RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/politics/tony-abbott-we-have-got-to-roar/

Below a slightly and lightly edited transcript of former PM Tony Abbott’s address to the recent CPAC conference in Brisbane. ‘What we need right now in Australia is not a Reform Party,’ he said, citing the rise of Nigel Farage’s populist movement in the UK,  ‘but a reformed party’, especially in the Liberal wastelands of Victoria and NSW.

It’s wonderful to be here in Brisbane! It’s wonderful to be with so many people who love our country and want it to be better. Like me, I am sure that you believe that this is the best country in the world. Our job is to keep it that way. The contemporary tragedy, as we all know, is that this country is drifting backwards. The fact that millions of people would live here if they could is a great vote of confidence in Australia. But we’re not as good as we should be, and our job is to make us better, quickly.Our economy is stagnant. Real disposable incomes – that’s to say living standards – have dropped almost 10% in the last three years. For the past two years, we have had declining GDP-per-person. Our productivity has gone backwards from where it was a decade ago. Our government wants to close down the great productive industries that have made us rich, whether it’s the coal industry, the gas industry, the salmon industry, the logging industry – and I will get on to the energy train wreck later!

Our society is fragmenting.

We have three flags, not one. Some 80 Labor-Greens councils are refusing to hold citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day. We have too many migrants, and too many of them are living in Hotel Australia rather than joining Team Australia.And yet you can hardly blame them when we have a left establishment which is embarrassed about our Anglo-Celtic core culture and does not like our Judaeo-Christian ethos – even though it’s these things that have made us great.

Our strategic peril is deepening all the time. As communist China continues the biggest and the fastest military build-up in history, we sit complacently. We say it’s all okay because we just might get some nuclear submarines in 10 or 15 years. But on that point, all I can say is, God save the King – who did have a meeting with President Trump and was able to raise the importance of the AUKUS agreement in a way that our Prime Minister never has.

So what’s my task today? First, I admit, it is to apologise, to all you decent, patriotic Australians, Australians who believe in the family, in small business, and in the institutions that stood the test of time. Australians who want smaller government, lower taxes, and greater freedom. Australians who believe that this is the best country on earth to live and want to keep it that way. My job is to apologise to you that the government that was elected in 2013 did not do better. 

And yes, we did stop the boats. And yes, we did scrap the carbon tax and the mining tax. And yes, we did start the biggest federally funded infrastructure build in Australia’s history. And yes, we did get those big trade deals done. But then something happened. That something was the revolving door prime ministership. To his great credit, Scott Morrison signed AUKUS, probably the most significant military development since ANZUS, a sign that at long last this country wanted to pull its weight in the wider world.

And yes, there was another prime minister. And yes, we did get same-sex marriage. As I say, I apologise to all you decent patriotic Australians that a government that should have been as good as John Howard’s, in some respects turned out to be more like Malcolm Fraser revisited. But all of that is not not a reason to quit. It’s a reason to redouble our efforts to be as good as we can be. And likewise, I am sorry that the Coalition at the last election did not make the most of its opportunities to get rid of the worst government since Whitlam.

We did not campaign for our pro-nuclear policy. We did not campaign against Labor’s unrealised capital gains tax policy, or their wealth tax. Instead, we made the election a contest over who could give the biggest handout, a contest which the Coalition is always bound to lose. And yet, I do want to pay this tribute here in his city to my great friend Peter Dutton. Along with the wonderful Warren Mundine and the blessed Jacinta Price, he did defeat the Voice. He did put nuclear on the agenda for our country. And by having the courage and the integrity to put the Greens last, something that Anthony Albanese would not do, he has all but consigned them to history, at least in the house House of Representatives – and that is a historic achievement!

But I do think that I speak for all decent Liberals when I say we must be a better opposition this time than last time. And we must be a better government next time than last time. I can say here that the Liberal Party has no divine right always to be one of the natural parties of government in this country. I accept that if we are to survive and flourish into the future, we have to earn that right. But I hope that you will give us one last chance to prove ourselves worthy of your trust, because, for all our faults and failings, we are still the best hope of better government in this country.

