A Reply to Tony Abbott: Grief Is Not a Mandate

Editor’s Note

In the aftermath of the Bondi killings, former prime minister Tony Abbott declared the attack “an assault on all Australians,” using the language of national unity to advance a familiar ideological script. This article examines who Abbott now speaks for, how his record in moments of crisis undermines his claim to moral authority, and why invoking “all Australians” can function less as compassion than coercion. It argues that grief does not confer a mandate, and that unity, if it is to mean anything, must be earned through restraint, humility and care for those directly harmed.

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Picture Tony Abbott at the IPA lectern, Bondi’s blood barely dry, branding the killings “an attack on all Australians.” Unifying? Or just another flag planted on fresh tragedy? Grandstanding on grief, Abbott wants to speak for “all Australians” again. Instead, he climbs private grief, nationalises it, and crowns himself the nation’s voice, while blaming Labor and attacking “radical Islam.”

Before we accept the performance, it is worth examining the script, and the stagehands.

This essay is about three things: who Abbott is now speaking for, what his record shows when grief meets power, and why his invocation of “all Australians” is neither neutral nor benign.

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Who Is Mr Net-Zero-Credibility Speaking For?

Abbott is not a former prime minister quietly offering reflection. He is a paid director of Fox Corporation, Rupert Murdoch’s US outrage sausage-machine. Public disclosures show Fox pays him in cash and stock for his board service; it is a gig worth well over AU$500,000 a year, not an honorary, civic duty.

That role anchors him firmly in a shallow attention economy that monetises fear, moral panic and division. So when Abbott inflates a violent crime into civilisational war, a local horror into another chapter in “radical Islam,” he is speaking from inside the Fox wheelhouse, not from any neutral civic space.

Fox did not elect him to speak for Australia, but it does pay him to keep the outrage cycle turning.

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Leadership, Remembered – or Absent

This is not the first time Abbott has been confronted by national trauma.

Australians have seen Abbott face terror before. During the 2014 Lindt Café siege, hostage-taker Man Haron Monis demanded to speak to Abbott live on radio. Abbott never picked up the phone. He followed briefings, stayed silent, and refused to shoulder personal authority at the moment he was being directly asked to exercise it.

Then, confronted with a direct plea in a live crisis, Abbott declined to act. Now, safely removed, he acts decisively on others’ grief.

Leadership is not obedience to advisers; it is judgement in crisis. And courage. The siege revealed a prime minister unwilling to own moral responsibility, or simply intercede, even as he now feels free to beat up Bondi into “an atrocity” that is somehow unique, civilisational, and all Labor’s fault.

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“An Attack on All of Us” – or on nuance?

Declaring Bondi “an attack on Australia” does not widen compassion; it abstracts it. It lifts the event out of the lives of shattered families and relocates it in a symbolic nation that politicians can claim to represent.

Abbott collapses a specific act of violence into a civilisational story he already knows how to tell.

Yet Abbott’s own record undercuts the mythic unity he now invokes. As Opposition Leader and Prime Minister, his “stop the boats” rhetoric and derogatory language around Muslims and their “death cult religion” were not accidents; they were deliberate strategies designed to sharpen social fault lines for political gain.

You cannot spend years profiting from division and then drape yourself in unity when tragedy strikes. Moral authority does not reboot on demand.

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The IPA Capture

Nor is Fox Abbott’s only institutional home.

In other ways, too, Abbott is no elder statesman guided solely by conscience. He is a “Distinguished Fellow” at the Institute of Public Affairs, a hard-right lobby group bankrolled by mining magnates including Gina Rinehart and other fossil-fuel fat-cats.

The IPA’s agenda; climate science denial, anti-renewables campaigning, deregulation on demand, and opposition to the Voice campaign (because, they cynically argued, a voice for Indigenous peoples would lead to a third chamber and “division”), is not pluralism. It is ideological capture.

A leader who treats a narrow, corporate-funded, and far from transparent lobby as a proxy for the national interest forfeits any claim to speak for the nation in moments of grief.

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“All Australians” as Coercion

In Abbott’s mouth, “all Australians” is not inclusive language. It is a device used to shut down disagreement by implying that dissent is disloyal.

Question his framing and you are divisive. Reject his language, and you are quietly marked as un-Australian.

This is not unity. It is consensus by coercion; a rhetorical trick that uses the nation itself as a human shield.

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Attention Economics Over Decency

Abbott’s calculation is as obvious as his attention-seeking. In a click-driven media ecosystem, “civilisation under attack” travels faster than restraint. It baits fury, earns shares, and guarantees Abbott another round of interviews and op-eds.

But common decency, simple humanity and good faith resist that logic.

The Bondi attack was a cruel, specific horror: a disturbed father and son radicalised into anti-Jewish hatred. It was not a referendum. It was not a clash of civilisations. Inflating it into an allegory about “all Australians” does not honour the dead; it exploits them.

Once again, grief is climbed, nationalised and monetised.

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Who Speaks for Australia?

Abbott’s latest book, Australia: A History, clinches the pattern.

It is a nostalgic hymn to British triumph that skims over First Nations’ ownership, dispossession and the unfinished moral business of colonisation, offering instead a comforting yarn of pioneers and statesmen much like its author.

Reviewers have noted how lightly it treats invasion, massacre and Indigenous resistance, and how little it engages with the plural, contested country Australians actually inhabit.

This is a vision of Australia that is narrow, elitist and superficial: unwilling to face the land’s contradictions, acknowledge its many voices, or recognise achievements that fall outside a colonial, Anglocentric frame.

Like his mentor John Howard, for whom the life of the mind has always been an optional extra, Abbott approaches the arts as ornament rather than necessity and treats imagination with suspicion.

Vision? Wash your mouth out.

Abbott’s new book further disqualifies him from any plausible role as the voice of a pluralist nation built, at its best, on self-criticism, open-mindedness and tolerance. What it does attest to is the reflexive cultural cringe of a ten-pound Pom, still marooned on the margins of the country he presumes to speak for.

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Seen Leaders Hide Behind “Unity”?

This is not an argument about ideology. It is an argument about legitimacy.

Grief does not confer a mandate. Tragedy does not license ideology. Unity is not claimed from lecterns; it is earned in silence, restraint, humility, compassion and care for those directly harmed.

While Bondi families bury their dead, Abbott buries nuance. Those families deserve better. Australia deserves better than having its name — and its grief — used as a prop by a man whose primary loyalties now lie with Fox’s ratings and the IPA’s donor base.

Fox News did not elect Tony Abbott to speak for Australia. Neither did grief. Neither did tragedy.

If unity is to mean anything after Bondi, it will not come from those who hide behind “all Australians” as a place to stand. It will come from those willing to step back, listen first, and speak — if at all — with care, restraint and circumspection.

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