Health Minister? Well, no-one remembers anything particularly positive there either.

Having torn down his leader in Opposition, he unleashed a feral – and deadly – negativism on Australian politics from which we have never really recovered.

So firmly set on a path of destruction, he set about making everything in his prime ministership a negative and ended up destroying himself.

You might think that at some point there might have been a moment of midnight reflection. But no.

Tony Abbott has continued on his destructive path, not just trying to destroy the man who replaced him but being happily prepared to burn the government of which he is allegedly a part, and some of his closest colleagues at the same time.

All in the truly deluded name of policies that he didn't have the political ability to implement when he was prime minister but which he still thinks might win votes.

Abbott's latest intervention has only had the effect of finally bringing out those who have been most admirably loyal to him - like Mathias Cormann - to call him on his disingenuous, hypocritical and dishonest policy critiques of the current government.

The other own goal of this latest speech is that it has finally freed the prime minister to give an honest appraisal of what his predecessor didn't achieve, and point out that he has, in fact, achieved things that eluded Abbott.


"We are acting and we are getting things done which we couldn't, wouldn't or didn't get done in the last Parliament," Malcolm Turnbull said on Friday.

"I haven't talked about reintroducing the rule of law to the building sector, I've done it.

"I've had the courage, not to give speeches, but to act."

The shame of it is that, as is always the case, Abbott leaves a stinking pile of loopy policy ideas steaming on the footpath – ranging from cutting immigration to the renewable energy target – that others will have to go to some considerable trouble to avoid, or, worse, being the sort of populist nonsense they are, be adopted by those profferring simplistic solutions.

This was all done under the deluded contention that the political debate in Australia has been hijacked by the Left.

Backed by the tailwind of a gushing and fawning conservative media, Abbott had every opportunity to set a new highwater mark for the right in Australia.

But as his own conservative colleagues publicly abandon him, it is a sign of Abbott's utter failure that he has even made this unfashionable.