Questions continue to be raised about Tony Abbott’s political position. One leftist critic from his student days said no one knew what Abbott ‘stood for’. Others, including a well-known political commentator, have questioned his conservative credentials. In 2013, I took up the question of Abbott’s political philosophy in a commentary on David Marr’s 2012 fictive piece on Abbott in The Quarterly Essay, for which he won a literary award. I reproduce it here, revised and updated.

The first two sentences in David Marr’s 2012 postmodernist essay on Tony Abbott (Tony Abbott: The Making of a Political Animal) read: ‘Australia doesn’t want Tony Abbott. We never have.’

Postmodernism is all about free-flowing fantasy where the rules of reason (normally understood) are thrown out the window as remnants of rigid oppressive patriarchy. In these two sentences we have a wonderful example. Australia for David Marr is identified with Marr’s class – that superior class made up of fervid homosexual and feminist activists gallantly in the vanguard of the Left’s long march through our institutions. The rest of us are homophobic non-persons who, if justice prevailed, would be put outside the walls. Continue reading Tony Abbott and the Left’s postmodernist fog →