Tony Abbott in frame for top Liberal Party job

Former prime minister Tony Abbott is in the frame to become president of the Liberal Party and join ally Angus Taylor in the fight to reclaim the party’s status as Australia’s dominant right-wing force from One Nation.

In what would be his most high-profile political role since leading the nation, Abbott is expected to put his hand up to lead the party’s organisational wing, which runs campaigns, fundraising and strategy, before a vote to appoint the position in late May.

It may turn into a contest between Abbott and another former party leader, Alexander Downer, who has also been mooted as a candidate.

Some of Taylor’s right-wing supporters have expressed their reservations about appointing Abbott, who is adored by the conservative establishment but polarising elsewhere. Abbott was ousted as prime minister in 2015 after a period of poor polling and lost his seat in 2019.

Taylor, likely to lose Sussan Ley’s seat of Farrer in a byelection on Saturday, has told several people he is confident Abbott would handle the role in a disciplined manner and refrain from generating unwanted headlines, according to sources familiar with the conversations.

A source who has witnessed conversations between Taylor and Abbott said the opposition leader had demonstrated an ability to push back and be firm with the former prime minister.

Abbott’s backers hope the 68-year-old – a prolific writer on Substack, podcaster and speaker at conservative forums worldwide – will inject energy and ideas into an ailing federal executive that Taylor and others want to turn into a sharper campaigning unit.

They also believe the staunch social conservative can rebuild passion in the party’s dispirited base, which has flocked to Pauline Hanson since Peter Dutton lost the last election. He has been campaigning in the regional NSW seat of Farrer before this weekend’s byelection.

“This is going to be a matter for the [party’s] federal council,” Taylor told this masthead on Tuesday. Abbott did not weigh into the speculation about the presidency when contacted for this story.

Taylor and other senior figures are respectful of current president John Olsen and are not pushing him out. Olsen was expected to tell associates on Wednesday afternoon that he would be stepping down after overseeing two elections and a saga over whether to keep secret the review into Dutton’s shellacking. The party president’s role is unpaid and equivalent to the chair of a company board, with the ability to set culture and direction.Abbott has for years urged the Liberal Party to create a more open and democratic internal culture to take power out of the hands of factional powerbrokers, particularly moderates from NSW, and re-embrace a more pure conservative agenda on migration and green energy.

“I hope that you will give us one last chance to prove ourselves worthy of your trust,” he told conservatives at a political conference in September.

Abbott’s two-year prime ministership was dogged by debates on same-sex marriage and his attitudes on the role of women in society. However, the election of Donald Trump demonstrates rising support for more traditional values and a backlash to multiculturalism and other liberal ideals.

Abbott, who has worked with controversial right-wing group Advance and sits on the Fox Corporation board, told the Inside Politics podcast in December that some of his views were out of step with mainstream opinion.
Taylor’s speech last month on migration, where he talked about “numbers being too high and standards being too low”, was influenced by Abbott’s thinking, according to Coalition MPs.

Several MPs said Taylor’s comments on ABC’s Insiders about the risk of people coming from “bad countries” had frustrated some in the Liberal-leaning Iranian diaspora.
Asked about the remarks, Taylor told this masthead it was “pretty obvious I’m talking about the regime” rather than the country itself.

Sources said Abbott received more applause and cheers than any other figure, including Dutton or Ley, when delivering a pep talk at the party’s campaign headquarters last year.

But Abbott’s arch-conservative agenda might make it difficult to broaden the party’s support to voters who are not rusted-on conservatives.

Abbott said on the Inside Politics podcast last year that he held repeated talks with Dutton about returning to politics.
“Now, different people said to me, ‘Oh, Tony, why don’t you have another go?’ and my view then and now is that I couldn’t or shouldn’t do anything that makes the life of the leader of the Liberal Party more complicated,” he said at the time.

At a meeting with young Liberals in Brisbane this week, Abbott appeared to take a swipe at One Nation’s link to billionaire Gina Rinehart, who donated a $2 million plane to Hanson.

The Liberal Party is preferencing One Nation at the Farrer byelection to avoid blowback from its conservative voters who may be turned off by any decision to preference a more progressive candidate. The trade-off is that swinging voters in the middle of the political spectrum might be turned off by the Liberals’ helping One Nation.

“No one owns us the way the unions own the Labor Party and indeed, a small group of shareholders seem to have a very strong interest in the One Nation Party,” Abbott said, according to The Spectator magazine.