Conservatism has triumphed in Australia, whoever its next PM might be

He’s ‘too archetypically conservative’. He’s too much of a ‘King Catholic’. He views the world through a ‘narrow ideological prism’. He’ll ‘split the party’. He’s ‘unelectable as prime minister’. Under his leadership, the centre-right Liberal party will become ‘a down-market protest party of angry old men and the outer suburbs’.

As these barbs indicate, Tony Abbott is as much a hate figure among Australia’s left-leaning academics and columnists as Margaret Thatcher was in the senior common rooms of Britain’s great learned institutions. But just as the BBC/Guardian forces badly underestimated the Iron Lady, so too have the journalists down under been spectacularly wrong about the ‘Mad Monk’. For Abbott — a monarchist, Rhodes scholar and devout Catholic — has almost singlehandedly resurrected the conservative cause in the Antipodes. At last Saturday’s federal election, the government of Prime Minister Julia Gillard copped what Abbott called a ‘savage swing’. So much so that the Australian Labor party not only conceded a double-digit poll lead in just a few months, it has now lost its governing majority. And although it could still run a minority government on the backs of a few Independent MPs, Labor is battered, bruised and bedevilled. Not since 1931 has a first-term government lost its parliamentary majority.

It was not supposed to be this way. When Kevin Rudd defeated the Liberal-National coalition government three years ago, the conventional wisdom predicted a New Labour-like political realignment in Australia. Not only did it spell the end of John Howard — the 33-year parliamentary veteran who president George W. Bush once lauded as a ‘man of steel’. It signalled the nadir of conservatism and the dawn of a new era of progressivism. After the 12-year interlude of the Howard era, we were told, normal programming had been resumed.