It was May eight, just days after the coalition's devastating election loss, when Tony Abbott made a phone call.
So Tony Abbott, of course, one of our former prime ministers, former leader of the Liberal Party, was on his way to Hungary, where he was planning to address the Danube Institute. This is a right wing think tank. But during a stopover on the way to Hungary in Dubai, Tony Abbott
decided that he needed to call Natasha Griggs. She's the president of the Country Liberal Party in the Northern Territory, and Tony Abbott wanted to talk to her about Jacinta Nabajimpa Price moving over to the Liberal Party.
Abbot was pressing his case that just Center Price was someone that the Liberal Party needed in their ranks.
Natasha Griggs told me that Tony Abbott said to her that in his view, just Enterprise was a very talented politician, someone who represents the future of the Liberal and that it was time that she came into the Liberal Party fold.
Hours later, Senator Price switched party rooms.
It was a very controversial move because I think all the Nationals felt that it was really a betrayal, and I think Tony Abbott probably anticipated this kind of reaction and so he wanted to smooth things over with the COLP administrative wing before just Enterprice's defection was announced.
For moderates, it was another sign that the former Prime minister was still pulling the party's leavers from the outside, something he's been doing for years from Schwartzmania. I'm Daniel James is seven am today, National correspondent for the Saturday Paper. Jason kotsukis on Tony Abbott. He shadow networks steering the Liberals and why inside to say there are cancer killing the party this Tuesday May twenty seven. So, Jason, it turns out Tony Abbott was pushing behind the scenes for
just Center Prize to switch parties. Can you tell me why he involved himself in that decision?
Well, Tony Abbott sees to Center Price as very much the future of the Liberal Party. She's on the far right of the party, and I think Tony Abbott wants to strengthen the conservative wing of the Liberal Party. He doesn't want to see his party moving back to the center, as Susan Lee said that she wanted to do after she won the leadership ballot. And I think for many inside the party. It was kind of felt like deja vous.
They've been here before. And Tony Abbott, of course, when he was Prime Minister, didn't last very long, and mainly that was thanks to him trying to implement a very far right agenda that caught voters by surprise. It caught his party room by surprise.
A little while ago I met with the Prime Minister and advised him that I would be challenging him for the leadership of the Liberal.
Party only two years into the role. He was, of course challenged by Malcolm Turnbull.
We have lost thirty news polls in a row. It is clear that the people have made up their mind about mister Abbot's leadership.
And he lost the leadership. He lost the Prime ministership.
Pole driven panic has produced a revolving door prime ministership which can't be good for our country, and a fedrole media culture has developed that rewards treachery.
For a lot of Liberals. It felt like though, going back to this kind of territory that they'd sort of fought over before and felt that this had sort of been dealt with. But here he is. He's back trying to push the same agenda that got him into all sorts of trouble ten years ago.
So what do we know about the reaction in side the parties more broadly as it unfolded, Well.
The Nationals were furious when the news was made public.
National Senate leader Bridget Mackenzie joining us from Bendigo.
Good to talk to you again, Bridget.
You must be disappointed by the news that senator just sent it now. But jimper Price is leaving your party to sit with the Liberals.
Yeah.
Absolutely. I think it's a devastating loss to our party room, particularly.
They remain angry about it.
Loyalty matters in the game of politics, and so it is incredibly disappointing our shared David.
For a start, they lost a senator, so their party's status in the Senate is no longer official. They're under that threshold of five senators down to four. They also lost a Senator from New South Wales at the actual election,
Paren Davies. She just didn't win enough votes. The Liberals were a little bit alarmed when it emerged that Price was not only joining the Liberal Party party room, but she'd be running as a deputy on a joint ticket with Angus Taylor for the leadership of the Liberal Party, and then there were rumors also circulating that Tony Abbott
had engineered all of this from behind the scenes. The news that he was kind of pulling the strings did alarm a lot of Liberal Party members, especially the moderate wing, that have been trying to push back against Tony Abbott for quite a long time.
