"If I'd been knocked over by a bus on the morning of the coup, I would have gone to the Pearly Gates and given an upbeat assessment," he said. Former prime minister Tony Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen "I don't believe we could have done much more or much better than we did. There was an enormous amount of solid achievement." Among the achievements were stopping the asylum-seeker boats, the successful negotiation of trade agreements with all three of Australia's biggest trading partners, and the establishment of the royal commission into trade union corruption. While many of his colleagues have blamed Mr Abbott and his staff for mismanagement and for the high levels of disgruntlement that eventually saw him voted out by 54 votes to 44, he saw it differently.

He said that the problems and limitations the government suffered were not of his making: "I think it was a very successful government in spite of a feckless Senate, an irresponsible Labor Party, a poisonous media culture and well organised white-anting." Tony Abbott and former chief-of-staff Peta Credlin asked Savva's former editor to sack her. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen Mr Abbott praised the work of Ms Credlin, his former chief of staff: "Credlin is a tough operator. She has opinions and she tells you, sometimes vigorously. That's what a PM's chief of staff needs to do. "It suited people who had a problem with me to say it was her. Ninety nine per cent of it was distortion or fiction." Where she was blamed for blocking ministers' choices of staff and travel, he said, "it was blamed on Credlin but the decisions were mine".

The former prime minister defended the 2014 budget: "We did manage to get $50 billion of savings in place," he said, over the four-year forward estimates. He cited four specific budget proposals - cutting the rate of spending growth by changing pension indexation, the Medicare co-payment, deregulation of higher education and the so-called "learn or earn" welfare changes and said: "These were all very important economic reforms. In the immediate aftermath, commentary was pretty positive. It was only after the Senate cross bench turned out to be populist and the ALP obdurate that the commentary went from 'reformist' to 'impotent'." These measures were blocked in the Senate, and Mr Abbott said "I'm not sure what more I could have done" to persuade the Senate crossbenchers. One of them, Nick Xenophon, said that Mr Abbott's comments made him "feel genuinely sad because he doesn't get it – his budget policies were built on a non-existent foundation of broken promises, and no community support." Mr Abbott said that two aspects of Fairfax Media's reports in part one of this series were incorrect. He said that Ms Credlin had not set the agenda of his talks with Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, and that he had never said in front of a foreign leader that he would "check with the boss" or "chief" in reference to Ms Credlin. "That's a fantasy," he said.