Political Animal Quotes

“when you haven’t got the numbers, be vicious. It’s called minority politics.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“While he was in the neighbourhood he went to New York for the – surely redundant by now – ceremonial visit of the next prime minister to Rupert Murdoch. Back home in the Spectator Australia he laid it on thick again: “Along with the commander of the First AIF, Sir John Monash, and the penicillin inventor, Lord Florey, he is one of the Australians who have made the most difference in the world.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“He knows the cruel truth that the baiter is never blamed when victims lose their cool.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Abbott was all over the shop on emissions trading. He feared destruction at the ballot box if the Opposition blocked Rudd. “The government’s emissions trading scheme is the perfect political response to the public’s fears,” he had said in late July 2009.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Turnbull is sharp with Jones once or twice, asking to be heard, reminding him his heroes Margaret Thatcher and John Howard wanted action on global warming: “Don’t you think,” asks the leader of the Opposition, “you sound like the old lady who says the whole world is mad except for thee and me, and I have my doubts about thee?”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“He doesn’t see private health insurance rebates or support for private school education as middle-class welfare. He sees it as backing family aspiration, sound public policy encouraging people to do more for themselves. And help should not be cut off simply because a family is earning a hundred thousand dollars or more a year.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“This champion of self-reliance, the man who made the unemployed work for the dole, has no doubt that families like his deserve a great deal of help from the government.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“He stumbled and told the truth one night: workers had lost protections under WorkChoices.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“But the bill was also loathed by the National Party because it would drain university sporting clubs of cash. Out in the bush, those clubs and that money mattered.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“A first bill for the abolition of compulsory student union fees failed in 2004 but it was back as soon as the government won control of the Senate.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“If we hadn’t controlled the Senate, I would never have had to eat that particular shit sandwich,” Abbott told Peter Hartcher. “Getting control of the Senate was a curse. It allowed us to do things that we would not normally have been able to get away with and I think it tempted us to chance our arm in ways which ultimately did us significant political damage.” In the end, he decided to stay in cabinet. He didn’t bitch and moan to the press gallery. He went back to work.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Abbott’s one big idea in Health was for the Commonwealth to take control of all the nation’s hospitals. This required a shift in his thinking. In the Keating years he had declared that Australia had “a perfectly good system of government provided each tier minds its own business.” He didn’t think so any longer. “As a new backbencher, I had not anticipated how hard this was, given that voters don’t care who solves their problems, they just want them solved.” As Minister for Health he lit on a new guiding conservative principle: “Power divided is power controlled.” He had in mind an enormous reform that would reshape Canberra’s relations with the states. He was roundly mocked in cabinet. His senior bureaucrats put a lot of work into talking him down. Did he really want to be responsible for every asthma patient who had to wait too long in an emergency department? Eventually he was persuaded that Commonwealth public servants could not run hospitals any better than state public servants. This was the argument that got him, but he found it frustrating.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“A happy Hickie verdict on Abbott: “He’s not a reformer; he’s a great opportunist.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“While he was pilloried for enforcing a severe regime of punishment to force them to look for jobs, he was trying behind the scenes to persuade the government to take another course entirely. He wanted tax breaks for those on welfare to encourage them to take work. This was his one big idea in the portfolio and he has cited it since as evidence that somewhere inside the Liberal Party the DLP was alive and well. But not very alive: the plan was killed off by Howard.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“He accused republicans in his own party of conducting a “proxy war” against Howard. He threw into the mix Churchill, Pétain, Charles de Gaulle, the failings of the Weimar republic and the rise of Hitler. In the Sydney Morning Herald at that time I set him some homework:   Clearly explain how an Australian head of state with powers as proposed in the referendum could bring to office in Canberra a local equivalent of the most vicious dictator of the century?   He never justified the Hitler slur to anyone.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Support for getting rid of the Queen was at 57 per cent but the nation was divided on the kind of republic that should replace her, a division that proved the death of the proposal. This was minority politics – the power of the passionate minority to hold the line – played at a level of genius by Howard and with inexhaustible passion by his lieutenant Tony Abbott. The republicans have never recovered. Abbott can claim a good measure of credit not only for wrecking the republican hopes in the 1999 referendum, but also for keeping them off the agenda ever since.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Though he went about the task with a will, he clearly did not share the ideological conviction that the jobless were better off without help from the public service. Abbott’s default position is that governments are there to act, to solve problems, not to withdraw and leave things to the cut and thrust of market forces. He was clearly not one of those conservatives who loved the market. His loyalty was to government and what government could achieve through intervention.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“He wanted the assurance from the department that nothing was going wrong underneath. But as long as that was the case, he didn’t really want to get into all the detail of how the Job Network was actually running. He was not hands-on. He was generally interested in employment but he was not one of those ministers who run their department.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Standing to one side watching the politicians and the journalists and the cameras is one of the factory’s owners, John Kernahan, who tells me Sulo’s annual turnover is $85 million. So the carbon tax? “It’s not a biggie.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Abbott has always had a knack of sidestepping blame for his own hyperbole. Even wild exaggerations are rarely held against him. He retracts a little and is forgiven a lot. “What you’ve got is constant colour and movement,” says his old boss John Hewson. “He gets right in your face. He exaggerates; he grabs the headlines, even if he knows that the next day he’s gonna have to back that off.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the parliament as a political crime.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“But before the year was out, Oldfield was plotting with the Queensland renegade Pauline Hanson to set up her new party. This emerged only after he left Abbott’s office in April 1997 armed with a glowing reference from the member for Warringah. A humiliated Abbott blasted Oldfield: “He’s a dangerous, snaky Rasputin who thrives on notoriety. Sure, I had him on my staff when I knew he held some unnaturally intense views on some things, but he seemed like a Liberal with a reasonable standing in the community. I’m not making any big claims for myself, but even Jesus had his Judas.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Briefly it seemed Abbott’s leadership might be under threat after a member of shadow cabinet, disgusted by what was going on, leaked to the press that Morrison had suggested the party capitalise on growing concerns about Muslim immigration. In the Sydney Morning Herald, Peter Hartcher reported being told: “He put it on the table like a dead cat.” There was talk in the party of easing up on boat people. It was not to be. One Liberal MP told the Courier Mail: “It works incredibly well for us in outer metropolitan electorates.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“From the moment Julia Gillard became prime minister, Abbott’s mantra has been: “If you want to stop the boats, you have to change the government.” But for that to keep working in his favour, it’s best the boats keep coming.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“WikiLeaks told us how keen the Coalition is to exploit the boats. In late 2009, in the dying days of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Opposition, a “key Liberal party strategist” popped in to the US embassy in Canberra to say how pleased the party was that refugee boats were, once again, making their way to Christmas Island. “The issue was ‘fantastic,’” he said. “And ‘the more boats that come the better.’” But he admitted they had yet to find a way to make the issue work in their favour: “his research indicated only a ‘slight trend’ towards the Coalition.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Abbott joined the union, the Australian Journalists’ Association. He led a little strike at the Bulletin and opposed a big strike at the Australian.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“The press has given up saying so but these two men are denouncing what they once supported: a price on carbon and an emissions trading scheme.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“They see a lot of pit bull pups at the RSPCA, her handler tells me. Why? “Because young guys have pit bulls and they are idiots and they don’t desex their dogs.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“He invaded the Women’s Room with a Channel Ten news crew and cub reporter Mike Munro. The issue was voluntary fees. The point was ridicule. When asked to leave the room, Abbott declared for the cameras: “This is a man’s room for the moment.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]

“Abbott was running a one-man campaign to wreck his own organisation.”
― David Marr, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott [Quarterly Essay 47]