Former PM says school attendance and performance will be his main focus as he takes up Scott Morrison’s offer

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has accepted an offer to become Scott Morrison’s special envoy on Indigenous affairs, saying school attendance and performance will be his major focus.

Morrison offered the Liberal backbencher the envoy role after leaving him out of his new-look cabinet, in an effort to heal the wounds of last week’s damaging leadership spill.



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Abbott has written to the new prime minister accepting the job, but has made a number of recommendations, the Daily Telegraph reported on Wednesday.

“What I expect to be asked to do is to make recommendations on how we can improve remote area education, in particular, how we can improve attendance rates and school performance because this is the absolute key to a better future for Indigenous kids and this is the key to reconciliation,” he told the paper.

However, Rod Little, co-chair of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, said Abbott’s record on the issue was poor and that he did not consult enough on Indigenous education and health matters when he was prime minister.



“There wasn’t enough conversations with communities on the ground to listen to their needs and work out solutions and work with them,” he told ABC radio on Wednesday. “We certainly don’t have any faith or hope in that this envoy and this role will make the slightest bit of difference.”

Senior Labor MP Richard Marles said Abbott “cut hundreds of millions of dollars out of Indigenous funding”, calling the appointment “a recipe for disaster”.

Barnaby Joyce, the former deputy prime minister, accepted Morrison’s offer as special envoy on drought issues when it was made on Sunday as the prime minister attempted to mend rifts in the Liberal-National Coalition.

But Abbott, who was blamed by some senior Liberal figures for provoking the bloodletting of last week, has spent two days considering his decision.

On Monday, Abbott told 2GB radio he would “love to do a fair dinkum job” but wanted to see what the job involved and said he did not want to “trip over the toes” of the Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion.

He told radio host Ray Hadley: “We’ve already got a lot of people in this space, I’d want to know exactly what value can I add given I’m already there as a backbencher and a former prime minister.”



Abbott said the portfolio of Indigenous affairs “requires prime ministerial authority to get things done ... it doesn’t need people running around at the margins; it needs someone at the very top to cut through”.

Abbott said he did not want “a title without a role”, adding that “somebody’s got to be able to make decisions”.



