How Australia’s Tony Abbott pulled off a great conservative victory

By conventional wisdom, Tony Abbott should not become Prime Minister of Australia this weekend. He ought to be too conservative, a throwback to a bygone age. He is sceptical about global warming, and proposed to abolish a carbon tax on the grounds of its expense and uselessness. He is a churchgoer who is against abortion and is sceptical about gay marriage. He is a former boxer, who tends to back America in foreign policy disputes. He is an Anglophile and an enthusiastic monarchist. He ticks almost every unfashionable box in modern politics.

His victory is not inevitable, but those wishing to place money on his rival, Kevin Rudd, can find bookmakers willing to give odds of 26-1. The Australian Labor party, which enstooled Mr Rudd ten weeks ago, regarding him a charismatic Blair-style centrist, is facing not just defeat but humiliation. When Rudd first took power, in 2007, the idea was that he would consign the Liberal party to the wilderness of irrelevance for at least a decade. Something has gone very wrong for the left, and very right for Australian conservatives.

It is worth noting what did not work for the Australian right. Its ‘modernisers’ first attempted to jettison remnants of the Howard era, believing the way forward was to embrace the Rudd approach. They wanted to reverse pro-market employment laws. They embraced the global warming agenda, and grew more relaxed about immigration.

They did not quite go quite so far as to copy Labor’s spending plans, but they did everything but. As if to demonstrate their fitness for government, they cosied up to Mr Rudd, rather than do what opposition parties are supposed to do and oppose him. Australia did not suffer so badly in the crash, thanks to the surpluses which John Howard had built up before his 2007 defeat.