I’d like you to cast your mind back to the first time you saw Tony Abbott bite into an onion. I know he’s done several other strange things since then, like eating another onion. Recall that moment if you can bear it, because it tells us something about the man who is somehow still the prime minister of Australia.
Whole raw onions are not a common feature of the modern Australian diet. Apart from anything else, most of us find that eating them is difficult and unpleasant: they burn your mouth and make you cry. As for the skin, it’s indigestible. Unless you’re on a dare, you’d probably rather have an apple.
In any event, you can’t do what Abbott did without practice. You need to want to learn to do it. It’s a kind of party trick, a piece of rugby club machismo that shows who, exactly, is the hardest man in the room. But instead of throwing down the gauntlet to a locker room or a public bar, Abbott is now basically yelling “Psych!” at an entire nation, a G20 economy, and a bewildered international community.
This kind of thing is not new for him. Figuratively speaking, he’s been eating onions for the entirety of his prime ministership, and longer. The red speedos, the fireman costume and the Lycra. The boxing, the “shirtfronting” and “selling his arse”. These are the words and actions of a man whose first instinct is to turn everything into a dick-measuring contest. The onion thing was weird, and part of the broader weirdness of Abbott, which seems to be ripening now he’s in office.
We’re told that voters in focus groups have taken to describing him as a “fool”. The usual response to such assessments from conservative commentators is to point to Abbott’s Rhodes scholarship, as if that institution is not simply an extension of the private schools where Abbott learned to think.
In any case, “fool” does not only signify a lack of intelligence. The voters polled might just mean that Abbott’s a loose unit. Who, at this point, could disagree? Christopher Pyne used that term to describe colleagues moving against Malcolm Turnbull on Abbott’s behalf back in 2009. Abbott’s response to rumblings about his own leadership was to tuck into a few bulbs; the question of his looseness is well and truly open for discussion.
First, there’s the whole question of his interactions with women. Abbott’s formative experiences of political activism involved fighting feminists over abortion. He later played “Vatican roulette” with a woman because he thought he would go on to become a priest, and when she gave birth to a child he thought was his, made the nation stand by while he thrashed out in public whether he was, in fact, the father. Politics came to resemble an episode of Maury.
During his uni years, two witnesses claim he punched a wall adjoining a female opponent’s head. People who have suggested that Barbara Ramjan made this story up have been forced to make public apologies under legal threats.
His political modus operandi went on as it started. He pursued Pauline Hanson, then Julia Gillard, with a peculiar relish that couldn’t quite be explained by the career advantages that success brought him. The defining image of his time as opposition leader was him yelling, in front of a sign calling Gillard a bitch.
Abbott’s weirdness goes beyond his treatment of political adversaries. There was the leering wink in Jon Faine’s ABC studio when an elderly sex worker called in to speak with him. There’s his belief that out there in voterland, women do the ironing, and that his decision to repeal the price on carbon was his greatest achievement for women. There was the discussion of the “precious gift” of his daughters’ virginity.
Later, he described the same daughters as “hot” in the Big Brother house. There was the rumination on how we might be able to find some middle ground on the question of marital rape. And who could forget his thirsty remarks about one of his own candidates, whom he praised for her “sex appeal”.
It’s not just that this combination of creepy come-ons and patriarchal protection is colossally sexist. It’s also that, like his boy’s own leisure pursuits, it gives the impression of a man who is wholly and worryingly out of time.
The rest of us are trying to understand how we negotiate peaceful progress in the pluralist landscape of 21st century Australia, where the goal of equal opportunities for men and women is a given. Abbott appears to mentally reside in a dreamworld situated somewhere in the first half of the last century.
He is always finding new and excruciating ways of confirming that he doesn’t inhabit the same era as the rest of us. Yes his casual invocation of the stereotype of the drunken Irishman insulted an entire nation on its national day. He also invoked a lost Australian world of ethnic and sectarian hierarchy, in which “the English made the laws, the Scots made the money, and the Irish made the songs”.
Sometimes it seems as if Abbott finds comfort in these largely forgotten prejudices. Almost unbelievably, this is the second time that he has been criticised for implying that Irish people are stupid — Ireland’s embassy complained when he told an Irish joke in parliament in 2011.
More dangerously, Abbott has made it clear that, like the Liberals of the 1950s, he thinks of Indonesia as somewhere between an existential threat and a third-world supplicant. In “stopping the boats”, apart from the cruelty he visited on refugees, he antagonised our neighbour. Only Abbott could follow this up with a lecture on human rights, in which he played the disappointed benefactor, tying aid to a criticism of the justice system of another democracy.
His atavism was incubated in the context of a particular brand of politicised Catholicism. Abbott was around when Bob Santamaria and his National Civic Council (the organisation founded to push Santamaria’s ultra-traditionalist Catholic social views), having long despaired of exercising parliamentary power, pivoted more decisively towards culture war.
