Tony Abbott has hit out at senior members of his own government over the failed China extradition treaty, saying ministers should spend less time trying to trash critics and get on with governing.
The former prime minister intervened in the China extradition issue, which blew up on Tuesday when Malcolm Turnbull was forced to withdraw the resolution to ratify a bilateral extradition agreement.
The government’s backdown came after Labor signalled it would not support the agreement in the Senate, where the government needed a majority to ratify the deal, signed by the Howard government in 2007.
Abbott and a number of his conservative colleagues, including Eric Abetz, had already indicated they did not support ratification. Liberal-turned-independent Cory Bernardi led the charge for a disallowance motion which would have blocked ratification in the Senate on Wednesday. Critics said Australia could not guarantee the credibility of the Chinese legal system.
After the deal fell over, foreign minister Julie Bishop rounded on some government members, suggesting they did not trust Australia’s own legal system. The extradition deal would require ministerial approval and allow court appeals before any Chinese national was extradited to China.
On Friday, Abbott told News Corp he had received a briefing note that backed his claim that he did not favour ratification of the extradition treaty based on 2014 legal advice. Abbott later told 2GB it was very bad practice for government ministers to blame everyone else.
“Ministers in government should spend less time trying to trash critics and get on with government,” he said. “Plainly the whole extradition process was badly mishandled by senior members of the government.”
Although he would not name “senior ministers”, Bishop and justice minister Michael Keenan had defended the extradition treaty on Tuesday.
Abbott said senior ministers should have realised there was a problem because government backbench members of the joint standing committee on treaties (Jscot) had raised a series of problems in hearings in 2016.
“There was plenty of official advice that we should not do this, including official advice to me in late 2014 and yet we had senior members of the government claiming earlier this week on two occasions I had somehow encouraged the Chinese government to think ratification was imminent,” Abbott said.
“Now this is simply false.”
It is understood that while legal advice may have advised the government to hold off on ratification in 2014, the foreign affairs department and the attorney general’s department revised that advice. By May 2015, both were advising to go ahead with ratification.
Abbott said he obtained the briefing note of 2014 advice because records were made available to former prime ministers so they could give “true and accurate accounts” for their time in government.
“I used this document to give a true and accurate account of my time in government, entirely in accordance with the rules because I was given advice by government that we should not proceed to ratify this treaty at the time and that is what I did.”
Abbott said there might well be advice from the foreign affairs department from mid-2015 but “to the best of my recommendation and the best of Prime Minister and Cabinet’s ability to search the records, that advice never came to me”.
“It’s the government’s job to explain why policies are right and proper, it’s not to run around trashing colleagues,” Abbott said.
He said in the past 18 months senior colleagues had made false or misleading claims about him.
“This time they have been caught out and I’m very pleased they have been caught out because hopefully they will finally learn the lesson that briefing against colleagues – that cowardly anonymous briefing against colleagues – is very destructive to a team and very counterproductive for a government,” Abbott said.