[A member of the audience yells ‘Pauline Hanson!’]

Pauline is a wonderful woman. The one political party which consistently gave support to the Coalition in the Senate was One Nation. But I do hope, as I said, that you will give us this chance to earn your trust, because I do believe that with your help, the Coalition can provide the better government that Australia so desperately needs.

Now, remember this: effort does not guarantee success – but lack of effort does guarantee failure! And remember this too: a majority that stays silent does not long remain a majority – and we have got to roar, make our voice be heard right around this country.

Now I know some of you are excited by developments overseas. I know some of you are particularly excited by the prospects of Nigel Farage’s Reform party in the United Kingdom. And I don’t say that something like that should never, ever happen here in Australia. But what we need right now in Australia is not a reform party, but if I may say so, a reformed party.

A reformed Liberal Party, especially in New South Wales and in Victoria, where, for too long, factional warlords have turned out great party into a closed shop and an insider’s club where the members are treated like mushrooms.

As my first political mentor, the late great, B.A. Santamaria, always said, if you want to help to build a better country, what you need to do is not sit on the sidelines and complain, but join the political party which best reflects your views and to make it the best it possibly can be.

[A clamour of voices from the audience: ‘One Nation!’]

Yes, one Australian nation under the best possible government, a Liberal National government. Everyone who normally votes Liberal, and everyone who is interested in public life, should be encouraged to join our party and to make a a difference: to debate policy, to choose candidates; and, above all else, to be free to think for themselves rather than believe whatever they’re told by some factional warlord.

Back in 2009, when I became the Opposition leader, I said that the job of an opposition is not to make weak compromises with the bad government, but to be a strong and clear alternative. So what would I know about politics? I have no great authority, except that I am the last person to have led the Liberal Party from opposition into government. So I want to offer two thoughts to a group of patriotic Australians who just want our country to succeed.

It goes without saying that this is a country with an immigrant character. From 1788, modern Australia has been comprised of the people who have come to this country. Almost all of us are migrants or the descendants of migrants. And the fact that millions of people have been able to come here from all over the world to make a better life for themselves and their children has lent an heroic dimension to our national story. 

But just because we always have been and always will be a settler society, doesn’t mean that immigration should be anyone, from everywhere, all the time. Right now, sustained record migration is putting downward pressure on wages, upward pressure on housing costs, and serious strain on our social and physical infrastructure. We simply do not have the houses for a half-a-million newcomers every single year. So what I say to my colleagues in Canberra is that numbers must come down, preferably to the levels on the Howard era.

And we have to make it absolutely clear to every single person who comes here that you have to take seriously the words of the citizenship pledge:

“From this time forward, under God, I pledge my allegiance to Australia and its people whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.”

Migrants come here to join us, not to change us, and we let them down – we let our migrants down – if we dilute our Anglo-Celtic core culture and if we water down our fundamental Judaeo-Christian ethos.

On the topic of climate and energy, I do think I have earned some credibility. Having fought Labor to a draw in 2010, campaigning against Kevin Rudd’s Emissions Trading Scheme — that great big new tax on everything. We stormed home in the 2013 election, campaigning against Julia Gillard’s carbon tax, which was socialism masquerading as environmentalism.

An opportunity has opened for us to take back Australia. The Albanese government’s commitment to 70% emissions reduction could be their political death warrant, if we handle it properly. Having created a 43% target for 2030 that it will fail to meet, and an 82% renewable energy target that it will also fail to meet, this government has doubled down on failure in its five-year-plan by announcing even more ambitious and even less achievable targets for its ten-year-plan. 

We have to be absolutely clear about this: Australia won’t meet Labor’s emissions reduction target, but it would commit national economic suicide in the attempt.

Running out power system to cut emissions rather than producing reliable and affordable power has already meant – think about it – that we subsidise renewables to increase their penetration.

