David marr tony abbott biography of michael

Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015

For other people named Tony Abbott, see Tony Abbott (disambiguation).

Anthony John Abbott (; born 4 November 1957) is an Australian former politician who served as the 28th prime minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015. He held office as the leader of the Liberal Party of Australia and was the member of parliament (MP) for the New South Wales division of Warringah from 1994 to 2019.

Abbott was born in London, England, to an Australian mother and a British father, and moved to Sydney at the age of two. He studied economics and law at the University of Sydney, and then attended The Queen's College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After graduating from Oxford, Abbott briefly trained as a Roman Catholic seminarian, and later worked as a journalist, manager, and political adviser. In 1992, he was appointed director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, a position he held until his election to parliament as a member of parliament (MP) for the division of Warringah at the 1994 Warringah by-election, before the election of the Howard government in 1996.

Following the 1998 election, Abbott was appointed Minister for Employment Services in the second Howard ministry. He was promoted to cabinet in 2001 as Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business. In 2003, Abbott became Minister for Health and Ageing, retaining this position until the defeat of the Howard government at the 2007 election. Initially serving in the shadow cabinets of Brendan Nelson and then Malcolm Turnbull, Abbott resigned from the front bench in November 2009, in protest against Turnbull's support for the Rudd government's proposed Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Forcing a leadership ballot on the subject, Abbott narrowly defeated Turnbull to become the party's leader and leader of the opposition. Abbott led the Liberal-National Coali

From David Marr’s Quarterly Essay, “Political Animal, The Making of Tony Abbott”, here are nine things we didn’t know about the man …

Tony’s Catholicism is of a recent vintage. His grandfather, Marr explains, “had made a bargain with God that were his family to survive a voyage to Australia in the early months of World War II they would go over to Rome. Untouched by torpedoes, the Abbotts converted with some fervour”. This may explain why he burns with the zeal of the newly converted, unlike “cultural Catholics” who believe that if several generations of their family have regularly attended Mass then they don’t have to (my husband).

As a teenager, he had a very odd attitude to sex. “I was sorta wrestling with this idea of the bloody priesthood, and I kept saying, ‘No, no! No sex! Against the rules! Then I’d say, ‘Oh, all right’.” And this was in the 1970s?

When his girlfriend, Kathy McDonald, became pregnant, 19-year-old Tony was unwilling to marry her as it would rule out the priesthood. It would also mean he could not apply for a Rhodes Scholarship, as it was then open only to single applicants. The  relationship broke down when she was seven months pregnant but he came to the hospital when the baby was born and held him for a few minutes, before he was adopted out. (Thirty-five years later, the son was found not to have been Abbott’s.)

He is alleged to have physically intimidated and punched the wall next to Barbara Ramjan after she defeated him in the election for the president of the Students’ Representative Council at Sydney University. Asked by Marr about it, Abbott said he had no memory of the incident, but put out a statement on Saturday saying that it had never happened. He said, she said …

His views about homos-xuality are scarier than we think. At university, writing in uni paper Honi Soit, he takes the reader into the SRC Women’s Collective, full of women who are “grim faced, overall-clad, hard, strident, often

Tony Abbott is fading fast. Within days of his fall he’s looking like a prime minister we once had a long time ago. The drama of his execution this week was muted by the lingering disbelief that he was ever there. His government has slipped easily into the past. He is gone and barely missed.

“The beauty of being leader is you are freer to be yourself,” he remarked five years ago after becoming leader of the opposition. But that self proved, in the end, not made for the politics of today.

Abbott was a brawling politician of great skill but he was also – and fatally – still in many ways the cold war kid who rode out with Bob Santamaria’s forces in the late 1970s to confront the zeitgeist and save western civilisation.

Along the way, Abbott would abandon nearly every policy Santa stood for but he never lost the old man’s fear of the future and the belief that his God-given mission was to save us from enemies we don’t even realise are there.

In Abbott’s political imagination danger lurks everywhere. Whether it’s the death cult abroad or the ABC at home, there is always more at stake than meets the eye. Ruin is at hand. Combat is imperative. Hyperbole is the order of the day.

In the end, that didn’t wash with Australia.

Abbott used to talk of himself as a mutt chasing a car. What happens, he used to wonder, when the dog catches the vehicle? The answer when he became prime minister turned out to be: not much.

It’s not that he didn’t have ideas. Opinion pieces were his strength in his early career as a journalist. Even as minister for health – and he was a good minister – he liked to lock himself away for days at a time to write newspaper pieces in which he threw around big, bold ideas.

But missing from these tens of thousands of words was much about strategy. Abbott does not have the profoundly professional imagination of John Howard, whose mind focused instinctively on the task of getting where he

There is a limit to what any writer can do in 20,000 words, so not too much should be expected of the essays in the Quarterly Essay series.

Nevertheless, a number of them have been influential, including QE 37 by David Marr, the now infamous Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd. That essay’s revelations of Rudd’s darker side played its part in undermining the Prime Minister prior to his removal in June of that year.

This context may have made Tony Abbott, the man likely to become prime minister next year, wary of being too open with Marr when he was researching his latest essay, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott. He did give Marr an interview but only allowed one skerrick from it to be made public.

“Political Animal” is a good read in typical Marr style, but it falls short of making any startling insights into the making of Abbott. It is also quite distracting, as it moves quickly backwards and forwards between historical analysis and contemporary snippets. It doesn’t quite hang together.

His starting point is abrupt: “Australia doesn’t want Tony Abbott. We never have.”

His main theme is that the opposition leaders is torn between “Politics Abbott” and “Values Abbott” and that eventually, “Politics Abbott” will win out.

He concludes:

The Abbott that matters is Politics Abbott. That’s the one who got him where he is today: an aggressive populist with a sharp tongue; a political animal with lots of charm; a born protégé with ambitions to lead; a big brain but no intellectual; a bluff guy who proved a more than competent minister; a politician with little idea what he might do if he ever got to the top; and a man profoundly wary of change.

That is sparkling writing and I agree with Marr’s conclusion, which is at odds with the wilder claims made about Abbott: that he will as prime minister he will let his Catholic values rule in some undemocratic way. But Marr doesn’t really get very far in explaining Abbott’s Catholic values.

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