Abbott, the workers' friend, and his army ... well if Christopher Pearson can be called an army ...

(Above: just wanting to set the tone for the day. It is the reader's laborious duty to photoshop Greg Sheridan out of the picture, and substitute Christopher Pearson, this day doing duty in relation to the martyrdom of St. Tony).


Tony Abbott, the workers' friend.

No you didn't read it first at the pond, you read it in The Australian, in an epic column by Christopher Pearson titled Abbott may be workers' choice (behind the paywall to protect the innocent).

What a fine slogan it is. Or it would be, if only Pearson or his sub hadn't felt the need to insert "may be" in the header. There's some doubt? He may be the workers' friend and choice, or he might not?

Quickly, it's off to the Oxford Dictionaries Online to discuss the use of 'may' and 'might':

May and might are both ways of expressing possibility. Is there a difference between the way in which they should be used? (here)

It seems there's not much difference, though the difference between 'may have' and 'might have' is a bit tricky.

It seems however that usage is now quite flexible, and there are many ways of expressing possibility:

Christopher Pearson may be a goose (present tense).
Christopher Pearson might have been a goose for using 'may' to pretend he was composing a balanced column when it was actually just a standard bit of adoration (past tense).

Phew, now that's cleared up, we can get into the meat of the piece. Tony Abbott may be a wondrous, lustrous, shiny human being, he may be the workers' friend, or he may not, and we mere mortals may be lucky to worship him afar as he moves amongst us, redeeming all, especially workers.

Pearson leads off his piece with a yarn the knavish tricks of Paul Keating pretending to accept the G.S.T., and the cleverness of John Howard, who was awake up to his game, unlike that silly John Hewson (who's gone quite soft in the head and sort of liberal it seems, though that's another story).

Anyhoo, for the past year or two, Pearson has been making hay about potential leadership spills in the Labor party. Anyone would do to mount a two horse race - Simon Crean, Wayne Swan, Greg Combet, Bill Shorten, who else have you got - what's that Kev, speak up - and all got a good run.

But at the moment they've pulled up short, and Tony Abbott seems to have lost his way a little, to the great distress, fear and loathing of the commentariat.

So it's time to erect more fortifications and barricades around the fearless leader. And in particular about the times that saw Abbott as an acolyte and satellite whirler in the orbit of B. A. Santamaria.

Now you might have read that Abbott stayed loyal to Santamaria:

All I knew of Abbott when he entered Parliament in 1994 at the age of 36 was that he had been educated by Jesuits, had wanted to be a priest and had described himself as “a junkyard dog savaging the other side”. It was only in early 1998 that I began to take serious notice of him, and that was because of a statement he made in Parliament about Bob Santamaria, who had recently died. 
Abbott called him “a philosophical star by which you could always steer” and “the greatest living Australian”. I thought that Santamaria had lost all political relevance decades earlier and was astonished that anyone would honour a man who inspired so much hatred. 
It became clear that Santamaria had been a crucial mentor for Abbott, ever since the early 1970s. As Michael Duffy remarks in his 2004 dual biography of Mark Latham and Tony Abbott, Santamaria’s effect on the latter was “immediate and profound”...
 Abbott has said that what impressed him about Santamaria was “the courage that kept him going as an advocate for unfashionable truths”... (and more here)

But don't take it from Louis Nowra, take it from Tony Abbott, and a poignant speech Abbott made on the release of a collection of B A Santamaria letters:

... the DLP is alive and well and living inside the Howard Government and Labor’s SDA caucus has a leader who should at least give them a fair hearing. The times may not have suited his (Santamaria's) more dire predictions but they have been kinder to his values. In his memoirs, Against the Tide, he observed: “In the midst of all these great historical events, we were nothing more than tiny minnows swimming in great and turbulent seas. But even the minnow must do what he can”. Some tide. Some minnow. (here)

The thing is, Abbott has always been open and honest about the way Santamaria was his mentor and his inspiration. Even when it involved endorsing a prime fascist:

In the famous Melbourne University debate about the Spanish Civil War, he declared: “when the bullets of the atheists struck the statue of Christ outside the cathedral in Madrid, for some that was just steel striking brass. But for me, those bullets were piecing the heart of Christ the King”. He could engender a thrill in the heart that was part patriotism, part Christian idealism and part “fighting the good fight”. I was lucky to know BA Santamaria for the last 22 years of his life, to have attended diligently to his writing and speaking over that time and to have been the beneficiary of the occasional private lunch and long phone call.

Yep, fighting the good fight for Franco.

Abbott saw himself as a warrior for Christ and the Church, and no doubt still does, even if his warrior ways became tinged with political pragmatism (as is noted in How Tony Abbott laboured over choice of party).

It's an honest and affectionate position, one with regard to the man with whom he had a relationship, his "first and greatest mentor", and never mind the barbs that Labor in the past or the present have flung at Abbott about it.

So how does Pearson deal with it, and defend Abbott? Why by trashing Santamaria up hill and down dale, flinging dirt and making him sound like a rampant medievalist:

Santamaria had a dream of the Catholic Church as a large rural landholder, encouraging many of the faithful to live as a yeoman tenantry in small farming communities. He was preoccupied for years with a scheme to reverse some of the NSW and Queensland rivers in their courses so as to water central Australia, notwithstanding the implacable and, in this case, warranted opposition of environmental activists. He was interested in the theory and practice of distributism as seen in Mondragon in Spain. He was deaf to all Bert Kelly's arguments against protectionism and had no problems with agrarian socialism at its most unabashed. 