We subsidise coal to keep the lights on.

And we subsidise consumers to prevent a voter revolt, which amounts to an absurd money-go-round.

Already, the result has been much higher power prices, the closure of much heavy industry, and the demand for subsidies to survive from the rest, starting with Glencore smelters, up to Mount Isa.

Let’s be crystal clear about this, in particular: There is only one renewable energy superpower, and that’s communist China. They supply the solar panels and the wind turbines that are undermining our economic strength and increasing our strategic vulnerability.

This is madness. And it will just get worse under this government. Our opponents peddle a false environmental apocalypse to justify upending our lives in ways we would never accept if we were told the truth. Apart from much higher energy prices, because of the need for reliable backup for unreliable renewables, achieving 70% emissions reductions would mean the end of heavy industry in this country, the near-total replacement of our vehicle fleet, much less meat in our diet, and much less air travel in our lives.

This is not even to mention the devastation of prime agricultural land and pristine national parks with forests of wind turbines and carpets of solar panels stretching as far as the eye can see and taking up a land area at least one and a half times the size of Tasmania.

Honestly, this is the very midsummer of madness – a moon beam from the larger lunacy. This is destroying the environment in order to save the planet. It must stop. The government says that this transition is the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution, but refuses to cost it other than to say that a disorderly transition would cost $2 trillion more than an orderly one.

When they start mentioning figures like that, you know they are conning you. Net Zero Australia put the cost at up to $1.5 trillion by 2030 alone. The Business Council of Australia recently costed just a 60% emissions reduction target at up to half a trillion dollars.

When pressed, the government falls back on saying that the cost of action will always be less than the cost of inaction. And yet we know that the cost of inaction is virtually nothing, because that’s what the former chief scientist, Professor Alan Finkel, told the Senate would be the global effect of Australia’s cuts to emissions: virtually nothing.

I consider myself a conservationist, and one of my boasts as prime minister was the establishment of the Green Army, to give us cleaner water and to eliminate feral animals and noxious weeds. I accept that we only have one planet and we have got to hand it on to our children and grandchildren in good shape. And yes, I even accept that we should reduce emissions. It’s a worthy objective, provided it’s at minimal cost, because the physics tells us that all things being equal, an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide would warm the planet. 

But not all things are equal! Have these people not heard of sunspot activity? Have these people not heard of oscillations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun? Have these people not looked to the sky and asked themselves what is causing the heat necessary for us to live. There is no reason to think that mankind’s carbon dioxide is not the only, nor even the main, contributor to climate change.

If it were, how are previous climate changes to be explained? What caused the Ice Age? The Industrial Revolution. That’s what caused the Ice Age. What caused the Roman Warm Period? Coal mining in Australia caused that! What made Greenland arable in the Middle Ages? Oh, that was gas extraction in Australia.

The trouble with maintaining a commitment to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050, come what may, is the straitjacket it places on all policy. That’s why this commitment has got to be dropped.

On one level, an argument about what might happen 25 years hence, at least eight elections away, is an exercise in political theology. But keeping such a commitment while opposing the government’s current reduction target just means that even more Herculean measures will be needed later.

I also want to remind my former colleagues that every time the coalition has fought an election on climate and energy – in 2010, in 2013, and yes, in 2019 – we have conquered. Every time we have “me-tooed” labour, we have failed.

Next Zero: Are we for it or against it? We have got to be against it. My side of politics owes it to the country and to our future to have this fight and to win it.

In closing, I want to clarify one thing. As far as I am concerned, politics and public life have never been a career. I mistrust anyone who speaks of their time in Parliament as a political career. The privilege of time in Parliament is not a career, it’s a cause. And I tell you this, you do not give up the cause just because you’ve left the Parliament. As long as there is breath in my body, I will be doing everything I can to help my party and to help our country, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

So, may God bless Australia. May God save the King. And may all of us be our very best selves now and in the future.