Former Australian prime minister says a Brexit defeat for Britain would be akin to losing the Falklands war

The former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has defended a speech he gave in praise of the far-right prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, and says a Brexit failure by Britain would be comparable to losing the Falklands war.

In an opinion piece for Spectator Australia, published on Friday, Abbott said the real “extinction rebellion” facing Western society “is not against our failure to reduce emissions more but against our failure to produce more children”.

The piece follows a speech he delivered to a conference in Europe last week in which Abbott, a staunch conservative ousted by his centre-right Liberal party in 2015 before losing his seat in 2019, praised Orbán for nativist policies and warned that “military age” male immigrants were “swarming” the continent.

In the Spectator piece, Abbott doubled down on incendiary rhetoric on people migrating or fleeing to Europe by praising Orbán, who he said “has not only transformed the 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”.

Tony Abbott attacks migrants 'swarming' to Europe while praising far-right PM of Hungary Read more

“Hungary, whose population is predicted to shrink by a quarter over the next half-century, is waiving housing debt for larger families and not taxing at all four-time mothers, among other measures worth careful study.”

Abbott – who has undergone a contradictory journey from opposing Brexit and calling on the UK to stay and “save Europe” to welcoming the referendum result – boasted that he was now able to give a “full-throttle, double-barrel roar” in favour of Brexit and against the UK parliament’s “attempt to sabotage the people’s vote”.

He suggested Britain was at risk of “[succumbing] to hectoring from Brussels” and being “permanently fractured by this existential argument over who and what they really are”.

“In my lifetime, there’s never been a more momentous decision, not even that to retake the Falkland Islands. Defeat in the South Atlantic would have been a disaster but would not have left Britain a permanent colony of an EU that despises it.”

Abbott defended the analogy between Brexit and war, by suggesting that “a collapse of self-confidence or a failure of will in a great matter could be scarcely less deadly” than war.

“The impact on the wider world of a much-diminished Britain, humiliated, and stuck half-in juridically but half-out spiritually of a gloating EU should not be underestimated.”