On Monday, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott lost a leadership ballot among the lawmakers of the ruling Liberal Party to Malcolm Turnbull, the communications minister, for whom Abbott is expected to step aside. The Australian people greeted another bloodless coup at the pinnacle of their government with indifference—and onions.
Abbott, the nation’s fourth Prime Minister in five years, exhibited a feckless machismo, which often verged on eccentricity. Visiting a farm in Tasmania earlier this year, he picked up a raw onion and bit into it as though it were an apple. It was the GIF seen ’round the world. “Better than any other onions I’ve eaten in a long time,” Abbott said, as the farmer stood dumbstruck. Soon after the result of the dramatic leadership challenge was announced, #putoutyouronions was trending on Twitter, and thousands of bulbs of all varieties were photographed on front porches, and even outside Parliament House, in Canberra. It was less a loving tribute than a door slam after a drawn-out breakup. Like Beyoncé might have said, “Everything you own in the box to the left,” Tony.
Abbott had an uneasy relationship with voters even at the time of his ascent, in 2013. The center-right Liberal Party won that election in part because its opponents, the Labor Party, had spent the previous three years squabbling over whether Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard should be Prime Minister. Labor’s dispute was, of course, partly about ego, but was also emblematic of a broader identity crisis, namely over the extent to which a party with roots in the trade-union movement should now speak for the progressive urban left. Amid this ideological turmoil, Abbott and the Liberals represented a coherent set of values. People weren’t sure they liked the values, necessarily—there were signs that Abbott wanted to move the party more to the right than Australians had historically been comfortable with—but they were, at the very least, there.
As an exporter mainly of raw materials and agricultural products, particularly to China, Australia was, until very recently, sheltered from economic distress. This meant that the biggest issue on which Abbott took a stand was the Labor Party’s implementation of a price on carbon, which he repealed on his first day in office. (Climate change is “faddish,” he has said.) The other major political debate in Australia was, and continues to be, about the treatment of asylum seekers. Like his Liberal predecessor John Howard, and not unlike the Labor Party, either, Abbott framed the issue of people arriving by boat seeking refugee status as one of national security. The numbers are small (as of June, just over two thousand people, including children, were being held in immigration-detention facilities), and the international obligations are clear (various treaties protect the rights of asylum seekers regardless of how they arrive or whether they have a visa), but it’s impossible to overstate, and difficult to explain, the national hysteria about “boat people.” (Notice the uptick in scare quotes—we’re about to enter the land of serious political spin.) Labor continued the “offshore processing” of asylum seekers, on the islands of Nauru and elsewhere; this was an extension of Howard’s “Pacific Solution,” and was ultimately designed to make sure that people arriving by boat without a visa would not be allowed to settle in Australia. Abbott went one step further, resolving to “turn back the boats” with a military-led border patrol called “Operation Sovereign Borders.” He kept his promise: earlier this year, the U.N.H.C.R. accused the Australian government of paying smugglers to divert boats, and Abbott didn’t bother denying the allegations.
“Boat people” and the “carbon tax” were the issues that swept Abbott to power, and no one could accuse him of not dealing with them once in office. But, as Labor continued its infighting, there were signs that Abbott wanted to deal with other things, too—things about which Australians felt more fond, like the largely functional health-care system, the national broadcaster, and the progressive taxation system for repaying university fees. As a young man, Abbott had entered a seminary, for which the media called him the “Mad Monk.” There were fears in the fiercely secular electorate that he was letting his religion get in the way of governing, like when he was asked about issues such as gay marriage and abortion. He reintroduced knights and dames to the Australian honors system, and this year gave the nation’s newest, highest honor to Prince Philip, who in 2002 asked an indigenous Australian, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” The world’s most famous ex-Australian, formerly a supporter, complained. “Abbott knighthood a joke and an embarrassment,” Rupert Murdoch tweeted, and, shortly after, Abbott conceded, “I probably overdid it on awards.”
Last year, before the G20 summit, Abbott vowed to “shirt-front” President Putin over what he saw as Putin’s involvement in backing the rebels implicated in the MH17 tragedy; instead of following through on his threat of an aggressive Australian Rules football maneuver, Abbott apparently made sure that Putin was given a particularly anti-social koala to hug at the conference photo call. For a time, Australians, who revile politicians even more than Americans, and who are used to seeing their leaders run around in Speedos (or budgie-smugglers, as they’re known), were amused by his awkwardness, like when he said that no one is “the suppository of all wisdom,” or paused for a full twenty-eight seconds after a reporter asked him a tough question. But some of the gaffes were more revealing. The self-proclaimed Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs said that it was right to cut funding for remote indigenous communities, because Aborigines practicing traditional ways were making a “life-style choice.” And, despite appointing himself the Minister for Women, Abbott seemed to grapple with how to speak to and about them, such as when he rated the “sex appeal” of a colleague running for office, or, in a Trumpian move, introduced himself on television as “the guy with the not-bad-looking daughters.” When he was asked about his government’s biggest achievements for women, he cited his “repeal of the carbon tax,” because “women are particularly focussed on the household budget.”
Little wonder that Monday’s leadership challenge was the second for Abbott in seven months. Turnbull, who narrowly defeated Abbott, is very different in style from Abbott, and in moving the Liberal Party back toward the center represents a victory for the élites over populism. Turnbull led the unsuccessful referendum for an Australian republic in 1999, supports gay marriage, and, with a background in investment banking, will probably take a more pragmatic, open approach to foreign policy. He is, in short, every Labor supporter’s favorite Liberal. The onions are out, keeping vigil for the Mad Monk, but for most Australians there are no tears.
