DANIEL:

It was May 8, just days after the Coalition’s devastating election loss, when Tony Abbott made a phone call.

JASON:

So Tony Abbott - of course, one of our former prime ministers, former leader of the Liberal Party - was on his way to Hungary, where he was planning to address the Danube Institute; this is a right-wing think tank. But during a stopover on the way to Hungary in Dubai, Tony Abbot decided that he needed to call Natasha Griggs. She's the president of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory. And Tony Abbott wanted to talk to her about Jacinta Nampijinpa Price moving over to the Liberal Party.

DANIEL:

Abbott was pressing his case that Jacinta Price was someone that the Liberal Party needed in their ranks.

JASON:

And Natasha Griggs told me that Tony Abbott said to her that in his view, Jacinta Price was a very talented politician, someone who represents the future of the Liberal Party. And then it was time that she came into the Liberal Party fold.

DANIEL:

Hours later, Senator Price switched party rooms.

JASON:

It was a very controversial move, because I think all the Nationals felt that it was really a betrayal. And I think Tony Abbott probably anticipated this kind of reaction. And so he wanted to smooth things over with the CLP administrative wing before Jacinta Price's defection was announced.

DANIEL:

For moderates, it was another sign that the former prime minister was still pulling the party’s levers from the outside – something he’s been doing for years.

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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Jason Koutsoukis on Tony Abbott, his shadow network steering the Liberals – and why insiders say they’re a cancer, killing the party.

It’s Tuesday, May 27.

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DANIEL:

So Jason, it turns out Tony Abbott was pushing behind the scenes for Senator Jacinta Price to switch parties. Can you tell me why he involved himself in that decision?

JASON:

Well, Tony Abbott sees Jacinta Price as very much the future of the Liberal Party. She's on the far right of the party and I think Tony Abbott wants to strengthen the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. He doesn't want to see his party moving sort of back to the centre, as Sussan Ley said that she wanted to do after she won the leadership ballot. And I think for many inside the party, it felt like deja vu; they've been here before. And Tony Abbott, of course, when he was prime minister, didn't last very long. And mainly, that was thanks to him trying to implement a very far-right agenda that caught voters by surprise, it caught his party room by surprise.

Audio excerpt – Malcolm Turnbull:

“A little while ago, I met with the prime minister and advised him that I would be challenging him for the leadership of the Liberal Party.”

JASON:

Only two years into the role, he was of course challenged by Malcolm Turnbull.

Audio excerpt – Malcolm Turnbull:

“We have lost 30 news polls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about Mr. Abbott's leadership.”

JASON:

And he lost the leadership. He lost the prime ministership.

Audio excerpt – Tony Abbott:

“Poll-driven panic has produced a revolving door prime ministership, which can't be good for our country. And a febrile media culture has developed that rewards treachery.”

JASON:

For a lot of Liberals, it felt like they were going back to this kind of territory that they'd sort of fought over before and felt that this had sort of been dealt with. But here he is, he's back trying to push the same agenda that got him into all sorts of trouble 10 years ago.

DANIEL:

So what do we know about the reaction inside the parties more broadly as it unfolded?

JASON:

Well, the Nationals were furious when the news was made public.

Audio excerpt – Chris Kenny:

“National Senate Leader Bridget McKenzie joining us from Bendigo. Good to talk to you again, Bridget. You must be disappointed by the news that Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is leaving your party to sit with the Liberals.”

Audio excerpt – Bridget McKenzie:

“Yeah, absolutely. I think it's a devastating loss to our party room, particularly…”

JASON:

They remain angry about it.

Audio excerpt – Bridget McKenzie:

“Loyalty matters in the game of politics and so it is incredibly disappointing.”

JASON:

For a start, they lost a Senator, so their party status in the Senate is no longer official. They're under that threshold of five senators, down to four. They also lost a Senator from New South Wales at the actual election. Perrin Davies, she just didn't win enough votes. The Liberals were a little bit alarmed when it emerged that Price, was not only joining the Liberal Party party room, but she'd be running as a deputy on a joint ticket with Angus Taylor for the leadership of the Liberal Party.
And then there were rumours also circulating that Tony Abbott had engineered all of this from behind the scenes. The news that he was kind of pulling the strings did alarm a lot of Liberal Party members, especially the moderate wing that have been trying to push back against Tony Abbott for quite a long time.

