“The king is dead, long live the king,” the former prime minister John Howard has pronounced, paying tribute to Tony Abbott and pledging to do “everything I can” to support his successor, Malcolm Turnbull.
Howard was effusive in his praise of Abbott in Sydney on Tuesday, singling out the government’s harsh off-shore detention measures in particular. “He achieved along with Scott Morrison a turnaround in relation to border protection policy that I didn’t really think would be possible,” Howard said.
“The fact that [Abbott] and Peter Dutton were able to convert the dividend of stopping the boats into the opportunity available for Australia to take 12,000 additional refugees from the war-torn areas of the Middle East is something of which his government can be particularly proud.”
“Budget repair” also rated a mention, the former prime minister describing the repeal of Labor’s mining and carbon taxes as one of “the very significant legacies of [Abbott’s] period as prime minister”.
He declined to comment on where Abbott, who once described himself as Howard’s political lovechild, had gone wrong. “I think the major reason why the Liberal party made the change was because of the polls,” he said. “Politics is governed by the laws of arithmetic, and I do think if the polls had been different, even to a modest but measurable degree, then there may not have been a change.”
Pressed on whether the party room had made the right decision in switching leaders, Howard replied: “The Australian people will decide that, but the important thing is they made a decision with a clear margin. In the end though the voters have a say in their judgment at the next election and I hope it is very favourable to the government.”
He praised the newly sworn-in prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, who deposed Abbott in a sudden leadership spill on Monday. “I’ve known Malcolm for a long time, he was of course a Howard-era minister, and he was a very good minister,” he said.
“He’s a person of great intelligence, he has the capacity to explain economic concepts very clearly and very lucidly, and that, as he indicated yesterday, will be a very important part of the skill-set he brings to his new responsibilities.”
Nor did he regret counselling Turnbull in 2010 to reverse his decision to quit politics, arguing that as a former leader it was his role “to encourage people of talent, merit, or ability to either enter politics or stay in politics”.
Howard offered the new leader of the Liberal party a piece of advice, hoping he would “understand, as I did, and as Tony Abbott did, that the Liberal party is a broad church … It is the custodian of both conservative values and small-L liberal values and it does best when it keeps a sensible balance between the two.
“I will do everything I can to help Malcolm Turnbull. He will have all the support and advice that he may care to seek from me.
“My operating principle is to keep the Labor party from government … And that can best be achieved by everybody giving the maximum level of support to the new prime minister.”
