a sleep-out. Roger Curtis, who befriended Abetz when both were studying law at the University of Tasmania, remembers being taken aback by the humble living conditions. "There wouldn't have been too many people at uni who came from a poorer background," Curtis says.

In the mid-1970s, campus politics was dominated by what Curtis calls the "out-there left". When he and Abetz stood as Liberal candidates for the Student Representative Council, their rallying cry was "Balance and Moderation". I ask whether Abetz had more charisma in those days. "Yes, um, a little bit more then," Curtis replies. "Just because of youthful exuberance." He also had hair, which was longish and wavy. "He looked like something out of The Partridge Family." The future Labor senator Nick Sherry, a fellow student, could see Abetz was destined for a career in politics. He stood to the right of the Liberal mainstream, even then, "but he was always going to do well because of his sharpness of focus, his perseverance and very hard work", Sherry says. Sure enough, Abetz became national president of the Australian Liberal Students' Federation before qualifying as a lawyer. He and Curtis went into partnership, hanging out their shingle in Hobart. "And if I might say so, we ran a pretty dynamic legal practice, as two Young Turks," Abetz says. Young Turks? "We were the first legal firm to have colour in their masthead." I start to laugh, then realise Abetz is serious. He and Curtis got into trouble with the state's Law Society for donating free wills to a charity auction, he continues. "Nowadays you'd be allowed to do it, but we were at the cutting edge." At 32, Abetz was president of the Liberal Party's Tasmanian division. He entered Parliament four years later, in 1994, replacing a senator who retired mid-term. Since then, his grip on the seat has been vice-like. "He can be ruthless," says Barry Prismall, deputy editor of Launceston's The Examiner and a former Liberal staffer. "If he believes that you're threatening his position, he'll tear you apart."

Prismall saw this close-up when he worked for Guy Barnett, now a Liberal MP in the Tasmanian Parliament but then a federal senator. In the preselection contest for the 2004 election, Barnett almost toppled Abetz from first spot on the Liberal ticket. The top two candidates were both certain to be returned to Canberra, Prismall says, but Abetz was angry anyway. One night, he invited Barnett to have dinner with him at Parliament House. "We were naive enough to think, 'Eric's being very friendly,' " Prismall recalls. "Well, no. Eric basically spent the entire time haranguing Guy, saying words to the effect of, 'You've been organising against me and I can't tolerate it. I'm letting you know I'm coming after you.' Guy came back rattled. Very shaken up." Abetz says he didn't shout at the dinner – it was a public place – but "I did seek a detailed explanation as to what Guy had been up to and he was unable to satisfy me". He adds that Barnett owed him: "I'd expended a lot of political capital amongst the Liberal Party membership to get him endorsed for a Senate seat." Afterwards, Barnett was overlooked for promotion in the federal Liberal parliamentary team, then lost his Senate seat after being dropped to third place on the ticket for the 2010 election. Prismall saw Abetz's hand in this, and felt something close to admiration. "He's an honest power broker in the sense that he doesn't stab you in the back," Prismall says. "He gives you notice that he's coming for you, then he knifes you in the stomach, looking at you." (Barnett declined to comment.) I make the decision: do I resign or do I play with the team?

LIFE AS A senior member of Tony Abbott's government had its tricky moments, Abetz confesses. It has been reported that on at least one occasion he was the blameless victim of a furious dressing-down by Abbott's chief of staff, Peta Credlin. ("I don't want to relive those moments," he says, "but, yeah.") Worse, he occasionally had to promote policies that he considered harsh and unworkable (making people under 30 wait six months for the dole; requiring job-seekers to apply for 40 jobs a month). But did he air his grievances outside the Cabinet room? No. "Unlike certain others, if I'm given an expletive-deleted sandwich to sell" – he really says that – "I won't go leaping to the media. I make the decision: do I resign or do I play with the team?" When Turnbull was federal Liberal leader first time around, Abetz was one of a handful of climate-change sceptics to quit his front bench over his support for an emissions trading scheme. Since this triggered the spill that saw Turnbull lose the leadership, some might understand why, as prime minister, he omitted Abetz from his ministry. But to Abetz, who still sees global warming as no cause for panic ("Look, all these things ultimately sort themselves out without the need of preaching Armageddon"), it is obvious that Turnbull has made a terrible mistake. Abetz says he knows from all the emails he has received that conservatives in the party are deeply unhappy about his exclusion. "And unless they believe their voice is being heard, they will start fracturing and seeking a home elsewhere." Already, he tells me, he has had to rebuff an approach by a Sydney businessman interested in starting a breakaway party. Abetz's adored wife, Michelle, has cancer. His brother Peter, a Liberal member of the West Australian Legislative Assembly, says Abetz considered leaving Parliament in order to spend more time with her, but Michelle urged him to stay on to keep the conservative flag flying. "I guess she felt strongly that it is an important role that he has," Peter says, adding that Abetz's entitlements under the parliamentary pension scheme mean he is paying for the privilege of remaining in the Senate: "If he were to retire from politics, his income stream would actually be greater than a back-bencher's salary." Abetz, whose three children are aged 26 to 21, says money has never motivated him. Sometimes, though, it falls into your lap. In early 2000, Abetz paid $100,000 for almost four hectares of government land adjoining his house block in the Hobart suburb of Kingston. In March 2005, the area was rezoned from "residential" to "business and civic". Four months later, Abetz sold both the house block and the adjoining land to property developer Robert Rockefeller's company, AAD Nominees, for a combined total of $1.9 million.

