The Right Words
Julian Leeser introducing Tony Abbott at the launch in Berowra, Sydney, on March 7.
Tony Abbott brought discipline, passion and extensive philosophical knowledge to the prime ministership, which is reflected in his brilliant anthology of speeches. By Julian Leeser.
Introduction for Tony Abbott at the launch of Abbott: The Defining Speeches, Sydney, March 7.
Ladies and gentlemen, on 4 July 1963, at a speech delivered at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, Sir Robert Menzies had this to say: “It is important to recall that men of great talent who embark upon the stormy seas of public affairs, and particularly those who achieve posts of leadership and responsibility, will frequently be over-praised by their friends – I haven’t had too much of that – and over attacked by their opponents.”
Over the course of his 25-year parliamentary career, Tony Abbott has certainly been over-attacked by his opponents and I think perhaps, like Menzies, insufficiently praised by his friends.
The launch of a book of Tony Abbott’s prime ministerial speeches provides an opportunity to even the ledger.
I congratulate the Menzies Research Centre and my friends Paul Ritchie and David Furse-Roberts on producing what I hope will be the first in a series of collected Tony Abbott speeches.
BUY: Click here to buy your copy of Abbott: The Defining Speeches.
A book of Tony Abbott’s prime ministerial speeches only covers two years of a vast and as yet unfinished public career that stretches back to his days as a student leader, Rhodes Scholar, trainee priest, journalist, executive director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, back-bencher, founder of Pollie Pedal, teacher’s aid in remote Aboriginal communities, front-bencher, senior Cabinet Minister under John Howard, special envoy, director of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation and now elder statesman.
In each role he used his great gifts with language to fashion public debate and thinking about important topics underpinned by a depth of reading and a life spent learning and engaging with the culture.
In fact, the only phase of his career he has not written a substantial speech on is his role in the Davidson Rural Fire Brigade and the Queenscliff Surf Club but he is still active in both organisations and so there is still time.
The Tony Abbott I know
I have many personal reasons to be grateful to Tony Abbott for his friendship. He gave me my start in federal politics; he encouraged me to produce a report for the late Paul Ramsay the fruit of which is the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation on whose board we both serve; it was Tony who inspired me to get involved in indigenous affairs to in his words “help my fellow Australians open their hearts as much as change their minds on Aboriginal policy”; and he has been a constant source of encouragement and guidance.
I have known Tony Abbott since 1993 when he was Executive Director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy. I joined ACM when it was founded and had been asked as a year 12 student, who had just finished the HSC, to organise some friends to attend the mass rally that Tony had organised at the Sydney Town Hall.
My friends and I went to sit down the front because we wanted to show the TV cameras that the monarchy was not an old person’s cause.
ACM had been launched in the small vestibule of the Town Hall the previous year but to fill the Sydney Town Hall for a cause which seemed unfashionable was audacious.
It is a tribute to Tony’s skills as an organiser and an advocate that he put together a stirring rally and gave so many of us who believed in the cause a sense of pride and a sense that we were not alone in our beliefs.
This has been the hallmark of Tony’s leadership – to take difficult or unfashionable positions, advocate for them, organise for them and give others the courage to join him on the journey.
I got to know Tony over the next seven years through regularly attending ACM events, being a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and member of the National No Case committee where in 1999 we won a mighty victory and preserved the Constitution and the Crown.
In 2000 Tony asked me to come and work for him. The job interview took place over a steak dinner in a Canberra restaurant. As Tony has always been interested in the life of the mind, he wanted to know what I was reading, and which books had had the greatest influence on me.
I started working for Tony Abbott the following year just after he was promoted to Cabinet as Minister for Employment Workplace Relations and Small Business.
For a year I was his adviser on small business with responsibilities for helping prepare him for Question Time. When he offered me this role I told him I had never run a small business but he said, “Well, mate, I am sure you have shopped in many of them and you are a smart guy so I’m sure you’ll learn.”
In that role, I got to observe him up close. Tony worked incredibly hard getting in before 6am and finishing late into the night surviving on little more than a couple of Scotch Finger biscuits.
During the early evening of a busy parliamentary day Tony would often lock himself way in his room to think and write. And at least one day a month he took the whole day out of his diary to do the same. I think this is something too few of us in public life manage to do. But these times were critical for Tony to formulate his thoughts and get them down on paper.
I observed two remarkable things about Tony Abbott. First that Oxford, the priesthood and a curious mind had uniquely equipped him to be a great parliamentarian.
Tony had thought deeply about where he stood on the big questions confronting Australia and the West. He knew in a personal sense the answer to Micha’s question, “What does the Lord ask of me?”
Second the discipline of writing weekly papers at Oxford and turning out daily newspaper columns meant that Tony made the writing look easy and his messages always had cut through. As he says, “good writing is good thinking.”
