AS far as young Eric Abetz was concerned it was just a jumper. The grey woollen pullover with purplish V-neck was unremarkable among the clothes given to him and his siblings by kind-hearted Tasmanians. But it became a quick lesson in how not to fit in to life in Hobart’s working-class suburbs.

The six youngsters had moved from Germany to Moonah in 1961 so their father could work for the Hydro-Electric Commission. Abetz was just three at the time and remembers little of the family’s cottage or the kindergarten at Moonah Primary School where he was sent without knowing a word of English. But some memories stand out.

“I remember we were given clothing and there was a particular grey jumper with a – I have now learnt – not pink but magenta V-neck,” Abetz says. “For us kids they were just jumpers but wearing a Hutchins [private boys’ school] jumper in the northern suburbs of a weekend was not necessarily the fashion statement or message you wanted to send out.”

While he learnt early on the sartorial rules for blending in, Abetz has never been one to adapt or tone down his opinions for the sake of popularity. His ultra-conservative world view, stemming from his Christian faith, was not the norm among teenagers in 1970s Australia. By the time the Whitlam government was dismissed in November 1975, Abetz was hooked on politics, something he says put him on the outer among fellow Year 12 students at Hobart Matriculation College.

“I was on the Southern Outlet driving home after Hobart Matric when I heard the news flash [about Whitlam’s dismissal],” he says. “I personally thought it was a good thing to have an election, for the umpire to bounce the ball, because we had a prime minister who was manically determined to hang on to government and a leader of the opposition manically determined to win government and something had to give. It would be fair to say not many people [at school] shared my interest in matters of public affairs.”

But when he started an arts degree the following year the University of Tasmania was rife with political activists. In an era when students would protest at the drop of a hat, Abetz joined the student representative council to counter what he describes as leftist propaganda being shoved down students’ throats.

“I was fed a diet by many of the academics and student union politics down there of Marxism and communism being the future of the world,” he says.

Abetz is seated in the boardroom of his electorate office in Hobart, from where the 58-year-old Senator has held sway over the Liberal Party in Tasmania for more than two decades.

A recent gift from a constituent up north sits on a chair waiting to be hung on a wall. It is Abetz’s likeness carved into a piece of timber, a fitting tribute to a former forestry minister who has been a tireless champion of Tasmania’s logging industry.

As Abetz recounts for TasWeekend an eventful career in law and politics, he gives the impression he is keeping some things up his sleeve.

But Abetz’s critics will be sorely disappointed if they think this God-driven fighter is about to hang up his gloves. If anything, his fighting spirit has been kindled by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to oust him from the ministry after Abetz supported former PM Tony Abbott in last year’s leadership spill.

media_camera Abetz with former Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

The push for marriage equality and new talk of Australia becoming a republic mean Abetz, more than ever, has a fight on his hands to protect the conservative ideals that saw him enter politics in the first place.

Turnbull’s decision to strip Abetz of the employment portfolio and role as Leader of the Government in the Senate is a huge blow to the conservative arm of the Liberal Party and also to Tasmania, which no longer has a representative in Cabinet. It is a result Abetz could perhaps have foreseen, having fallen out with Turnbull in 2009 over the carbon pollution reduction scheme and leading a vocal Tasmanian support campaign for Abbott.

But Abetz wrongly assumed Turnbull would put aside their differences and at least let him keep the prestigious role of Leader of the Government in the Senate in a gesture of goodwill to the conservatives. In a further affront to Abetz, Turnbull promoted less-experienced Tasmanian senator Richard Colbeck to the non-Cabinet role of Tourism Minister.

Despite, or perhaps partly because of his harsh treatment from Turnbull, Tasmanian Liberal Party preselectors elected to put Abetz at the top of the Senate voting ticket for this year’s Federal Election.

“There may be some sentiment that I might have deserved better, let’s put it that way,” Abetz says.

He remains hopeful Turnbull will put him back on the frontbench, but is not holding his breath.

“When Malcolm Turnbull was leader of the Opposition, whenever he wanted something prosecuted in the Senate he always rang me and asked me to do it, which is indicative of the fact he appreciates my qualities and capacities,” Abetz says.

“What has happened has happened and I never got into politics to be Leader of the Government in the Senate. It has been a great privilege and if something comes along my way, great.”

Though Abetz feels deeply disappointed at the way in which many of his Government colleagues ultimately turned against Abbott, on the record he chooses his words carefully.

“I have the old-fashioned view politics should be honourable,” he says. “Tough, very tough, but there should still be rules and honourable behaviour in it.”

Abetz’s father Walter, who was injured on the Russian front during World War II, was uneasy in his final years about his youngest child’s keen interest in politics.

