By Mungo MacCallum Monday 29 September 2014

Photo: Prime Minister Tony Abbott speaks during a UN Security Council meeting. (AFP: Saul Loeb)

The spirit of Chifley, the humble visionary whose optimistic belief in peace was a beacon of hope, is to be cynically stolen by the present reality of a man who thrives on conflict and aggression, writes Mungo MacCallum.

The minor earth tremor you detected around Bathurst cemetery last week was Ben Chifley turning in his grave as Tony Abbott invoked his memory (though not his name).

Abbott appropriated Labor's most memorable image, the light on the hill, in Labor's most respected venue, the United Nations General Assembly, to celebrate his pawing at the ground to Washington to give the OK for Australian war planes to bomb Iraq. The man has no shame.

It was only last week in the same city that our Prime Minister publicly gave his finger to most of the world by very publicly rejecting the invitation to participate in the UN secretary-general's Climate Summit. His office, he said, was too busy attending to affairs in Canberra, presumably to do with preparations for the Great Humanitarian War.

Well, hang on it a minute. The previous week he was happy, indeed insouciant, to go to Arnhem Land while dealing with the same matters of state, apparently managing to both walk and chew gum without overdue exhaustion. And of course such dilettantes as Barack Obama and David Cameron, among numerous other leaders, considered the meeting of sufficient importance to interrupt their schedules.

In any case, Abbott had been asked to attend long before Islamic State had even appeared on Australia's radar, and then decided to come to New York at very short notice anyway. It was hardly a matter of dropping out at the last minute.

And it was not a trivial issue; UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon said flatly that it was the defining issue of the age, and Obama said that from all the immediate threats such as IS and the Ebola epidemic, climate change was the one that would shape the contours of the century. And he implored the world, and particularly both the emerging giants and the developed nations, to act. Abbott was presumably included in his absence.

But Australia did not leave an empty chair; the indefatigable Julie Bishop filled in, if only as a cheerio call. She did reiterate that of course Australia was concerned and was doing something. She did not mention Abbott's triumph in helping Australia become the first country in the world to abolish putting a price on carbon but she was adamant that Australia was definitely doing something. Especially, it was talking about economic growth and competitiveness, presumably meaning coal.

As if on cue, Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane appeared in Canberra with a fantastic (literally) report that apparently foreshadowed a Utopian dream of supplies of cheap coal - he almost added, as did Abbott quoting Chifley, for the general betterment of mankind.

The message of Australia's dismissal of climate change as a problem could hardly have been more blatant. But Abbott's deliberate snubbing of Ban Ki-moon and Obama, not to mention the other 120-odd leaders of the New York meeting, egregious as it was, should not be excused as an aberration. Both his critics and his supporters have been demanding that he produce a narrative for his muddled Government, and the signs are that he is finally preparing one and here it is: stop the world, I want to get off. Or, in more active mode: up you, Jack.

In spite of his fervent devotion to what he called "like minded countries" (by which he really means the United States) his Government is turning determinedly isolationist - or as he might see it, sturdily independent. Not only do we no longer need to observe accepted international standards of behaviour, we now glory in rejecting them.

And who better to exemplify the new paradigm than the man most ambitious to succeed Abbott, at least according to his growing coterie of boosters, Generalissimo Scott Morrison.

Morrison does not go into nuance, he has spelt his credo out in stentorian terms: the Australian Parliament will be the one and only arbiter and other authorities need not apply. "We area sovereign country. We get to decide what our rules are and what our obligations are."

Echoes, as the long suffering noted, of John Howard's defiant: "We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come."

In the past, successive governments have at least pretended to follow the International Convention on Refugees; however much they worked through it and around it, they insisted that they were not actually breaching it - they bowed to international law. Morrison is happy to tear it up, although he still claims, absurdly, to follow the letter while there ignoring the spirit, let alone the various recommendations. He has, effectively, placed (or displaced) asylum seekers outside the pale.

Christmas Island will be wound up: many of the hapless inhabitants will simply be repatriated, or if they can't be repatriated, stuck in some undefined limbo. The so-called winners will be given the endless uncertainty of Temporary Protection Visas, or, if they are really lucky, given what are to be called Safe Haven Enterprise Visas and sent to the remote regions to work, courtesy of Clive Palmer Mining Enterprises.

From Nauru, some will be sold to the corrupt and poverty-stricken shambles of Cambodia, the destination favoured over the far more salubrious Malaysia - which, of course, was the solution proposed by both Julia Gillard and an independent panel of experts, but rejected in horror by Abbott as being outside the now irrelevant convention.

These victims will, of course, be volunteers - take it or leave it, since the rest will presumably be left to Nauru and Manus Island or whatever other hellhole Morrison can conjure up to rot, and who cares what they, and the rest of the world, thinks. Up you, Jack.

Not a lot of light on the hill here.

And so the pattern is starting to develop: we'll take part in the wars, at least when they're America's, but that's it - the rest is jingoism. The spirit of Chifley, the humble visionary whose optimistic belief in both domestic and international peace and goodwill was a beacon of hope, is to be cynically stolen by the present reality of a man who thrives on conflict and aggression in defiance of the United Nations and their ideals.

But if he is serious about channelling his much-loved predecessor, it would behove him to study the history: Chifley's "light on the hill speech" was made, not on a moment of bravado, but on the eve of the 1949 election, and would inflict upon Labor a disastrous defeat and consigned it to 23 years of opposition.

Perhaps, after all, there is hope.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.

The cheek of Abbott channelling Chifley - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)