Abbott was equally warm about his host. Writing for The Spectator magazine a couple of days later, he said that Orban had "not only transformed [Hungary's] economy but was the first European leader to cry 'stop' to the peaceful invasion of 2015 and is now trying to boost Hungary's flagging birth rate". Given Orban's growing influence in Europe and Abbott's central position in conservative thought in Australia, it's worth unpacking the ideas that the two discussed in Budapest. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video In his speech, Orban asserted, "If in the future Europe is to be populated by people other than Europeans, and we accept this as a fact and see it as natural, then we will effectively be consenting to population replacement: to a process in which the European population is replaced … in my view there are some in Europe who see this as the basis for policy: there are political forces which, for a variety of reasons, want to see population replacement." Abbott did not use the term "replacement" but echoed Orban nonetheless in quotes attributed to him by a reporter who attended the summit and filed a story for the ABC.

"The vast majority of migrants did not come to Australia to change us but to join us," Abbott said, according to that report. "There were the British or the Irish coming in our first 100 years. They changed us but for the better, in - for instance - the artistic sense. "The problem with the people who have been swarming across the borders in Europe in very recent times is that you don't get any impression that they come to join. You get the impression they come to change. Tony Abbott in conversation with The Spectator while on his recent trip to Europe. Credit:Courtesy of The Spectator "I mean … you get a million angry military-age males swarming into a single country in a year. They are not there to be grateful, they are there with a grievance. And people who come with a grievance are very different to people who come with gratitude in their hearts. If Abbott does not know what Orban meant when he discussed "replacement", he should have.

The Great Replacement is a term coined by the white supremacist French philosopher Renaud Camus in 2012. It is a conspiracy theory that holds that, with the complicity of globalist elites, white European populations are being replaced by black and brown Muslim immigrants in a deliberate effort to end Western civilisation. The same theory has taken hold in the United States, where Latinos stand in as the aggressor. The last Australian to achieve international attention espousing the theory was Brenton Tarrant, who published a document called The Great Replacement minutes before he shot dead 51 Muslims at prayer in Christchurch. "It's the birthrates. It's the birthrates," he ranted in that document. It might be jarring to read about Abbott being associated with such ideas, but it is not surprising when it comes to Orban. Since he came to power for a second time in 2010, Orban has attacked Hungary's free press, its judiciary, its high schools and its universities. One of the reasons for his nation's population decline is that one in 10 of its citizens has bolted over the past decade, including much of its intelligentsia. Last year, Transparency International found Orban's Hungary to be the second most corrupt nation in Europe. It was in effect "a captured state" with all major institutions reshaped to support Orban's government, said Jozsef Peter Martin, the group's executive director in Hungary. "It seems to be a kind of laboratory of transparent corruption."

But Orban's signal achievement has been the blossoming of racial animus in his nation. Orban harnessed resentment at the mass migration to Europe prompted by carnage in the Middle East, going so far as to build his own border fence in 2015. In 2017, Gallop devised a Migrant Acceptance Index to measure how accepting populations were on issues such as "an immigrant becoming your neighbour". Hungary recorded the third-worst score in the world. The following year, Orban won an election after a campaign rooted in racist incitement and then created a new category of crime, "promoting and supporting illegal migration". The package of bills, collectively known as the "stop Soros laws" after the US billionaire who is the subject of fevered anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, criminalise any individual or group that offers any help to an illegal immigrant. Far from disguising his contempt for the sort of liberal values that Abbott might once have championed, Orban boasts of it.