“I still recall my father having reservations about me entering politics,” Abetz says. “He died while I was at uni but saw me getting involved. Given the very ugly political situation he left behind in Germany and having grown up in an era when a lot of people just accepted propaganda and he saw what the political machine did, he had very real reservations about politics and what it can lead to.”

media_camera A young Abetz in 1997.

Abetz’s family history became a hot topic in 2008 when it was revealed his great-uncle Otto Abetz was a Nazi war criminal. Otto, who was Adolf Hitler’s ambassador to France, was jailed for crimes including the deportation of French Jews to death camps.

Abetz, who was born the year Otto was killed in a car accident, accused Labor of “sinking to a new political low” by linking him with the war crimes of his grandfather’s brother. However, according to news reports, rumours of the Nazi link emanated from within the Liberal Party.

Abetz says he shared his father’s concerns about extremist politics.

“Hence my motivation to be in politics, to be of service and to try to guard against those sort of extremes,” he says.

Abetz studied law after completing his arts degree and became the first Tasmanian to be president of the Australian Liberal Students’ Federation. Already incensed over the involuntary nature of university student unionism, one of Abetz’s first fights was to stop union funds being spent on a pro-choice campaign on the issue of abortion.

“The student union was going to make money available for a pro-abortion campaign and I was of the view that poor students should not be having money that was forced out of them used for these extraneous campaigns, pro or anti-abortion,” Abetz says.

His motion opposing the campaign succeeded. Abetz had found his calling. His earlier vague plans to become a teacher disappeared as he became more and more immersed in student politics.

“That period at university is when I got to meet Tony Abbott, [former Treasurer] Peter Costello, [Victorian Liberal Party powerbroker] Michael Kroger, from the Labor side [Victorian MP] Michael Danby, at the local campus [former Tasmanian Labor senator] Nick Sherry and so the list goes on,” Abetz says. “You think of yourself and everybody around you as just knockabout students, not thinking a whole bunch of you are going to move on and have the huge privilege of leading the country or being in the engine room of leading the country.”

In his late 20s, after working in a northern suburbs law firm for five years, Abetz started his own practice with a friend from his university days, Roger Curtis.

“A few people saw us as Young Turks trying to set up a legal practice from scratch. But if I might say, we did quite well at it,” Abetz says.

Abetz refuses to name the man who gave the pair the financial backing they needed.

“We are extremely thankful he gave us a break in life,” is all he will say of the mystery guarantor. “For two years we worked like absolute Trojans to pay down the debt.”

In 1989, while still working as a lawyer in his own firm, Abetz became state president of the Liberal Party, taking over when the party was, he says, bankrupt with debts of about $240,000. His orders to close the party’s offices up north and lay off staff did not go down well.

“It’s never popular for a Hobart-based president to tell Launceston and the North-West Coast we can no longer afford offices there,” Abetz says. “But we got through it and the party has fully recovered but it took many years to overcome.”

He likes to think of the past management of the Liberal Party as a “microcosm” of what happened to Australia in the Rudd and Gillard years.

“People were told ‘It’s not that bad, we can borrow, tomorrow’s another day’ but finally tomorrow does arrive and you’re up against it,” he says.

media_camera Abetz talks with Weld Valley activist Adam Burling outside his offices in Davey St.

As a lawyer, Abetz was a “jack of all trades” who thrived on the detailed research required to get an edge in complex civil cases. He likes to joke he is an expert on tiling, although he has not laid a single tile, because of a building dispute he worked on in his early days. The intricacies of apple exports are another of his fortes.

Abetz’s criminal clients ranged from petty to murderous. A few cases stick in his mind more than others, such as a chap who was perhaps a little too timid in demanding an appointment.

“He was sitting in the waiting room all afternoon wanting to see me,” Abetz says. “I said, ‘Look, mate, I’m terribly busy, you can see I’ve got a waiting room full of people’, and he said, “I’ll wait, I’ll wait’.

“At the end of the day after I’d finally finished seeing the last client I said, ‘Come in, what’s the matter?’, and he said, ‘The police are after me for murder’. I said, ‘Oh, you might have said, I could have possibly deferred a few of the appointments’.”

A long night ensued, in which Abetz took his client to the police station to hand himself in. The man was eventually found not guilty of murder but guilty of the lesser charge of manslaughter.

If the law gave Abetz the opportunity to hone his argumentative skills, politics has allowed him to get the stinging verbal rebuke down to a fine art. Abetz’s questioning of witnesses at Senate estimates hearings has attracted a cult following of Canberra journalists.

His relentless pursuit of ABC managing director Mark Scott last year over perceptions of bias at the national broadcaster was a particular favourite among the Twitter-mad press gallery.

One Liberal member describes a partyroom meeting in which Abetz “tore strips” off Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman, who was in Opposition at the time.

