Top 40 Peter van Onselen Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It was what journalist Paul Kelly called Howard’s ‘remorseless self-knowledge’ that ensured he was willing to change the way he governed.5 By contrast, during Abbott’s two years in the political wilderness after.”

— Peter van Onselen

2. “Putin was talking to the Papua New Guinean prime minister Peter O’Neill at the APEC summit in Beijing on 11 November when Abbott sidled over, downplayed the reports of shirtfronting and tried to be friendly to Putin, saying that he just needed to be seen having a conversation with him. O’Neill found it all very amusing, telling others about the odd experience.”

— Peter van Onselen

3. “Julie Bishop had the good grace to joke that she was in favour of publishing talking points so she didn’t have to inanely repeat them.”

— Peter van Onselen

4. “Abbott’s most important failure during the transition to government was not seeking out a chief of staff with a different set of skills to Credlin’s. Prior to the election Abbott described Credlin as ‘the smartest and fiercest political warrior I’ve ever worked with’, a phrase he would repeat many times in coming years. The problem with this formulation was that it wasn’t a good description of a prime minister’s chief of staff.”

— Peter van Onselen

5. “The thumping victory in 2013 obscured the concerns of his colleagues about Abbott’s personal style, that he was a bully and a policy lightweight. These perceptions of Abbott didn’t so much underestimate the man as underestimate the time it would take the voting public to overcome their distaste for Labor and place Abbott under the microscope.”

— Peter van Onselen

6. “The fact that a senior minister could make news by meeting a cross-bencher said much about the state of negotiations.”

— Peter van Onselen

7. “His lack of sympathy occasionally surfaced in other ways. Under pressure from victims of asbestos-related diseases for compensation, Abbott contended that the near-death campaigner Bernie Banton was not necessarily ‘pure of heart’. His words came in reply to a robust insult from Banton but were rightly interpreted as victim blaming.”

— Peter van Onselen

8. “Abbott refused to listen to explicit warnings from colleagues that he needed to change his ways. Prince Philip’s knighthood was a dramatic sign that he intended to continue indulging his quaint social views regardless of the political cost.”

— Peter van Onselen

9. “There was little to the Coalition’s economic plan other than scaremongering about debt and deficit. This lack of positive policy displayed a complacency based on the Liberal Party’s genuine belief that Labor governments are bad for the economy and simply booting them from the treasury benches was sound economic management.”

— Peter van Onselen

10. “One MP told us that they didn’t believe ‘Abbott the loyalist’ is a narrative which accurately captures the former prime minister’s character, arguing instead that poor political judgement was often ‘rebadged’ as loyalty when events conspired against him.”

— Peter van Onselen

11. “Opinion journalism doesn’t change minds; it only caters to ingrained prejudice. It can, though, create a false sense of security that a set of ideas, such as climate change scepticism, is popular when it is only the dominant view within a closed feedback loop.”

— Peter van Onselen

12. “No one should underestimate the significance of this moment for Abbott’s colleagues, realising there wasn’t much he wouldn’t jettison to protect Credlin. He was even prepared to call them a bunch of misogynists.”

— Peter van Onselen

13. “In some respects Abbott proved to be the id of Australia’s modern conservative movement: hyper-adversarial, willing to occupy itself in opposition to whatever social issues were preoccupying the left. Owing more to American political culture than the British inheritance Abbott claimed to value, contemporary Australian conservatism makes the grave error of believing in things other than power and stability.”

— Peter van Onselen

14. “In some ways, Abbott has never ceased to be a student politician – both in style and substance.”

— Peter van Onselen

15. “Characteristically, Bill Shorten led from behind, waiting for the social media uproar before condemning the concept of random visa checks.”

— Peter van Onselen

16. “Chris Mitchell, recalls meeting with Abbott just ahead of Christmas 2014 wherein he argued that replacing Hockey with Turnbull would improve the government’s messaging and abate Turnbull’s ambitions. Abbott retorted that all it would do would be to give Turnbull another stepping stone towards the Lodge.”

— Peter van Onselen

17. “By labelling the increase a ‘deficit levy’, Abbott showed he had learned one thing from Howard, as such weasel words were one of the reasons focus groups thought Howard.”

— Peter van Onselen

18. “Costello, no great friend of Abbott, and no doubt jealous of Abbott’s decision to fight on and prosper instead of quitting after the 2007 defeat, would become a constant critic of Hockey.”

— Peter van Onselen

19. “In a national security speech after the February spill motion, Abbott called on immigrants ’to be as tolerant of others as we are of them.”

— Peter van Onselen

20. “Abbott had never been a great listener. He had the habit of losing attention when the person talking strayed outside topics that interested him.”

