Tony Abbott once promised to be the nation’s “suppository of wisdom.” Now he’s Murdoch’s courier of toxins, importing America’s rage politics like duty-free bourbon — cheap, corrosive, and guaranteed to rot the liver of democracy.

“Abbott hasn’t mellowed into elder statesman; he’s calcified into Murdoch’s choirboy, piping Trumpist grievance into Australia.”

Tony Abbott: From Onion-Eating Buffoon to MAGA’s Choirboy in Australia

Tony Abbott is not a sage elder of Australian politics. He is the ghost of our national misadventures, still clanking around the Liberal Party like a poltergeist in budgie smugglers, bellowing slogans through Murdoch’s megaphone.

This is the man who ate a raw onion on camera, who blurted out that climate science was “absolute crap,” who sanctified offshore detention with scripture: “Jesus knew that there was a place for everything, and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.” Abbott hasn’t grown wiser. He has merely grown more dangerous, now less parliamentarian than permanent wrecking ball.

Theology wrapped in razor wire

Abbott’s gift has never been governance. It has been weaponised nonsense. “Shit happens,” he muttered after a soldier’s death — less a gaffe than a governing creed. He was the self-anointed “suppository of all wisdom,” a line that would have been funny if it weren’t so accidentally true: his political style has always been less light than laxative, purging complexity and leaving only slogans behind.

From Murdoch’s boardroom to MAGA’s hymnbook

Today, Abbott lounges in the Murdoch empire’s choir stalls, listed as a director at Fox. This isn’t retirement; it’s redeployment. He pipes America’s culture-war hymns straight into Australia, teaching our conservatives to sing the MAGA songbook — grievance, paranoia, endless enemies. He’s not a guardian of tradition; he’s an importer of toxins.

The recent assassination of U.S. hard-right activist Charlie Kirk shows just how lethal this script can be. In America, grief was immediately repackaged as grievance: vigils morphed into rallies, Kirk canonised as a martyr. The playbook is familiar — sanctify the dead, demonise the enemy, demand permanent mobilisation. Abbott’s network knows the tune and is ready to belt it across the Pacific.

The Australian sty of MAGA-curious

Here at home, the echoes are unmistakable. Attacks on Welcome to Country, pandemic “health despotism” tirades, the weaponisation of the Voice referendum — all follow the MAGA template: crisis without end, institutions cast as villains, rage professionalised into a business model. Abbott’s protégé Jacinta Nampijinpa Price has been swept into that orbit, her prominence part Australian phenomenon, part American franchise.

Perpetual student politician

Abbott himself remains the eternal campus brawler. Barbara Ramjan’s allegation that he punched the wall beside her head after losing a university election — denied but never forgotten — sticks because it feels true to type: intimidation as theatre, combat as creed. As Health Minister he was infamous for walking into meetings unbriefed; as Prime Minister, he governed by three-word slogan. Always the prefect with clenched fists, never the leader with open hands.

Poison, not statesmanship

Abbott normalised a style of politics at war with its own country: suspicion of institutions, contempt for science, reduction of public life to slogans, spectacle and spite. The risk now is that this Americanised culture-war model metastasises fully here, mistaking noise for nation and grievance for government.

And now, with the death of Charlie Kirk, Abbott and his ilk are rehearsing the oldest trick in the demagogue’s manual: canonising scoundrels as martyrs. A political grifter is rebadged as a fallen saint, his legacy lacquered with holy grievance, his death weaponised as proof that the movement is righteous and under siege. The danger is obvious: if Abbott can sanctify Kirk, what won’t he sanctify? Which scoundrel is next for the shrine?

Australia doesn’t need another importer of outrage. We don’t need Abbott’s theatre of resentment, nor MAGA politics in an Akubra, lycra and bike shorts, nor the canonisation of hucksters as heroes. What we need is civic stubbornness: parliaments with spine, media that refuses the dopamine hit of rage, and citizens prepared to laugh off imported hysteria rather than applaud it.

Abbott may fancy himself an elder statesman. History will remember him differently: as a courier of poison, the canoniser of scoundrels, a man who mistook noise for wisdom and spectacle for statesmanship.

It will be hard, Tony, given your Peter Pan character, but it would be best for all parties if you accept your epic fail as a clueless PM. Stop the press drops; do a Peter Dutton. Hit the mute button.