“His ability for oral debate is second to none but it takes a while to get over his delivery, which is sharp and cruel,” says the party member, who chooses not to be named. (I know this unattributed anecdote will anger Abetz. Journalists’ reliance on unnamed sources is one of his pet hates. “Gutless,” he once called it. But as I discover during our interview, he too has a habit of telling stories and giving private views that are infuriatingly “off the record”.)

Liberal-turned-Democrat Richard James admits he is somewhat in awe of Abetz’s oratory prowess, having been at the receiving end of his verbal lashes. James, now a Clarence City Council alderman, was president of the Hobart branch of the Young Liberals in the late ’70s.

James ran unsuccessfully for the Liberals twice but his stance on the environment attracted the ire of Abetz and other party conservatives so he defected to the Democrats. James recalls Abetz punishing him for his disloyalty at various public “meet the candidates” forums.

“He always liked to get in the front row and he always took a bit of a shot at me. He was quite antagonistic at the meetings,” James says. “He wasn’t in Parliament at the time and he was trying to get a foothold in the system. He’s got a clever mind and he knows how to go on the attack. I thought I handled it quite well because I knew how he operated.”

type_quote_start The future of Tasmania, I think, is now as good as it’s ever been, as I’ve known it type_quote_end

Former Tasmanian Liberal leader and self-confessed political failure Bob Cheek spoke out about Abetz’s power within the party in his political memoirs in 2005. It was also Cheek who famously described Abetz’s clipped monotone as a “voice like a dripping tap”.

“I saw Eric at the airport about 12 months ago and we had an amicable chat,” Cheek tells TasWeekend. “I think he’s forgiven me.”

He says Abetz’s success as a politician should be given due credit. “He’s not the most popular politician but he’s a very astute politician,” Cheek says. “He’s probably been the most influential Federal politician we’ve had for a long time. I don’t think there will ever be another one like Eric Abetz.”

Something a little disconcerting happens as Abetz ponders Tasmania’s future, sipping green tea instead of coffee, because he believes it is better for his health. He appears, for a few seconds, to be channelling one of his old Senate sparring mates Christine Milne. It was the former Australian Greens leader who in the early ’90s envisaged a “clean, green and clever” future for the state.

“The future of Tasmania, I think, is now as good as it’s ever been, as I’ve known it,” Abetz tells TasWeekend. “We’ve got a number of strings to our bow. We’ve got agriculture, we’ve got irrigation, we’ve got tourism, we’ve got an arts component with Mona, Antarctic endeavours. So we’ve got a whole lot of strings to our bow now which I think make us a more resilient economy.”

I mention the argument that environmentalists can claim at least a little credit for one of Tasmania’s bow strings: tourism. In 2006, Abetz opposed the protection of a logging coupe at Recherche Bay because, he said at the time, it would cost 10 forestry jobs. Now there are plans for a floating eco-resort at Recherche Bay, which would introduce tourists to the site’s beauty and its history of friendly relations between French explorers and Aborigines.

A decade on, Abetz is still not willing to concede any ground on the issue. “That’s the sort of thing that holds Tasmania back,” he says of anti-logging campaigns such as the one at Recherche Bay. “It draws attention to Tasmania for all the wrong reasons.

“That Recherche Bay area had already been logged not once but twice. To claim it was pristine forest was just a nonsense.”

He refuses to be drawn on the potential of the historic location as a tourism site.

Abetz is back on familiar ground, attacking those who he says denigrate Tasmania’s reputation for forestry. It is a battle he has been fighting for almost as long as he has been campaigning against forced uni student unionism. He loves spending time in Tasmania’s wilderness and enjoys a bushwalk as much as the next person, but cannot abide those who want to protect it all at the expense of jobs.

“We should be celebrating our forestry practices as world leaders and instead we get a diet of negative imagery and claims we are destroying our forests when we are talking about re-harvesting areas that have already been harvested,” Abetz says.

On the day of our interview, Abetz launched a new Federally funded training centre at Electrona aimed at value-adding the state’s forest products.

“It really highlights that the forest industry is not only about chainsaws and log trucks, but people involved in information technology, in science, in engineering, in genetics,” he says.

Just one television crew turned up to the launch.

By comparison, just two days earlier, former Greens leader Bob Brown made headlines around the country when he was arrested for protesting against the harvesting of a logging coupe in the state’s north.

“You demonstrate and try to stop jobs and you get all the media there,” Abetz says of Brown’s arrest at in the Lapoinya forest. “But you have this wonderful collaboration between the University of Tasmania, the Federal Government and a lot of private enterprise to really value-add our wood resource and there’s no interest.”

media_camera Abetz is front and centre at Remembrance Day services in Hobart in 2010.

After exactly 22 years in Federal Parliament, Abetz is realistic about his ability to grab headlines. But it frustrates him nonetheless.