— Peter van Onselen

21. “Whatever the details of the entitlement rules, the mob wanted contrition, something alien to Bishop. She submitted herself to a jaded unapologetic media conference in which she even took aim at Hockey, because the treasurer had the temerity to say that she had questions to answer. It was sheer petulance and the polls came crashing down again for the government.”

— Peter van Onselen

22. “While Brandis might have come under pressure for using entitlements to fill out his bookshelf, unlike many of his colleagues, at least he was reading.”

— Peter van Onselen

23. “In winning the 2013 election, Abbott looked like an effective political leader only because in a two-party system someone has to triumph.”

— Peter van Onselen

24. “The Australian’s John Lyons exposed Abbott’s thinking, all the while under constant attack from certain polemicists on the right. These commentators didn’t seem to understand that denying any such proposal while simultaneously threatening to expose Lyons’ source didn’t make much sense.”

— Peter van Onselen

25. “Showing the skills more of a high-school debater than a barrister, Brandis blustered in the Senate that ‘people do have a right to be bigots’.”

— Peter van Onselen

26. “What the outbursts against Roy, Blaine, and the party more generally over complaints about Credlin had in common was a sense that his authority was not being respected.”

— Peter van Onselen

27. “Abbott’s strategists had hoped that the domestic lament in front of world leaders might gain international media attention, given the comparatively modest user-pays amount, and help his case to pass the rebate legislation. If this was the plan, it failed.”

— Peter van Onselen

28. “What is Julie supposed to do?’ one MP asked sarcastically at the time. ‘Perform worse to make Tony look better by way of comparison?”

— Peter van Onselen

29. “Brandis was the Abbott minister whose self-regard most outweighed his performance in office.”

— Peter van Onselen

30. “The government had a reverse mandate not to do the very things they tried to do,’ cross-bench senator Nick Xenophon told us. ‘He put an albatross around his neck from the very beginning.”

— Peter van Onselen

31. “Tony, Tony, we’re not going down that path again’ was a line cabinet ministers recalled Howard using with Abbott on more than a few occasions.”

— Peter van Onselen

32. “The contrast with the disposal of Rudd was becoming clearer. Grievances with Abbott had been well and truly aired, in a much more public fashion than the backgrounding against Rudd.”

— Peter van Onselen

33. “Authority to Abbott was hierarchical. Those at the top exercised power and those at the bottom deferred. As we have seen, Abbott was, to his great cost, largely uninterested in the views of those beneath him. His dismissal of subordinates was partly because as he made his way through Australia’s great institutions, he tended to look to leaders for support rather than peers. This was crucial to understanding the way Abbott learned about politics, and why he ended up being a failed prime minister.”

— Peter van Onselen

34. “Senator Xenophon told Abbott at the end of 2014 that he needed to be very careful, because family members of the senator who were lifelong Liberal voters were not prepared to vote for the government. Xenophon told Abbott he was saying this as a critic, not an enemy, of the Liberal Party, and warned Abbott his colleagues would turn against him. ‘I’m not going to be rolled,’ Abbott fired back. ‘It will not happen.’ He wasn’t using his ears.”

— Peter van Onselen

35. “Oakes added the delightful touch that Abbott stormed out of his own office, taking any authority he might have had with him.”

— Peter van Onselen

36. “If Australia’s political culture has become especially adversarial in the last few years, Abbott himself is hardly blameless. Live by the sword.”

— Peter van Onselen

37. “In their own ways, Menzies, Fraser and Howard embodied the essence of conservatism, reconciling themselves to periods of social change, pragmatically choosing which social trends to embrace and which to reject. Indeed, the founders of the Liberal Party were explicit in establishing a party with links to the broad electorate in contrast to prior conservative parties at the beck and call of business, hence the name Liberal rather than Conservative.”

— Peter van Onselen

38. “In opposition, Abbott once gathered his staff to ask for suggestions on how the team could improve. One brave staffer mentioned Credlin’s tendency to micro-manage. Abbott wasn’t impressed and told the staffer to apologise and buy Credlin flowers. Chivalry wasn’t dead for Abbott.”

— Peter van Onselen

39. “Making a distinction between principle and policy was a useful formulation for a minister who wanted to talk about a wide range of issues without breaking Prime Minister Howard’s strict rules about ministers sticking to their portfolio areas.”

— Peter van Onselen

40. “Wine was flowing and the drunker everyone got the more the offices were trashed, with some junior staffers even deliberately pouring wine all over the floor and some of the furniture, commenting that it was Turnbull’s mess to clean up now.”

— Peter van Onselen