Tony Abbott’s prime ministership continued to unravel with Monday’s meeting of the Liberal party room, where he begged his rebellious colleagues for six more months. There’s been a lot of talk about how the decision to knight Prince Philip fatally damaged him, but an earlier humiliating encounter with a foreign dignitary was even more telling.

Back in November, Barack Obama flew into Brisbane from Beijing, where he had announced an historic climate change agreement with China’s Xi Jinping. Having been greeted by a radiant George Brandis, Obama stood before an audience of students at the University of Queensland and rebuked the Abbott government for its approach to climate change.

His address affirmed the science that many in the Coalition deny: that climate change will have particularly ruinous effects for Australia, in the form of “longer droughts, more wildfires. The incredible natural glory of the Great Barrier Reef is threatened”. He pointed to Australia’s outsized production of carbon emissions and demanded that Australia “step up”, both in terms of seriously attempting to limit emissions and in contributing more to the international Green Climate Fund.



Before turning to his next topic he told the assembled students:

You have the power to imagine a new future in a way that some of the older folks don’t always have.

As a way to commence a visit to an ally, it was brutal. Abbott, who had tried to keep climate change off the G20 agenda, was immediately forced onto a footing of damage control, and his government was soon briefing against the leader of the free world.



Rather than the foreign affairs showcase Abbott had been hoping for, the G20 underlined how Australia was now out of step with the leadership of almost every major economy. Efforts to cosy up to Canada’s Stephen Harper in the hope of forming a “carbon bloc” only illustrated how convoluted and marginal the international politics of denial have become.



After a polling mini-recovery of sorts for Abbott between July and September, November – the month of the G20 and Obama’s address – marked a turning-point. Between September and November, Abbott’s always-poor net satisfaction ratings had improved and stabilised a little; from November they declined rapidly to where they are today. In some polls, Abbott now has more than half the voters saying that he should resign. November was also the month in which Bill Shorten decisively overcame Abbott as preferred prime minister, and Shorten’s lead is now wider than ever. From November until now, the ALP has enjoyed an unbroken ascent in the polls. The latest Newspoll gives Labor its biggest-ever lead on a two-party-preferred basis, of 57% to 43%.

After Obama’s Queensland speech, howls went up from conservative columnists (some of the same ones who delighted in calling Bush critics “anti-American”) accusing the president of treachery. As far as they were concerned, sabotaging climate change policy was the reason Abbott was in the Lodge, and was integral to the meaning of his prime ministership. In a sense, they were absolutely right. Absent his willingness to take a certain line on climate policy, Abbott would never have been Liberal leader or prime minister.

The flaws that Abbott has displayed since he took over as opposition leader in 2009 – the meltdowns, the appalling political instincts, the anachronistic attachments, the sexism – have been evident since he entered public life. He has never been popular, and he was only elevated because of a freak-out from the denialist wing of the Liberal party over Malcolm Turnbull’s proposal to deal with Labor on an emissions trading scheme. There has been a lot of analysis in recent weeks of Abbott’s peculiar personality, but not enough recollection of the reason that it’s on such prominent display. He’s the leader because he promised his party’s right wing to make no deals on climate, and to blindly oppose any meaningful policy response.

Ultimately, Abbott and the Coalition have been brought undone by the same failure that has defeated a decade’s worth of Australian national leaders: the failure to generate a credible response to the most pressing global crisis. John Howard dragged his feet in the midst of drought, and was brought low by an ALP leader who promised vigorous action. Kevin Rudd called climate change the “greatest moral challenge of our time”, only to reveal that he wasn’t up to it, which began his fatal slide in the opinion polls. Julia Gillard offered a response she couldn’t readily explain, allowing her carbon price to be framed as a tax, and therefore a lie, by Abbott.

Now Abbott, who was promoted beyond his abilities in order to obstruct any action – to “Axe the Tax” – finds himself out of alignment with the global mood, and threatened by Turnbull, the man he tore down.

This obvious thread in Australia’s recent national history is ignored by those who would rather point to social media, or indeed democracy itself, as the source of political instability. More arguments have been made this week that politicians are somehow crippled by voluble public disaffection that social media facilitates. Fewer have been willing to consider that causation runs in the opposite direction: that the anger at politicians across the spectrum in recent years should be read as an outcome of the unwillingness of national leaders to face up to long-standing crises. Fewer still have wondered whether this may be because the orthodoxies about possible solutions to climate change and other fundamental problems – like growing inequality – produce policies that are bound to fail.

Economic historian Philip Mirowski considers market-based responses to climate change, of the kind proposed in Australia for a decade on both sides of politics, are a form of “bait and switch”. They mean that:

... political actors originally bent upon using state power to curb emissions are instead diverted into the endless technicalities of the institution and maintenance of novel markets for carbon permits, with the not unintended consequence that the level of emissions continues to grow apace in the interim.

Some will say that this overstates the matter, but it works uncomfortably well as a potted summary of Australian national politics since 2007. The rise (and eventually fall) of Abbott is a direct result of our political class taking their eyes off the prize, and getting lost in the details.