So Abbott's first and greatest mentor was an unabashed fruitloop? And we're supposed to believe that Abbott himself has spurned the fruitloop, even though he launched those letters in 2007, and said then that the spirit of B. A. Santamaria lives within the Liberal and Labor parties?

Yep, have another sip of that kool-aid:

Abbott isn't remotely interested in creating Catholic enclaves and understands the Australian aspiration of home ownership and our marked preference for living in cities. He doesn't aspire to reverse the rivers in their courses and has a respectable record on environmental issues, not least his sponsorship of the Green Corps. He has no time for distributism or agrarian socialism and has only been prepared to mount a nuanced case for limited protection if a respectable case can be made that it's necessary to preserve some, mostly defence-related, heavy industry.

Yes, yes, but doesn't Christopher Pearson just love a set of straw men, and no doubt Abbott supports high speed broadband and is fervently aware of the need to take urgent action in the matter of global climate change, inspired as he is by the complete and utter crap of climate science.

But here's the thing. You don't do yourself a favour calling old political heroes who were your first and greatest mentor mad uncles who need to be sent to the attic, and only allowed out when their letters are published.

Amazingly Pearson even calls on that arch-fiend David Marr to defend Abbott. Yep, that's the very same man he ravaged in Detestable Standards, in the matter of Chris Masters' discussion of Alan Jones' sexuality:

It is, I suppose, just possible that, a week later, Marr is beginning to realise how damaging this episode has been to him. It would be hard to imagine a more plausible embodiment of the old epithet "bitter and twisted", not to mention vengeful and ideologically driven.
 I hadn't realised how much of a 1960s-style queen he was; or, to use White's preferred spelling at that time, harking back to convict slang, "quean". It was, as a friend remarked at the time, "the kind of thing that gives the rest of us a bad name".

Now the old quean, to use Pearson's use of a White-ism, that bitter, twisted, vengeful, ideologically driven wretch, is dusted off, and dragged out to provide a character reference for Abbott as the workers' friend:

Marr said on Lateline: "He opposed Work Choices. He thought it was bad politics and he thought it was unfair. Because Tony Abbott doesn't come from the standard background of Liberal Party politicians. He comes out of the DLP. And the DLP was a working-class movement, it was there to protect the unions. It's not in his DNA to see the purpose of the Liberal Party or the purpose of government to beat up on unions. And in cabinet, he argued against Work Choices."

So B. A. Santamaria is a mad, mad uncle, except that his inspirational D.L.P. ideas are ferociously in favour of workers and to be celebrated and upheld as a deep part of the DNA of Tony Abbott?

It's such a bizarre flip-flop, and within the same column, but it does position Pearson for a final heroic celebration:

Abbott's landmark speeches were organised around the theme of "pragmatism based on values". In his own way, he has been enlisting an Abbott army in the same mould as the Reagan Democrats and the Howard battlers. They're voters with traditional values who, whatever their past party allegiances, have real concerns for themselves and their families over the cost of living, jobs and their futures. 

And now Howard's battlers have turned into Abbott's Army, infused with the deep DNA of workers and unions and working class movements. Why the lad is only one step short of being an anti-commie pinko god-fearing Labor party pervert.

Will the rhetoric catch on?

 Labor has been briefing journalists that Abbott is a "one-trick Tony", clinging on to the carbon tax for lack of anything else to say, while "lived experience" since July 1 establishes that it's nothing to worry about. Labor doesn't understand the actuality of lived experience in suburban Australia. Many households are facing flat-lining house prices, poor superannuation returns, tax increases and no real wages growth. They're worried and have reason to be. Abbott isn't going to let go of the carbon tax, with electricity bills up 15.3 per cent in the past quarter and gas prices up 14 per cent. He knows what Abbott's army expects of him.

Or did the world see the real Abbott's army clustered around those signs, ditch the witch, and Bob Brown's bitch?

Whatever, it takes a profound cheek to suggest that Labor doesn't understand the actuality of lived experience in suburban Australia, as if Tony Abbott, Christopher Pearson, and the rest of the lawyers, spivs and sharks residing in the Liberal Party and keen to keep on introducing 'flexible' contracts into the workplace do ...

But it does explain Pearson's preferred ongoing tactic.

Fear. Scare the bejeesus out of people. Explain to them that prices are climbing, the world is flat-lining, and you're all doomed, unless you join Abbott's army and march off to save the world ... for B. A. Santamaria, your inspiration and the workers' friend, whose D.L.P. DNA is embedded deep within Tony Abbott.

Which just goes to show. It seems, after all, and despite Pearson's initial denials, that Santamaria was Abbott's first and greatest mentor.

Who know what other whacky ideas he swallowed from that Catholic fundamentalist snake oil salesman.

Will we be hearing about turning the rivers inland soon? Which was incidentally a pet theme of Alan Jones, at least until people made too much fun of the notion and of him. (Alan rewrites record: renounces river redirection)

After all, if Santamaria thought it a good idea, and another great mate, shock jock Jones, thought it a good idea, who knows. Maybe it can be dusted off, like David Marr and brought out of the closet.

So why doesn't the pond buy this tale of apocalypse and the need for rapture and marching and cheering?

Why a cup of tea at the mad hatter's table, shared with Abbott, Pearson and Santamaria is enough to lift the gloom, brighten the world and send out the pond to enjoy the world in good cheer ... without any need to all to march in anyone's army, least of all amongst Tony Abbott's very confused and incoherent and bitter and twisted and vengeful ideologically driven followers ...

(Below: yes, there's Dorothy but it's up to you to guess which one is Christopher and which one DNA D.L.P. Tony)