If you were Tony Abbott (try to picture yourself in a pair of red Speedos) you’d have some massive regrets. The 2014 budget would be top of the list, followed by knights and dames in general and the gong for Prince Philip specifically. And then there’s the raw onion thing. Twice.
But no. In an address to the Centre for Independent Studies on Thursday, he confessed that his biggest regret during his not-quite-two-years of occupying not-quite-The Lodge was his failure to procure ... wait for it ... nuclear submarines.
The man who wasted no opportunity to talk tough on national security in front of the nation’s entire output of Australian flags and publicly fantasised about shirtfronting Russian presidents with KGB combat training admits he didn’t adequately secure Australia for the future.
And now, as he’s licking his still-weeping wounds on the backbench, he announces that he’d take Australia nuclear. And while I’m no defence policy maven, it’s not exactly hard to pick his speech as profoundly radioactive.
Abbott put serious energy into the question of replacing the Collins class subs when he was running the country. And before he was dumped, Abbott entered into an informal agreement with Japan to build their subs – which was later repudiated when Turnbull chose France.
Japan, obviously, is the last country that would be in the business of providing nuclear warships. So what’s changed?
Abbott argued today that we are trying to take an existing nuclear sub and re-engineer it to work on conventional fuel, and it would be more effective to use it as designed, especially given our range requirements.
So why didn’t he embrace those glowing fuel rods as PM? Probably because nuclear fuel is toxic politically, as well as literally.
Most Australians back rapidly away whenever they hear the word “nuclear”, especially post-Fukushima, and even more so when we envisage vessels that need to operate in close proximity to our cities.
I loved touring a submarine at Kirribilli’s HMAS Platypus back when I was a kid, but I’m not alone in preferring the nuclear version to be kept well away from where there are people.
You’d think that Abbott, as a genius at scare campaigns himself, would know when he’s offering his political opponents a terrific one. But his tin ear for substantive public policy evidently hasn’t improved during his exile.
Abbott can operate a wrecking ball with aplomb, but he’s no nation builder – his track record boasts little more than an abandoned parental leave scheme.
And now, he’s ignored the consensus on nuclear energy that’s existed for decades. What’s more, our closest partner, New Zealand, is absolutely opposed to nuclear subs to the point where it backed away from the US over the issue. What kind of a message has Abbott sent across the Tasman?
But perhaps the best person to explain the shortcomings of his idea is the defence minister, Marise Payne, who not only pointed out that Abbott designed the process to pick the subs, but then slammed his naivety in ignoring those conclusions now.
“Australia currently lacks the qualified personnel, experience, infrastructure, training facilities and regulatory systems required to design, construct, maintain and operate a fleet of nuclear submarines,” she said. “Developing this capacity domestically would take far longer than ten years.”
But other than that, it’s a cracker of an idea.
So what was the point of Thursday’s speech about the subs? Like everything he’s done this week, it’s an attempt to pitch himself as the leader Australia needs to keep us safe. It was a torpedo aimed at Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership – via the troubled Christopher Pyne, of course, who has eagerly become Australia’s Mr Submarines in a bid to keep his SA constituents happy. It seems unlikely they’d welcome their precious plant being upgraded to handle uranium.
Abbott is trying to rebrand himself as a teller of hard truths, unfettered by the politically correct, moderates who are too chicken to stick up for our national interest. Nobody will mess with Australia if we have nuclear subs, he claims, but Turnbull and Labor are too weak to say it.
He’s channelling Trump, trying to be the kind of straight talker that he sometimes was in opposition but rarely was as prime minister.
This all ties in with his latest plan to win government, currently outlined in a splashy graphic on his website. He’s pitched versions of this five-point plan over the past year or so – I’ve taken a close look at a previous attempt.
Abbott’s desperate to take the Coalition to the right to win back conservative voters. But we know what happens when he does that, because that’s what he did for two years. What happens is that the Coalition tanks in the polls.
(That’s also what happened, incidentally, when Turnbull proved to be more Abbott-like as PM than we know his personal views would dictate.)
Abbott is obsessed with luring Bernardi voters back inside the tent, but it doesn’t work. Trying to pitch to a small number of hardliners alienates far more voters in the middle.
It’s rather tragic how determined our former PM is to prolong the agony that his colleagues visited on him back in 2015, without learning any lessons from why they did.
By contrast, his colleagues know that leadership dramas are fatal for incumbents, as they were for Labor in 2013. That’s why whenever Abbott tries this stunt, senior ministers smack down his ideas – even his former ally Mathias Cormann did so earlier this year. They know Abbott’s self-indulgent posturing takes the focus away from the government’s substantive policies.
You’d think that having benefited so spectacularly from Labor’s prolonged instability, the last thing he’d want to do is inflict the same fate on the Coalition. But we can only conclude that the poor fellow thinks people were voting for him in 2013 instead of against Labor.
Sad, as Trump would say. All his would-be Aussie imitator has achieved this week is a nuclear-fuelled boost to his passage towards political oblivion.
