A common complaint of the Australian parliamentary game is that it’s merely a case of Tweedledum versus Tweedledee, a contest between two parties who largely resemble one another in both policies and methods. Certainly, this has been the case for federal politics in recent years – Rudd was at pains to present himself as a ‘fiscal conservative’, and emphasise his religiousity and populism (see his comments re: the Bill Henderson sage, for instance). On the other side, Brendan Nelson and Malcom Turnbull were ‘moderates’, who both were supposed to represent ‘generational change’. To this game, the Coalition has now said basta, electing Tony Abbott as leader. He in turn has elected a shadow cabinet comprised of rightist demagogues and old discards from the Howard era. The dust is yet to settle on this one, but I think there are a few things to be considered.

The focus at the moment, is on Copenhagen, climate change, and Rudd’s proposed ETS. It is by opposing this piece of legislation, and being a climate ‘sceptic’ more generally, that Abbott has come to be leader. Yet behind (and underpinning) the struggle for ‘action’ on climate change is the familiar spectre of another, older struggle, that of antagonism between rich and poor, bosses and workers. When we contemplate what an Abbottian future might look like, we ought not merely to think about climate change, but about the latter’s radical zeal for class struggle, as enthusiastic as that of the most ardent leftist revolutionary.

If we are honest, most of us would accept that a bad boss is a little like a bad father or a bad husband. Notwithstanding all of his faults you find he tends to do more good than harm. He might be a bad boss but at least he’s employing someone.

This was Abbott’s message as ‘Workplace Relations’ minister under Howard, in 2002, where he also quipped that a “bad boss” does “more good than harm”. This ought to tell you everything you need to know about where Abbott stands on ‘workplace relations’ (and, for that matter, marriage and parenthood). Abuse, authoritarianism, exploitation, and so forth – we can suspend our judgement on these things insofar as they are called to service for a ‘greater good’ – employment, parenthood, and so forth.

Naturally, Abbott now, as leader, accompanies his prattling about ‘battlers’ with a pledge to overturn the ALP’s ‘re-regulation’ of IR. This is despite the fact the past two years have seen wages drop proportionally in relation to corporate profits. Abbott is, relatively speaking, a straight-talker among politicians. Unlike Howard, he does not intend to cloak his intentions with simpering talk of workplace ‘flexibility’, or the need to martial ‘wage restraint’ vis-à-vis inflation. Abbott will make himself perfectly clear – profits must be increased, workers’ pay and conditions must be diminished, and the unions (the ALP’s bases) must be crushed. In concrete terms, this means yet another overhaul of IR laws, with the level playing field to be tilted dramatically toward business (particularly in terms of unfair dismissal).

A recent poll suggested that, ALP protestations notwithstanding, many Australians do not regard Abbott as an ‘extremist’. This is entirely correct. There is nothing whatsoever extreme about Abbott – he is the logical culmination of Howard-era Coalition policy, except that what Howard had to dress up with euphemisms, Abbott parades nakedly and without shame. He intends to go back to the future – the future that would have existed had not climate change and a GFC hindered the neoliberal political and economic agenda.

For this reason, leftists who attack Abbott on the grounds of his being a supposed ‘conservative Catholic’ are misguided, to say the least. To be sure, Abbott is happy to bait women (see his actions regarding the ‘abortion pill’), and those in favour of legal abortions. Nonetheless, his politics are decidedly neoliberal rather than truly conservative. Cuts to welfare and attacks against unions are not inherently conservative positions. The same goes for Abbott’s take on Catholicism. He may be pals with Pell, but his version of the faith is at odds with the many Catholic orders and other Christian denominations that stridently criticized Workchoices, Iraq, and other fiascoes of the Howard era. Focusing on Abbott’s religious views risks obscuring his much more dangerous political ones, and also risks alienating the many ‘conservatives’ and Catholics out there who do not subscribe to Abbott’s theology of paternalism and exploitation. The abortion debate is more or less settled in this country, and it suits the Coalition only too well for their detractors to be bogged down in this sort of a sideshow.

