Tony Abbott has launched a defence of his prime ministership, saying he would have won the federal election with budget cuts and lower taxes.



“The poll-measured unpopularity of the Abbott government was not due to any shirking of responsibility but to our determination to do our duty by getting our own spending under control,” Abbott says in a forthcoming essay obtained by the Australian.



His view was endorsed by his predecessor John Howard, who told the Australian that he believed Abbott would have retained power.

“I think he probably would have won it but I can understand why the colleagues got nervous. Politics is always driven by the laws of arithmetic and the arithmetic was not good at the time,” Howard said.

Abbott also issued a warning for Malcolm Turnbull saying his successor’s biggest challenge will be to retain popularity once he has a credible narrative of his own.



Abbott said he wore his unpopular 2014 budget as a badge of honour and the problem was less that it was tough but more that it failed to pass the parliament.



“Indeed, one of the strongest endorsements of the Abbott government’s economic policy has been Malcolm Turnbull’s pledge to maintain it,” he said.



Abbott was careful not to take a direct swipe at Turnbull but issued a critique of senior Liberals for the “very well-organised” September 2015 spill “who didn’t want the Abbott government to succeed”.

Abbott made a strong defence of his government’s economic policies, which were so roundly attacked by Turnbull when he staged his spill on 14 September 2015.

“It was also claimed on September 14 that the government lacked an economic narrative,” he wrote in the Australian. “In fact, the government’s economic narrative had been clear from the beginning — lower taxes, less regulation and higher productivity — but that necessarily meant getting debt and deficit under control by responsibly restraining government spending: by cutting it where necessary, by refraining from increasing it where possible and by striving in all areas to reduce its rate of growth.

“Early on, the Abbott government showed its economic mettle. Refusing to offer further subsidies to chronically unprofitable carmakers when Holden and Toyota announced, around Christmas 2013, the end of production in Australia; declining to extend a loan guarantee to Qantas when it claimed its future was in jeopardy; and telling SPC Ardmona to look to its parent company, rather than to government, for a bailout when its closure was a risk to regional Victoria meant that “the age of entitlement was over”, at least for business welfare ...

“In workplace relations, the Abbott government swiftly moved to reform the union movement in a pragmatic, two-step process that would lead to reform of workplaces.

“Wherever the Abbott government had comparative freedom of action — for instance, in national security or foreign policy — it was largely successful. Even in economic policy, which often required the passage of legislation through a difficult Senate, much was achieved.”