DANIEL:

So you've been speaking to a number of people inside the Liberal Party. What have they been saying about this episode?

JASON:

I think a lot of moderates feel that Tony Abbott and his closest confidant, who is of course his former Chief of Staff Peta Credlin, who's now a prominent commentator across the Murdoch tabloids as well as The Australian and Sky News. A lot of moderates feel that both Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin have been really trying to shape the federal party's direction from the sidelines.

Audio excerpt – Peta Credlin:

“It was a very hard watch for Liberals around the country on Saturday night, so where to now for the party?”

Audio excerpt – Tony Abbott:

“Well, under no circumstances should the party become Labor light. It's not a question of being more progressive or more conservative, it's a question of being more strongly Liberal.”

JASON:

But what struck me in doing this story was how much ill feeling there is within the Liberal Party towards Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin. It wasn't hard to get people to say what they really think. And one person said to me that “Tony Abbott and his Sky News after dark cronies and those few people left in the parliamentary party who still listen to him are so tone deaf that they are trying to pretend the weaknesses that made the coalition unelectable are actually strengths.”

Another person said to me that they had a big role in shaping Peter Dutton's policy agenda. They said to me, “it was Abbott and Credlin who were forever in Dutton's ear… programming Dutton’s stupid policy positions.”

“These people are like cancer”, another person told me, “arguing for more carcinogenic policies. They will kill the Liberal Party for good”, and “if you're trying to understand why the Liberal Party today is a smoking ruin, then look no further than Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin.”

DANIEL:

After the break – what other disastrous decisions have Abbott and Credlin had their hand in?

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DANIEL:

Jason, you've been looking into the enduring influence of Tony Abbott in the Liberal Party. What else has he been involving himself in?

JASON:

Well, when you put it all together, Tony Abbott is involving himself in quite a few different causes. I think another thing that Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin were heavily involved in last year was this decision by the federal Liberal Party executive to take over the New South Wales division of the Liberal Party. And I think there's few grievances in the New South Wales division that run deeper than this one, because they feel that at Tony Abbott's instigation that Peter Dutton appointed two very prominent right-wing Victorians, Alan Stockdale, the former Victorian Treasurer, and Richard Alston, former Minister in the Howard Government.

And the pretext for this intervention was a bungled nominations process for the New South Wales local government elections last year.

For whatever reason, the New South Wales division was not able to organise the nominations for a lot of candidates, so the Liberal Party didn't actually run candidates in a lot of key local government contests, And understandably there was a lot of anger over this bungled nominations process and it did prompt the federal intervention. But I think a lot of moderates believe that the real agenda here was the Conservatives wanting to take over the New South Wales Division and punish a lot of those. Moderates who were in influential positions...

Another thing that both Abbott and Kredlin have been heavily involved in is this very nasty dispute that's taken place in Victoria between the former leader of the Victorian Liberals, John Pesutto, and Moira Deeming, who's a member of the Victorian Upper House.

Audio excerpt – Peta Credlin:

“Tony, welcome to the programme. I've got a whole laundry list of stuff I want to get your view on, but I've gotta get your on Moira Deeming. I just spoke to her live in the studio.”

JASON:

Moira Deeming had attended an anti-trans rally in Victoria back in 2023. And John Pesutto was very critical of her for attending that rally, especially because some neo-Nazis had sort of turned up in support of what this rally was all about. And he had linked Moira Deeming with this neo-nazi group. And Moira Deming ended up being expelled from the Liberal Party party room.

Audio excerpt – Tony Abbott:

“Peta, as the father of three daughters, I'm utterly dismayed that a mainstream political party would sack a Member of Parliament for defending women's rights. And to the extent that the Liberal Party has a women's problem, it must have got much, much worse by the expulsion of this brave and smart woman from its own ranks.”

