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.