Tony Abbott’s warped story of Australia

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, Murdoch’s The Weekend Australian Magazine promoted its interview with Tony Abbott on the release of his new book with a cover shot of him submerged in a sea pool from the neck down. Thankfully, the former prime minister’s budgie smugglers are hidden from view. He is surely kneeling because even with its sinister jingoistic undercurrent, the Christian nationalist myth he’s hoping to sell in Australia: A History is disturbingly shallow. We’re going to need a better book.

Jaws parody aside, this aquatic portrait of Australia’s great white political shark speaks less to his watered-down version of the past and more to the certain future of our warming, melting planet if we embrace his climate denialism. No prime minister since Harold Holt has waded so blithely into troubled waters.

Abbott’s Australia – specifically, the one that exists only inside his head – is so white it has to be read in the dark. The blurb inside the dust jacket would have you believe that “by the standards of a harsher time, the first governors tried to respect the original inhabitants”. Personally I have never tried to show respect to anyone by committing genocide against their people. That’s just me though.

The first line of the author’s note reads, “This is the book that should never have been needed.” More accurately, it’s the book nobody asked for. Tony Abbott – friend to the ironing housewives of the nation, Fox Corporation board director, cheerleader for George Pell and mortal enemy of raw root vegetables – evidently sees the world through rose-tinted onion goggles. His latest propaganda piece idolises the British colonial regime, downplays the impact of fossil fuels, decries Australia’s tolerance of immigrants and praises our torturous refugee policy.

None of these positions seem to perturb Governor-General Sam Mostyn, who hosted the official launch of Tony’s tone-deaf tome. Sadly, she did not launch it into space. “I believe that Mr Abbott’s desire to get Australians talking and caring about who we are and how we got here is a significant act of care in and of itself,” Mostyn’s official account posted on social media, beneath a photograph of her sandwiched between Abbott and Nova Peris. The same Nova Peris who once reposted a meme describing Muslims as “Satan worshipping cockroaches [that] need to be eradicated” – she has since said she does not share these views – and recently posed with far-right provocateur Avi Yemini at a breakfast in Israel.

Fear not, for Abbott has the answers. All we need to do is abandon identity politics and climate science, cash in on fossil fuel exports, stop “giving special consideration to people on the basis of race and gender” and wait for the emergence of a handful of good leaders.

If we want to have an honest conversation about who we are and how we got here, we’d do well to look beyond the myopic perspectives of prime ministers preoccupied more with their personal legacies than the consequences of centuries of dispossession and the threat of planetary destruction.

From the outset of his revisionist project, it is abundantly clear Abbott has an agenda. He is trying to ride the global rise of right-wing populism signalled by the result of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum, rising fascism in parts of Europe and South America, radicalised online networks and the catastrophic re-election of United States President Donald Trump.

Australia is a strategically timed, God-and-country conservative manifesto couched in academic language. Abbott’s intellect and eloquence do little to disguise the sense of white superiority that permeates the text. He sees Australia’s decision to vote “No” to enshrining Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution as a high point in our history, and mischaracterises the Voice to Parliament as a body that would have had power over all Australians.

Continuing in this vein, he sanitises the White Australia policy by invoking the paternalistic notion that Western civilisation is the only antidote to the implied inherent instability of First Nations, as if colonial occupation has had no ill effects. Referring to neglect as “a highly subjective concept between two very different cultures”, he draws on a tired white saviour trope that the state has provided a better life for the world’s oldest surviving culture. Versions of this racist narrative still serve Australia’s corrupted child protection industry as illegitimate justification for the forced removal of children.

Political ideology is no substitute for science, or history. It’s certainly no substitute for truth.

And, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges says, we “can’t balance truth with lies”. Nor can we balance it with tactful omission. Brimming with decidedly mild accounts of settler violence and selective convict success stories, Australia paints a relatively glossy portrait of early colonial life in Eora/Sydney, where ex-prisoners were apparently empowered and Aboriginal elders received gifts from the thieves of their land. Abbott does not specify which gifts. Smallpox, perhaps?

In any case, we are to be thankful that our colonisers were British. “Whichever European people had settled Australia first, almost certainly the Indigenous population would have suffered from disease and occasional violence,” writes Abbott, adding, “indeed settler violence would almost certainly have been worse under any other European power”.

On the whole, the book is as unoriginal as it is biased and boring. Much like the glitchy AI systems that scrape the annals of the internet to generate content and pass it off as something new, Abbott has hallucinated a fragmentary history from existing works and filled the gaps with wishful thinking. From the gold rush to World War I, the Great Depression and beyond, there is little that can’t be found in a high-school curriculum. There are no revelations, no ground is broken.

When Abbott launches into his reflections on the governments of the past 50 years, all pretence of balance and objectivity falls away. The eras of Robert Menzies, Malcolm Fraser and John Howard are his obvious favourites. In his view, Gough Whitlam’s dismissal was an honest function of democracy.

Rare praise is given to former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke, while Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard are broadly criticised, along with former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is far too left-leaning for Abbott’s liking. Scott Morrison is lauded for AUKUS but condemned for his approach to leadership during the pandemic.

While he rightfully casts Gillard’s famous misogyny speech as a performative defence of then speaker Peter Slipper, Abbott can hardly call himself an advocate for women. He nevertheless judges his own government as practically faultless. His warped nostalgia brings him to the conclusion that Australia is losing its way.

Like other nation states in the Anglosphere, we are reportedly suffering from spiritual poverty, despite our material wealth. Migrants aren’t as willing to assimilate as they once were, we are “culturally confused” and “drifting backwards”.

Fear not, for Abbott has the answers. All we need to do is abandon identity politics and climate science, cash in on fossil fuel exports, stop “giving special consideration to people on the basis of race and gender” and wait for the emergence of a handful of good leaders. There is no disadvantage by design, it’s just a symptom of bad luck.

And it’s not staggering wealth inequality, or environmental desecration driven by corporate greed, tax-evading billionaires, rigged markets and unregulated industries, that are eroding our sense of purpose and meaning. It’s our collective rejection of faith. Just ask the rapist George Pell, who is quoted in the final chapter. Ultimately, it is the all-but-dead Liberal Party, for which Abbott still acts as chief necromancer, that prevails as our supposed moral and economic compass.

Far from adding to Australia’s colourful story, Abbott has whittled it down to an outdated, destructive doctrine. One that reinforces already debunked socioeconomic theories borrowed from Trump and, worse, casts doubt on the efficacy of efforts to save the planet and repair the damage wrought by systemic discrimination.

I quickly descended into despair over these bleak contents. Before I had managed to claw my way to the end, I made the mistake of bringing Australia: A History into the home of a close friend, who proceeded to cleanse me and her property with sage. She almost set the book on fire in the process, possibly on purpose. Thankfully, there are those of us who can resist the temptation to sink so low.