Photo: Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott prepares for a bicycle ride in Sydney the morning after the Coalition claimed victory in the federal election. (AAP: Paul Miller)
Tony Abbott was a tiger as opposition leader. Whether he should be better described as a leopard who cannot change his spots remains to be established. If he is to govern for all Australians that is his challenge, argues David Barnett.
There were lots of winners on Saturday.
There are new members of parliament, almost all of them coalition members. Even Kevin Rudd got his lesser achievement, with the ALP emerging on the night not in shreds, but with enough seats to begin a fight-back plan.
But the real winner was Tony Abbott, who now has it in his grasp to be a great prime minister, with a long future. He made a sound acceptance address on election night, striking exactly the right note, while Kevin Rudd was bizarre, as if unable to accept his loss, describing himself still to party members as their prime minister.
Abbott was the man who thanked not only those who worked for him, but also those who voted the coalition into office, promising to govern for all Australians.
So will he?
Of course he will try, but his real opponent is the enemy within himself. As Caesar observed during my final year of high school: "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves".
Australia has had Catholic prime ministers, but it was always no more than an observation about them.
If Joe Lyons was a devoted Catholic with Catholic views, it was at a time when such views were broadly shared. Ben Chifley was best defined by his trade unionism and his commitment to left-wing principles. John Curtin refused the last rites.
None of that is true of Tony Abbott. He was educated at a Jesuit school and a seminary. He did not proceed to ordination, presumably because he found celibacy not to his nature, but he is proud of his principles and he sticks by them.
So he rejects the argument of his sister for gay marriage. Restrictive censorship proposals for the internet found their way into policy that had to be repudiated at the 11th hour. His views on abortion and contraception produced, when he was health minister in the Howard government, a unique union in the Senate of Liberal, National, ALP and Green women who forced him to back down on the morning after pill.
His properly criticised proposal to make maternity leave equal to half an employee's salary arises from his earlier opposition for a simple and far cheaper, proposal to set maternity leave as a social welfare payment at the social welfare level, so that corporate lawyers could keep up the mortgage payments and barmaids would not find themselves compelled to return to work after a month.
Tony Abbott was a tiger as opposition leader. Whether he should be better described as a leopard who cannot change his spots remains to be established. If he is to govern for all Australians that is his challenge.
There is more to it than that, of course.
Economics is not Tony Abbott's strong point. Promising not to return to Work Choices, and not to change entitlements to overtime and penalty rates might have been electorally necessary, but it was an economic error of great magnitude.
He cannot get unemployment back down to the level of four per cent that the ALP inherited from the Howard government except by freeing up the labour market, which is now conventional wisdom in the rest of the world.
He hardly needs to be reminded that during this extraordinary year the ALP made an enormous blunder. When it is time to go the polls, go there immediately. Certainly, three weeks is more than enough.
A campaign that goes on for months, as this one did, provides all the time in the world to forget that the contest is between the nation's prime minister, who commands loyalty, and a bloke who wants his job.
Despite the polls, Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd stayed preferred prime minister right up to the last poll before the poll that counts.
What else might one observe about the year 2013?
Along with a great many others, I was much amused by the remark attributed to Paul Keating that two poofters and a cocker spaniel don't make a marriage.
By the time we got to 2013 I had come to the conclusion that if two people of the same sex want a formalised union, who am I, or anybody, to tell them they cannot.
If Tony Abbott clings to the Keating definition, he will find that the issue becomes a running political sore. It won't be worth it, not if he is to govern for all Australians and get unemployment back down to four per cent, which is what he is there to do.
Nor should we forget that the qualities that make a formidable opposition leader do not necessarily make a good prime minister.
John Howard was a terrible campaigner, who once fell over on his way to an interview, but he was a great prime minister (until right at the end).
As a senior public servant some years ago remarked to me, sadly, that he had seen so many prime ministers fail because of flaws in the character. He was talking about both sides.
David Barnett is a journalist and farmer. He was press secretary to former prime minister Malcolm Fraser. View his full profile here.
Abbott's challenge: to govern for all Australians - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
