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Washington: Failing mainstream conservative parties have no one but themselves to blame for the rise of far-right populists, former prime minister Tony Abbott has told a global audience, amid the resurgence of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in Australia.
This masthead can also reveal that Abbott met privately with US Vice President J.D. Vance for about half an hour during his trip to Washington.
Former prime ministers Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd brandishing each other’s books while in Washington.
Addressing a global conference of centre-right political leaders, Abbott said voters in the Anglosphere were sick of “conservatives who don’t really know where they stand and what they’d do differently”.
He cited recent losses by the Liberal-National Coalition in Australia and Canada’s Conservative Party, as well as last year’s Tory drubbing in the United Kingdom.
“There is no mystery to the conservative eclipse – revolving-door prime ministerships, careerist MPs, policy incoherence, and a sense of impotence against the unelected and unaccountable administrative state,” Abbott said.
“We have to face up to the fact that it’s not our opponents’ brilliance but our own deficiencies that are to blame.”
Former prime minister Tony Abbott, pictured speaking in the United Kingdom in October, says conservative parties have themselves to blame for their defeats.Credit: Getty Images
Abbott said the success of US President Donald Trump and the Republicans in 2024 demonstrated the need for political strength and for conservatives to have better answers to voters’ problems than the other side.
In his speech to the International Democracy Union, Abbott said conservative parties should adopt the Trump position that “there is no climate crisis” and abandon the pursuit of net zero emissions.
“Why are we turning our economies upside down to decarbonise, given that China, India, Russia – and now America too – have made no commitment to reduce their emissions to net zero by 2050?” he said.
On immigration, Abbott argued that Anglosphere nations should be more selective about the migrants they accept. Rather than relying on migrants to fill jobs that “locals won’t do”, they should instead pay local workers more and end “virtually unconditional” welfare payments.
“We need to break the something-for-nothing, entitlement mindset that is so corrosive of societies’ morale,” he said. “People in low-paid jobs deeply resent their neighbours earning almost as much from welfare as from work.”
Abbott said conservatives failed when they allowed political calculations to stop them from doing what they knew to be right.
“Our challenge is to be a strong and clear alternative to the green-left parties that have exported manufacturing jobs to China, created vast ineffectual bureaucracies, made too many citizens dependants of government, and let our armed forces run down to the extent that we can’t give the Ukrainians the weapons they need to fight for everyone’s freedom,” he said.
“If mainstream conservative parties keep failing, it won’t just be fringe parties of the right that supplant us. Unhappy voters will keep replacing incumbents, even if it means jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.”
Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is riding a surge in popular support.Credit: Chris Hopkins
The former PM’s comments come as the Coalition bleeds voters to the far-right One Nation. This masthead’s Resolve Political Monitor has the party on a primary vote of 12 per cent, though a recent Redbridge poll for The Australian Financial Review had the figure at 18 per cent, only six points behind the Coalition.
Hanson is also wooing former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce, who has quit the Nationals and is “seriously considering” joining One Nation.
Abbott told this masthead that Opposition Leader Sussan Ley was moving in the right direction by “abandoning the net zero straitjacket” and flagging a more restrictive policy on immigration.
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“The best way to succeed as a centre-right party is to have strong and distinct policies. If you are hard to distinguish from the centre left, that’s when you get insurgencies on the right,” he said.
“That’s certainly been the problem with the Conservatives in Britain, and I think to some extent it’s a problem now in Australia.”
Ley had at one point planned to attend this week’s IDU Forum in Washington, but ultimately did not. However, former prime minister Scott Morrison and former defence minister Marise Payne were in attendance.
Earlier on the trip, Abbott met Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, also a former prime minister removed by his own party.
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