Speech writing
Tony’s thoughts and his writing found expression in his speeches.
In those days, to prepare a major speech, Tony completed a first draft and sent it around the office for comment. He would also send it to a few select friends outside the office including the journalist, bon vivant and Abbott confidant, the late Christopher Pearson.
A substantially different draft would emerge although I would rarely recognise any of my own suggested phrases in the speech. This is because while Tony likes ideas, jousting and debate he was always his own best wordsmith.
Tony is inspired by that other great writer-statesman Winston Churchill, a man who it was said “sent the English Language into battle” and saved Western civilisation.
Like Churchill, Tony Abbott was a writer with a deep knowledge of history and an extraordinary imagination. Like Tony Abbott, Churchill laboured for hours over his speeches, sucking the words in his mouth so that the combination of words in a sentence would not only carry the correct image but have an arresting impact on the listener’s ear. And in many respects Tony Abbott is Churchillian.
The theme song for transformative conservative leader is Fanfare for the Unreasonable Man. As the transformative conservative leader stands up against the wisdom of his age and says, “Wrong way, go back.”
“The conventional wisdom in 2009 was that Kevin Rudd was unassailable and that his emissions trading scheme was inevitable. Only someone with Tony Abbot’s courage and advocacy skills could have turned the tables”
Like Churchill, there is an element about Tony Abbott that is crazy brave. In Churchill’s day appeasement was the conventional wisdom but Churchill, who had been wrong about so many things, was right on the big thing – that Hitler had to be stopped.
The conventional wisdom in 2009 was that Kevin Rudd was unassailable and that his emissions trading scheme was inevitable. Only someone with Tony Abbot’s courage and advocacy skills could have turned the tables.
When I went to visit Tony Abbott a few weeks after his prime ministership had been, in Enoch Powell’s words “cut off in mid-stream”, I thanked him for getting the two big things right – stopping the carbon tax and standing up to ISIS.
Indeed, I am told that in his last conversation with President Obama, having lost the prime ministership, despite facing an incredible sense of personal loss, Abbott remained focused and urged Obama to do more to fight against and destroy the ISIS death cult – proof that Tony Abbott is always focused on the big things.
Returning to the theme of this book
How difficult must it have been for Tony Abbott to reach the prime ministership and realise that there was simply never the time to write all his speeches himself? As the book reveals, “Tony Abbott was in parliament for almost 20 years before he had a speechwriter.”
Paul Ritchie was his first. And Paul Ritchie was an excellent choice.
This book was Paul’s idea. When Paul was called back to serve as Scott Morrison’s speech writer it was lovingly finished by David Furse-Roberts, who is a great historian of our political leaders.
Paul Ritchie and Tony Abbott have known each other since they worked for John Hewson in the early 1990s. Ritchie understood how important words are to Tony Abbott. As Ritchie writes, Tony “saw the essence of public life as shaping the debate because if you shape the debate you shape the direction of the country.”
The words in the book belong to Tony Abbott. Paul’s contribution is as a storyteller – providing a framework for a grand narrative and finding an important image or anecdote that inspires or crystallises the point a prime minister is trying to get across.
Conclusion
This book of speeches reveals various aspects of Tony Abbott’s character and achievements.
First, the book reveals Abbott as a writer with cut through phrases and simple language and constant use of contrasts. Never forgetting the need to remind the listener that politics is about choices. Even when he is speaking about programs the speeches are not programmatic, they remain exercises in persuasion not laundry lists of achievements.
Second, the book reveals Abbott the philosopher – a man who brought to government a firm moral underpinning which underscored why he was serving and what he saw Australia as being. He led a government which broadened the Liberal Tradition to include not just the liberal and conservative tradition but a patriotic tradition as well.
Third, it chronicles many of the achievements of the Abbott government as they were happening:
· Opening Australia for business by cutting red tape and repairing the budget
· Signing free trade agreements to give Australian producers access to more markets
· Abolishing taxes to give Australians more of their own money
· Stopping the boats to restore confidence in our immigration system
· Returning the rule of law to the workplace so people could get on with their jobs
· Rolling out infrastructure to get us home and off to work more quickly, and
· Internationally standing up to those who sort to harm Australia and Australians whether it was global Islamist terror in the form or ISIS or home grown terrorists, or whether it was Vladimir Putin for failing to take responsibility for the deaths of 38 Australians on flight MH17.
Finally, it reveals Tony Abbott as a man who has made and continues to make a significant mark on Australia. What Tony Abbott said of one of his predecessors could equally have been said of him:
Whether you were for him or against him it was his vision that drove our politics then and which still echoes through our public life. …. His [is] a life full of purpose. Proof, if proof were needed, that individuals do matter and can make a lasting difference to the country they love.
Tony, that is what you have done and continue to do.
Tony Abbott launching his book in Geelong.