David Cameron should be lauded for his tough economic and social policies rather than his support for gay marriage or action on climate change, the former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott has said.
Abbott, who called on European countries to adopt hardline immigration policies when he delivered the Margaret Thatcher lecture in London two weeks ago, offered his assessment of the British prime minister in a new article for the Spectator.
He also warned that Malcolm Turnbull, who ousted Abbott as prime minister after winning a party challenge in September, would find it difficult to overhaul Australia’s tax system because of “the ‘no one can be worse off’ mindset that makes serious reform so hard”.
Abbott said he had used his recent visit to Britain to catch up with Cameron, who was “still savouring his against-the-polls win in this year’s election, assisted by our very own strategist Lynton Crosby”.
“In Australia, Cameron is mostly portrayed as the conservative who supports gay marriage and takes climate change seriously but his real strength has been successful social and economic reform,” he wrote.
“So far, his government has transformed education by, in effect, privatising public schools; tackled the culture of welfare by ensuring that people are always better off in work than out of it; and halved the deficit inherited from Labour ... Yet his government’s latest measure to rein in spending – reducing tax credits for the low income workers while increasing the minimum wage – has been rejected in the House of Lords. It shows how carefully even politically ascendant conservatives have to tread.”
Abbott also cautiously waded into the political difficulties facing his successor, who has put all options on the table for tax reform including changes to Australia’s goods and services tax. Turnbull has said any changes would have to be seen as fair and would include compensation for low-income earners.
Abbott said changing the tax burden from income to spending made sense “but only if overall taxes become lower, simpler and fairer”.
Having himself lost political capital for breaking election promises, Abbott wrote: “As a potential reformer, Malcolm Turnbull has the advantage of being relatively unbound by previous commitments but still faces the problem of how to deal with the ‘no one can be worse off’ mindset that makes serious reform so hard.”
He suggested that the real challenge in Australia and Britain was “how responsibly to spend less on short-term consumption and more on long-term investment in infrastructure and national security”.
Abbott also addressed the reaction to his Thatcher lecture address, when he argued the imperative to love your neighbour was “leading much of Europe into catastrophic error” on asylum seeker policies.
In the Spectator article, Abbott said the speech had attracted “carping from the usual suspects” but added: “In any morality contest, preventing hundreds of deaths at sea surely justifies robust measures to prevent people smuggling.”