Here's where Abetz got lucky. For the big vacant block (3.8 hectares), Rockefeller paid him only $400,000. For the house block (0.6 hectare), Rockefeller paid $1.5 million – more than five times the government valuation. This meant the bulk of Abetz's proceeds from the two sales was not subject to capital gains tax (a person's residence is exempt from the tax). The enormous discrepancy in the two sale prices cannot be attributed to the value of the house, a six-room weatherboard construction which has since been demolished. In 2014, the capital value of Abetz's vacant former house block was assessed by the Tasmanian Valuer General at just $470,000. John Hawkins, the columnist on the Tasmanian Times website who first drew attention to the land deals, believes an explanation is long overdue. Abetz's attitude is calmly dismissive. The house block had more road frontage than the bigger block, which enhanced its commercial value, he tells me. The whole thing was entirely above board. 'His biggest flaw is his lack of empathy' AT A LIBERAL Party bash at Hobart's Wrest Point Casino last June to celebrate Abetz's 21 years in Parliament, speakers including John Howard and Tony Abbott lined up to pay tribute to him. "They all said, 'One thing about Eric Abetz is his inherent decency,' " the senator remembers. Conservatives aren't the only ones who regard him as a straight-shooter. "I couldn't see myself going out for a beer with him," says Andrew Wilkie, the Independent member for Denison, "but I can really respect someone who stands for something, and fights for it."

Not that Abetz is immune from scandal. Last month, the former Victorian Liberal Party state director, Damien Mantach, pleaded guilty to embezzling $1.5 million of campaign funds. Mantach had been forced to resign from a previous post as Tasmanian Liberal Party state director because he used a party credit card for $48,000 worth of personal expenses. This had been covered up by the Tasmanian state executive, of which Abetz was a member. Mantach, the son of a former state president, repaid the money and moved to Melbourne, where he was hired by the party's unwitting Victorian division. Abetz insists he was barely aware of any of this. Yes, he was informed of Mantach's misuse of the credit card by the then Liberal Party state president, Dale Archer, but "no advice was sought or offered. No sum of money was mentioned." Bryan Green, Labor's Opposition Leader in the Tasmanian Parliament, is incredulous. "Eric Abetz is the power broker in the Liberal Party," Green says. "He's the person who runs it with an iron fist. But Abetz was told nothing? And didn't ask any questions?" Rodney Croome, the Tasmanian-based national convenor of Australian Marriage Equality, says he feels no hostility towards Abetz, but suspects he is missing something in his make-up. "I really wish he could see that people like me value marriage and tradition as much as he does," says Croome. "The fact that he can't is a reflection of his biggest flaw: his lack of empathy." After Croome addressed a Tasmanian Liberal branch meeting one evening a few years ago, he watched the members bring out a whiteboard and discuss possible Senate candidates. Written across the top of the board was "ABE". "Anyone But Eric", Croome says. Abetz's former staffer, Jonathon Duniam, acknowledges that the senator can rub people up the wrong way. In his defence, says Duniam, no politician is more committed to giving practical help to his constituents. "He will go to the end of the earth and back to try to solve your problem for you. He is a true advocate."

Abetz now lives in the beachside suburb of Blackmans Bay, where he runs on the sand to keep fit. He has not given up hope that Turnbull will come to his senses and recall him to the ministry. "It would be immensely healing for the party if that were to occur," he says. I ask Duniam, who is fond of Abetz, whether he is fun when you get to know him. Duniam pauses. "In an Eric kind of way," he says.