And he had a blunt message for people hoping he may quit politics:"I'm in no hurry to leave public life because we need strong Liberal conservative voices now, more than ever." Former prime minister Tony Abbott is pushing for reform of the NSW Liberal Party. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen His comments at an Institute of Public Affairs event in Brisbane this morning are the clearest statement yet of an alternative policy program. "In its early years, the Howard government deliberately reduced immigration to well under 100,000 a year," he said. "A big slowdown in immigration would allow housing and infrastructure to catch up with population. It would give harder-to-assimilate recent migrants more time to integrate with the wider Australian community before many more came in," he said. Mr Abbott warned the Coalition could only win the next election if it drew up new political battlelines that would give the conservative side of politics something to fight for and, in a down-beat assessment of the nation, Mr Abbott said Australia "plainly, is not working as it should" and that "we are letting ourselves down".

For conservatives: "Our challenge is to stay the course, to keep the faith and to fight the good fight." Mr Abbott said Labor's support would be needed and he credited Labor under Bill Shorten for not playing politics on national security. Credit:Brook Mitchell Mr Abbott said all political parties were vulnerable to populism, and bemoaned the fact that "the whole political spectrum seems to have moved to the left". He said the government's school funding deal, which was passed last week and hailed by the Turnbull government as a major political victory, may have simply shifted the goal posts rather than ending the war. "The risk with compromises designed to end policy 'wars' is that the war doesn't actually end, the battleground just shifts; and, in the meantime, principles have become negotiable, and the whole political spectrum has moved in the wrong direction," he said.

Mr Abbott would also see the government attempt the "mother of all reforms" - amending section 57 of the constitution to get around Senate gridlock and allow twice-rejected laws to be brought to a joint sitting of the Parliament without a double dissolution election. His speech comes as a fresh round of political infighting breaks out in Coalition ranks over same-sex marriage and could further stoke divisions in the Turnbull government. On energy policy, Mr Abbott staked out a clear policy difference between himself and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. The closure of Hazelwood in Victoria and the Northern Power Station in South Australia, Mr Abbott warned, "mean that some blackouts might be unavoidable". But, he said, a government that's "serious about keeping the lights on should get another big coal-fired power station into action as soon as possible, and be prepared to "go it alone" if "political risk means the market won't do it". "Maintaining that Labor will put power prices up and that the Coalition will put power prices down will be much harder, though, if our renewable-energy target goes from 23 per cent to 42 per cent, as flagged in [the] Finkel [review]," he said.

"We should stop any further subsidised renewable power and freeze the Renewable Energy Target at the current level of about 15 per cent." The Turnbull government has signalled it could back a new coal plant, but freezing the renewable energy target at 15 per cent and a moratorium on new wind farms were not government policy. Follow us on Facebook