JASON:

And in response, I think at the urging of Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin, Moira Deeming sued John Pesutto. She won that lawsuit. She won $300,000 in damages. And she's also won legal costs. And I think John Pesutto now has to pay $2.3 million in legal costs, and so he's facing bankruptcy. And that will mean that he'll have to resign his seat in parliament if he can't raise the money. And a lot of moderates feel very angry towards Tony Abbott and Peta Credlin for goading Moira Deeming into taking on this lawsuit and so there's a lot of anger about that.

DANIEL:

So it seems like there's been a string of poor decisions with Tony Abbott's fingerprints on them. Tony Abbott famously lost his premiership a decade ago and then lost his seat in parliament. So why does he still have so much influence within the party?

JASON:

This is a great question, Daniel, because how could you take someone seriously who after winning a massive majority, as Tony Abbott did in the 2013 election, he had, I think, 90 seats he had a relatively tame crossbench yet managed to throw away the prime ministership within I think it was two years and two days that he served. And I find it difficult to understand why anyone would take Tony Abbott seriously as a person of any kind of political wisdom. And it wasn't just Tony Abbott that managed to do it by himself. He had Peta Credlin as his chief of staff and it is really a puzzle that these two still have any real influence in the Liberal Party.

I think the reason why they've tried to hold onto a power base is, as one liberal put to me, it's all about revenge, it's about Tony Abbott trying to rewrite history as to why he was dumped by his own party. It's worth remembering that it wasn't some sort of moderate uprising that saw Tony Abbott lose the leadership, it was Tony Abbott's policy decisions, things like wanting to give Prince Philip a knighthood, that disastrous first budget that he brought down in 2014 which broke so many of the promises that Tony Abbott himself had made during the election campaign. In the end it was conservatives within the Liberal Party that decided they couldn't keep Tony Abbott on as leader or prime minister any longer, and it was them that got rid of him. But I think Tony Abbot believes that the moderates were to blame, and I think his goal is to try to cast them out of the party. He wants to recast the Liberal Party in his own image and justify his past leadership and, I think, prove that the path that voters have already rejected is the path that the Liberals should still follow.

DANIEL:

Sussan Ley is the new leader and she is a moderate. How do you expect the fact that she's in charge now to change the level of influence Tony Abbott has?

JASON:

Well, I think Sussan Ley has indicated pretty clearly that she agrees that the Liberal Party has to move back towards the centre. She said that the Liberal Party has to meet voters where they are. But I think she's going to have real trouble trying to limit Tony Abbott's influence because he does have such a strong grip on a lot of sections of the party, but he's kind of doing that with the help of the Rupert Murdoch empire here in Australia. Tony Abbott is on the board of Fox International. He's very close to Lachlan Murdoch, who is the CEO and chairman of Fox. Liberals that I spoke to last week said that Lachlan takes far more active interest in Australian politics than his father ever did.

And so I think anyone that threatens to deviate from the sort of Tony Abbott worldview risks getting slammed on the opinion pages or the news pages of The Australian or on Sky News. So Tony Abbott's got a lot of kind of levers that he can pull when it comes to exerting his influence within the Liberal Party. And I think Sussan Ley has got a real fight on her hands trying to push back against that.

I guess the big advantage she has is she can just point to the scoreboard at the last election and show that if the Liberal Party's gonna have any hope of pegging back that huge majority that Labor has at the moment, then they really do have no choice but to move back to the centre. But I think Sussan Ley's going to have to gear herself up for what will be a long and bruising battle.

DANIEL:

Jason, always a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for your time.

JASON:

Daniel, thanks for having me.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today…

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says Israel’s blockade of aid into Gaza is “an outrage” – calling the Israeli government’s justification for stopping critical food and medical supplies quote “completely untenable”.

Audio excerpt – Anthony Albanese:

“It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need in Gaza.”

The comments come as calls are growing for Australia to join the UK, France and Canada in threatening sanctions, if Israel's campaign continues.

And,

Weather conditions are expected to complicate recovery efforts on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, as residents recover from the devastating floods that ripped through the region last week.

About 32,000 residents from 14 communities remain isolated, even as floodwaters recede.

This has been 7am, thanks for listening.

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