Rarely seen without crisp suit and tie, he has steadfastly refused to go down the celebrity MP route of staged television stunts. You will never see Abetz down at his local Kingston Beach in a pair of budgie-smugglers like his ally Abbott or holding a doorstop interview outside church on a Sunday, a la former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd.

In 2010, there was an uncharacteristic moment when he caught the attention of mainstream media when he spoke out against a parliamentary rule that prevented politicians replacing their own office light bulbs. Abetz was pleased his light bulb moment got so much airtime, but annoyed journalists did not give the same attention to more serious matters such as what he called the then-Labor Government’s “misspending”.

Abetz believes his German heritage and conservative, Christian values make him easy game for mischievous journalists and political opponents. It also means his achievements are overlooked, he says.

“As a conservative the media aren’t that interested in the firsts,” Abetz says. “I’m the first person from a non-English speaking background to become a Leader of the Government, either in the House of Representatives or the Senate.

“That is, I think, a wonderful testament to Australia’s embracing of migrant communities.”

In an era when spouses and children are increasingly being rolled out to boost MPs’ profiles, Abetz remains determinedly private about his family. He took time off last year to care for his wife Michelle, who is ill, but the topic is off limits in our interview.

However, Abetz does talk with pride of the varied paths his children are taking in life. The eldest works for the Commonwealth Bank in Melbourne, the middle child is majoring in English and works at his local McDonald’s, while the youngest studies medicine at Monash.

“I take the job very seriously,” Abetz says of his refusal to bolster his personal profile. “I would think people would expect me to spend my time on getting my head around facts and figures, developing policy, listening to people, making representations rather than thinking, ‘Will I use a goat or a donkey in this stunt?’.

“If I wanted to be a celebrity I would have become an actor.”

He may not be an actor but his critics call Abetz the puppeteer of the Tasmanian Liberals.

“They talk about factional warlords in the Labor Party. Well, Eric Abetz would fit well within the ALP for the fact he’s so controlling of the party,” one-time Liberal candidate Greg Barns says.

Barns, whose political career was thwarted by Abetz years ago, predicts – perhaps a little wishfully – his former nemesis is gearing up for retirement.

“Eric is going to get out mid-next term and he’s already planning his succession like a French king,” Barns declares in his typically self-certain tone.

“He plans to hand over to his ideological love child Jonno Duniam.”

Jonathon Duniam is the Liberal’s third Senate candidate for this year’s election, running alongside Abetz and Senate president Stephen Parry. Duniam was an adviser to Abetz in Canberra, both in Opposition and during the dying days of the Howard Government.

Normally it takes two people to produce ideological offspring, as in Tony Abbott’s jocular claim he is the political love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop. But Barns’ point is clear enough.

Like Abetz, Duniam is a Christian and staunchly opposed to gay marriage. Duniam is 33. Abetz was 34 when he was first elected. Both have three children.

type_quote_start If I wanted to be a celebrity I would have become an actor type_quote_end

When I meet Duniam for coffee his phone vibrates non-stop – one of the side-effects of running for Parliament – but he is polite enough to ignore it. He is lean and clean-cut like his former boss but about half a foot taller and with a white toothy grin that seems made for campaign posters.

“Ideologically, yeah, we’ve probably got quite a few things in common,” Duniam says of the comparisons with Abetz.

“Am I modelling myself on a person I think who’s stood up for what they believe in and worked hard for those causes? Yes, absolutely.

“Do I want to be a carbon cut-out of anybody? No of course not. I have a different way of doing things. He [Abetz] is very much a forceful character. You know where he stands. I’ve probably been described as more conciliatory.”

Duniam is deputy chief of staff to Premier Hodgman, which aids the legend of Abetz’s supposed power over Hodgman.

Abetz scoffs at his reputation as the puppeteer or almighty ruler of the Liberals in Tasmania. After all, he argues, how could he, a right-wing Christian monarchist fiercely opposed to gay marriage, be pulling the strings if Hodgman is willing to come out in support of marriage equality and a republic?

“This ridiculous assertion that I control everything … if people were to honestly believe I held sway over Will Hodgman, then undoubtedly I author his views on the republic and same-sex marriage. I don’t think so,” Abetz says.

Abetz tells TasWeekend he has every intention of sticking out the full term. “I’m 58 and if I serve out six years that will make me 64 so I would like to think there’s at least one senate term left in me, if not more,” he says.

With so many battles left to fight it is easy to see Abetz keeping his word. He may have ditched the grey and magenta jumper, but do not expect him to go down the populist path any time soon.

“True leadership isn’t about popularity,” he says. “Anybody with half a brain, I think, can become popular.

“True leadership requires being able to make tough decisions and say things which are not popular, but nevertheless, on close examination, correct.”

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