<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/20/tony-abbott-history-australian-democracy-trumpian-half-truths-marcia-langton>
"Are there two conservative political leaders with the name Tony Abbott? The
author of
Australia, A History: How an ancient land became a great democracy.
And the one who praised Viktor Orbán in his speech at the Hungarian conference
of Conservative Political Action Network, or Cpac, the same Viktor Orbán who is
accused of steadily destroying democracy in Hungary.
There is one Tony Abbott but two faces. At the same Cpac conference in Hungary,
he stated: “Trump 1.0 and Brexit were popular revolts that couldn’t quite drain
the swamp. We have to hope that Trump 2.0 will be more successful, lest
resistance to moral vanity projects be further discredited.” It’s as plain as
daylight that US president Trump’s administration is trying to dismantle
democracy in the US, so the question is, what is it that Abbott is hoping will
be more “successful”?
The answer is white Christian nationalism, albeit an eccentric Catholic,
parochial version expounded by the right kind of immigrant that Abbott extolls
in his speeches at Cpac, white and British. Abbott was an acolyte of Bob
Santamaria, who led the traditionalist conservative Catholic and anti-communist
movement in Australia and was a founder of the Democratic Labor party, which
split from the Australian Labor party in the 1950s and kept them out of power
until 1972.
Frank Bongiorno, professor of history at the Australian National University,
judges the book highly: Abbott “has done a good job with
Australia: A
History. There are places where he has done a very good job.” When I read in
the introduction that Abbott attributed the term “fire-stick farming” to
palaeontologist and environmentalist Tim Flannery, rather than historian
Geoffrey Blainey, my suspicions were aroused. In 1975, in
The Triumph of the
Nomads, Blainey argued that “firestick farming” was “a symbol of their
technology and often a sign of their achievement” and completely transformed
the continent, an idea pursued rigorously by Bill Gammage in
The Greatest
Estate on Earth. Flannery, on the other hand, argued in
The Future Eaters
that Aboriginal people caused the extinction of the megafauna, a theory long
since overturned by evidence.
I have several theories about the blend of fact and error, evidence and myth,
ideology and history that Abbott weaves together when claiming Australia as
“the world’s most successful immigrant nation” with quite a few
counter-arguments to follow. I dismissed the possibility that the book was
written by AI or by volunteers at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation or
the Institute of Public Affairs.
Blainey wrote the congratulatory preface, and I returned to this to try to
understand the contradictions disguised in some “very good” history. There is
indeed some “very good” historical writing in this book. Yet I was left asking
why, when it sits alongside sloppy rhetorical arguments that are not entirely
supported by the facts."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
