{"id":687671,"date":"2026-05-22T16:35:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/687671\/"},"modified":"2026-05-22T16:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T16:35:09","slug":"saint-tony-wants-to-slay-the-dragon-but-is-blind-to-the-beasts-of-australias-past-ben-doherty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/687671\/","title":{"rendered":"Saint Tony wants to slay the dragon \u2013 but is blind to the beasts of Australia\u2019s past | Ben Doherty"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cGo forth in search of dragons to destroy,\u201d Tony Abbott<\/a>, in a lyrical moment, tells his audience at the Sydney writers\u2019 festival.<\/p>\n

Certainly, there is no rest in Australia\u2019s seemingly endless culture wars, the Manichean struggle of good versus evil, righteous versus ignoble, the virtues of straight-talking versus the perils of nuance and complexity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a good country, not a bad country,\u201d Abbott declares, for those playing along at home.<\/p>\n

The former prime minister\u2019s dragon metaphor on Friday was a reflection on the deployment of the Australian military \u2013 he argues Australian F-35s should have been dispatched to America and Israel\u2019s war to bomb Iran \u2013 but Abbott\u2019s call to arms could have been for any number of dragons that need slaying: environmentalism, welcomes to country, multiculturalism, dual-placenames, republicanism.<\/p>\n

Abbott has written Australia: A History<\/a>. And it is that, a history, one which prosecutes a very particular conception of what this nation is, and how it came to be.<\/p>\n

The false dichotomy of Black Armband versus Three Cheers history felt antediluvian when I first encountered it at school (too many decades ago now). A tiresome debate then for ancient, irrelevant figures.<\/p>\n

That it is being litigated again in 2026 is evidence of how little Australia has progressed, how there is, for some, almost a comfort to be found mired in the same, tired old culture wars.<\/p>\n

Abbott\u2019s talk \u2013 with no questions from the audience \u2013 hit all the predictable notes.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump should \u201cfinish the job in Iran\u201d, Australia has a \u201ccore Anglo-Celtic culture \u2026 a foundational Judeo-Christian ethic\u201d, the country has suffered because of \u201cthe injection of this concept of multiculturalism\u201d.<\/p>\n

Abbott believes great and powerful people (usually men) shape world history \u2013 he cites \u201cAlexander the Great or Richard the Lionheart or Nelson or Wellington or Napoleon\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the end what happens in this world is far less a function of great impersonal forces beyond our control, but of the decisions, for better or for worse, that individual people make.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did I imagine that pandemic?<\/p>\n

Make no mistake, Abbott can write.<\/p>\n

He can be eloquent and erudite, waxing especially lyrical when he is on the firmer ground of favoured subjects such as the government of John Howard (\u201carguably our best prime minister\u201d and in whose cabinet he served).<\/p>\n

Elegiac even, when (briefly) talking about his own premiership, or reflecting on the \u201cdestructive political cannibalism\u201d of recent political history, the antipodean bloodsport of tearing down political leaders.<\/p>\n

But self-reflection is not a strong suit. \u201cOne of my former colleagues made my life almost impossible,\u201d he bemoaned.<\/p>\n

Et tu Brute?<\/p>\n

And Abbott is blind \u2013 wilfully so \u2013 to so much.<\/p>\n

He glosses over the role of state governments in Australia\u2019s history, despite their fundamental significance in the lives of Australians every day, in policing, in providing hospitals, in educating children.<\/p>\n

He is sceptical of climate change, rejecting the view that \u201cthe science is settled\u201d.<\/p>\n

Over years in public life, Abbott has, admirably, dedicated significant time to sitting on country, meeting with Indigenous communities and leaders. But he seems to have learned little from it.<\/p>\n

His book does not mention genocide at all (the word features once in the book, in an endnote, the title of a different book).<\/p>\n

He rejects the term \u201cFirst Nations\u201d as fundamentally misleading, and celebrates the defeat of the voice referendum, repeating the canards of racial division from the no campaign, knowing that the question was never about race at all, but about indigeneity.<\/p>\n

Even within his arguments, internal inconsistencies abound.<\/p>\n

He says he disapproves of Indigenous acknowledgements of country \u2013 \u201cmetastasized into a form of separatism and a practice of grievance politics\u201d \u2013 but his disapproval is selective.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I\u2019m at Hermannsburg \u2026 and someone stands up and says, \u2018look, you\u2019re in Warlpiri country\u2019, or if I\u2019m in Alice Springs and someone says \u2018you\u2019re in Arrernte country\u2019, fair enough, because there are lots of Warlpiri people and Arrernte people around.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut if I\u2019m in Forestville and someone says, you\u2019re in Gadigal country, well, actually, I\u2019m in Tony Abbott country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hermannsburg, also known as Ntaria, is on the traditional lands of the Western Arrernte people.<\/p>\n

Abbott describes Australia as \u201ccolourblind\u201d, surely not an experience that accords with that of any person of colour in this place. To claim to be colourblind is the privilege of the unoppressed, of one who has never had to live with the grinding miserable small-minded racism of everyday existence for millions in this country.<\/p>\n

But he then argues that there are too many migrants who haven\u2019t signed up to his (narrow) version of Australian values.<\/p>\n

He writes: \u201cIt seemed that at least some of our recent migrants were living in \u2018hotel Australia\u2019 rather than joining \u2018team Australia\u2019. It\u2019s our broadly Anglo-Celtic culture and fundamentally Judeo-Christian ethic that\u2019s made our country attractive to migrants from all over the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cYet it is record migration, without any effective discrimination on values, that could put this at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

So which is it? The colourblind country, or the polyglot boarding house?<\/p>\n

It takes only a small act of grace to imagine the world, or the history of this country, from another\u2019s perspective.<\/p>\n

But the book does not assent to that.<\/p>\n

The Lucky Country, as originally penned by Donald Horne, was not a compliment, but a scathing, vituperative criticism: that Australia is safe and stable and prosperous not because it is well-led, but because of sheer dumb luck, coasting by on the flukes of geography, natural abundance and the achievements of other nations.<\/p>\n

\u201cAustralia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck,\u201d Horne wrote. \u201cIt lives on other people\u2019s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.\u201d<\/p>\n

An inability to be honest about one\u2019s own past is just another sorry example.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cGo forth in search of dragons to destroy,\u201d Tony Abbott, in a lyrical moment, tells his audience at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":687672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[64,63,44],"class_list":["post-687671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=687671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/687672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=687671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=687671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=687671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}