Neither should observers be fooled into thinking Abbott is some kind of ‘mad extremist’, a kind of Tory answer to Mark Latham. Mark Latham may well have been mad. He certainly lacked Abbott’s survival skills. But he was never an ‘extremist’, or even, very clearly, a leftist. In contrast to Abbott, who has reaffirmed his support, time and again, for the worst excesses of the Howard era, Latham showed in his speeches and his writings that he was an anti-Labor Labor leader, a kind of Blairite peddler or ‘third-way’ politics. The Coalition are staking everything on a clear Howardist platform, not some attempt at party compromise. Australia is at a stage in its history where, to all appearances, it would be utterly unwilling to re-embarked on a Howard-on-steroids misadventure. As far as Tony Abbott is concerned, history needs a push.

The mythical “doctor’s wives” and “small ‘l’ liberals” who were supposed to rescue Australia from Howard (and never did) do not exist as any kind of serious electoral or political force, and will almost certainly continue to vote Liberal, albeit with pegs on their noses. We saw this recently in Higgins and Bradfield, and we saw it very clearly in the 2007 federal election. The doctor’s wives returned Turnbull with an increased margin; it was salaried workers in relatively low-income areas that tipped out the Howard government, not a fairy-tale army of principled libertarians.

The fight against Abbott and his cronies is therefore very real, and it is also one orientated quite clearly around class struggle (as was the 2007 election, insofar as this was a contest about Workchoices and IR). There are no indications that Abbott shies away from this interpretation of things, suggesting that he and his backers either believe that the Australian public has suddenly warmed to a ‘deregulatory’ industrial and environmental agenda, or he is simply possessed of utter stupidity and hubris.

Of course, the coming political battle is not solely reducible to class. This is evident when one peruses the flotsam on Abbott’s front bench. Ruddock, that hollow man who should serve as a living (or undead) warning to all “small ‘l’ liberals”, was given a position, no doubt for his work against asylum seekers. The race-baiting and serially incompetent Kevin Andrews was given a senior position, and the detestable, walking caricature of the Liberals, Bronwyn Bishop, was recalled to the shadow cabinet for the seniors’ portfolio. Barnaby Joyce, as proficient on economic matters as a bucket of pigshit, was given the finance portfolio, pairing him with ‘avuncular’ Joe Hockey. Clearly, it would seem, Abbott prefers a ‘type’.

Abbott may be a Rhodes scholar, and no doubt, he is, in some respects, an able man, but he’s already managed to deal himself out of the game when it comes to climate change. A carbon tax was the perfect, market-based rejoinder to Rudd’s complex and useless ETS. There were strong arguments in favour of a carbon tax from a Coalition point of view. (The intra-right debate on this topic was quite interesting, from my observations). Instead, Abbott has positioned himself as opposing a ‘great big tax’. Without the government imposing ‘price signals’ with respect to carbon emissions, there is no market-based solution to be had. You are then left with a Federal Coalition government that will either do nothing, more or less, or one that will attempt to tinker about the margins with command and control solutions. Again, none of this is particularly ‘conservative’.

All this may look rather grim to those of us who don’t vote Tory. There is, however, a silver lining or two. The working classes have often been persuaded to vote against their own economic interests in the past, but the Tories couldn’t pull of this trick in 2007, and it’s even harder to see them doing it in 2010, post-GFC. We should thank Abbott and the Liberals for shedding their disguised, and revealing themselves to the public as they really are (and always were!). That is to say, they are neither ‘liberal’ (except in an economic sense) nor a party. Finally, there are few people better than Abbott at unifying the enemies of the Coalition. Under Abbott, the Coalition will wage Republican-style ‘culture’ wars, which themselves mask a rather nasty economic war. In this, Abbott has every chance of inadvertently fomenting a counter-coalition, comprised of workers, immigrants, homosexual couples, and the many other who would be the targets of Coalition policy. It is as if, politically speaking, Mao’s famous blessing has come true in Australia, and we are finally beginning to live in ‘interesting times’.