Like anyone marked by Santamaria’s influence, Abbott was not only hostile to the second Vatican council’s liberalising reforms – both inside the church and in secular society – but was necessarily committed to living and thinking totally against the grain of the present, and dreaming of an impossible restoration of the past.
It was reported that an email campaign from the NCC saved Abbott from being dumped at the moment when his leadership lurched from its customary sense of crisis into an apparently terminal phase. We should be astounded that this marginal, mouldering organisation still has such influence on the Liberal party. In the 1980s Townsville in which I grew up, the NCC types were even then regarded as the parish outliers. They were integralists, who believed that to be truly Christian was to bring the secular world back under the authority of the one true church.
Playing politics in a modern nation, after having had this kind of political education, must be an enormous strain for Abbott. We don’t have to imagine how much of a strain, because he pretty regularly lets us see it. The infamous moment where, as opposition leader, he stared in silence at Mark Riley for almost 30 seconds, was not only an unusual thing for a politician to do, but a striking departure from the ways in which normal people usually treat one another.
And admitting to Kerry O’Brien that he frequently lied – “gospel truth is those carefully prepared scripted remarks” – was not only a blunder, but a revelation of the kind of confessional impulse that needs a national stage. After a while, you start to feel like a therapist, sitting in silence while Abbott regales us with his symptoms.
It’s true that politics draws extreme personalities, but it’s difficult to nominate a weirder postwar prime minister.
Opposition leaders like Herbert Evatt and Mark Latham were weeded out precisely because the electorate caught a strong whiff off them. Kevin Rudd may have been a tantrum-prone control freak in private, but he managed to keep his public persona on a relatively even keel in a way that Abbott simply can’t.
Paul Keating was intense, and even overbearing, but he was purposeful. Even John Gorton managed to persuade friends and foes of his humour and humanity. Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam each had prodigious self-esteem, but nothing approaching Abbott’s desperate physical narcissism. And Abbott has managed to make his two Liberal predecessors in the job look almost Periclean in their sagacity and dignity.
It’s important to remember that none of this has been a secret. Indeed Abbott himself has made a point of broadcasting his failures and idiosyncracies, even the deeply personal ones. We knew all about him, because he told us. Few politicians in any era have done more than Abbott to make a public display of their flaws.
The question we are left with is why we find ourselves in this situation. More precisely: why, between 2010 and 2013, was Abbott taken seriously as a candidate for Australia’s highest political office? Recently, there have been some full-blown attacks on Abbott from press gallery journalists. But there were few criticisms to be seen when it counted, in the last term of the Labor government (the exceptions were mostly to be found outside the pages of the legacy media, not least of all in Guardian Australia).
Journalists who had known about Abbott’s weirdness for decades put him alongside a sitting prime minister, and for the most part they found her wanting. This didn’t just happen in those parts of News Corporation which wound up effectively campaigning for Abbott: one of the things that sealed Gillard’s fate was Fairfax editorials calling for her resignation.
They did this despite the fact that Gillard had a track record established in difficult circumstances, and Abbott had an agenda consisting of three word slogans. The centrepiece of that agenda, such as it was, was destroying what had been Australia’s only serious attempt to come to terms with climate change.
This was dangerous and entirely a product of what passes for thinking on the rightward fringe of the Liberal party. And yet no one called out its chief advocate until it was far too late. Abbott got a free pass, and the journalists who are now pointing to the perspicacity of their hindsight are doing nothing to change that fact.
Partly, no doubt, this is due to long-observed pathologies of contemporary political journalism everywhere. The desire to appear even-handed, and the constraints of space and time mean that such debates are often merely presented for the judgment of the audience, rather than analysed by those who are closer to the detail of political disputation. The “view from nowhere” has worked its way into the heart of the modern journalistic enterprise, and it has proven exceptionally difficult to dislodge.
But there is another possibility that needs to be confronted, and it is specific to Australia, and to Abbott.
For a journalist to be usefully critical of Abbott before the election – for them to say then, rather than now, that he was unfit for the office of prime minister – would have required them to rest that argument on a number of other assumptions that would go to the heart of the way our politics is structured.
That the Liberal party was incapable of delivering a candidate who was both worthy of the office and satisfactory to elements of the party that are far more rightwing than the general public.
That Abbott may well have been similarly unworthy of other positions of authority he has held in the past.
That all of this has been evident for decades.
That it all failed to come to light because the personality-focused nature of press gallery journalism failed to connect Tony’s “quirks” with their likely political manifestations in government.
The last of those truths is impossible for a journalist to utter, so the other truths went missing, only to return at a time when they were of far less import.
As a result, Abbott has been able to make Australia a little more like himself: a bit more self-involved, a bit more threatening, a bit more masculinist, a bit more difficult for outsiders to understand, a bit creepier, a bit more weird. No, I’m not crying, I swear. It’s the onions.