So you've been speaking to a number of people inside the Liberal Party. What have they been saying about this episode?
I think a lot of moderates feel that Tony Abbott and his closest confident, who is, of course, his former chief of staff, Peter Kredlin, who's now a prominent commentator across the Murdock tabloids as well as the Australian and Sky News. A lot of moderates feel that both Tony Abbot and Peter Credlin have been really trying to shape the Federal Party's direction from the sidelines.
It was a very hard watch for Liberals around the country on Saturday night.
Where to now for the party?
Well, under those circumstances, should the party become labor light. It's not a question of being more progressive or more conservative. It's a question of being more strongly Liberal.
But what struck me in doing this story was how much ill feeling there is within the Liberal Party towards Tony Abbott and Peter Kredlin. It wasn't hard to get people to say what they really think, and one person said to me that Tony Abbott and his Sky News after Dark cronies and those few people left in the Parliamentary Party who still listened to him are so tone deaf that they are trying to pretend the weaknesses that
made the coalition unelectable actually strengths. Another person said to me that they had a big role in shaping Peter Dutton's policy agenda. They said to me it was Abbott and Kredlin who were forever in Dutton's ear programming Dutton's stupid policy positions. These people are like cancer, another person told me, arguing for more carcinogenic policies, they will kill
the Liberal Party for good. And if you're trying to understand why the Liberal Party today is a smoking ruin, then look no further than Tony Abbott and Peter Kredlin.
After the break, What other disastrous decisions have Abbot and Kredlin had their hand in. Jason, you've been looking into the enduring influence of Tony Abbot in the Liberal Party. What else has he been involving himself in.
Well, when you put it all together, Tony Abbott is involving himself in quite a few different causes. I think. Another thing that Tony Abbott and Peter Kreblin were heavily involved in last year was this decision by the federal Liberal Party executive to take over the New South Wales
division of the Liberal Party. And I think there's few grievances in the New South Wales Division that run deeper than this one, because they feel that at Tony Abbott's instigation that Peter Dutton appointed two very prominent right wing Victorians, Alan Stockdale, the former Victorian Treasurer and Richard Olsten, former minister in the Howard government. And the pretexts for this intervention was a bungled nominations process for the New South
Wales local government elections last year. For whatever reason, the New South Wales Division was not able to organize the nominations for a lot of candidates, so the Liberal Party didn't actually run candidates and a lot of key local government contests and understandably there was a lot of anger over this bungled nominations process, and it did prompt the
federal intervention. But I think a lot of moderates believe that the real agenda here was the Conservatives wanting to take over the New South Wales division and punish a lot of those moderates who were in influential positions. Another thing that both Abbott and Kredlin have been heavily involved in is this very nasty dispute that's taken place in Victoria between the former leader of the Victorian Liberals, John Persudo, and Moira Deeming, who's a member of the Victorian Upper House.
Toty, welcome to the program. I've got a whole laundry list of stuff I want to get your view on, but I've got to get your view on Moira Deeming. I just spoke to her live in the studio.
More Deeming had attended an anti trans rally in Victoria back in twenty twenty three, and John Perzudo was very critical of her for attending that rally, especially because some neo Nazis had sort of turned up in support of what this rally was all about, and he had linked Moira Deeming with this neo Nazi group and Moira Demi ended up being expelled from the Liberal Party party room. Peter as the father of three daughters.
I'm utterly dismayed that a mainstream political party would sack a member of parliament for defending women's rights. And to the extent that the Liberal Party has a women's problem, it must have got much much worse by the expulsion of this brave and smart woman from its own ranks.
And in response, I think at the urging of Tony Abbott and Peter Credlin, moy Redeeming sued John Persudo. She won that lawsuit. She won three hundred thousand dollars in damages and she's also won legal costs, and I think John Persuda now has to pay two point three million in legal costs, and so he's facing bankruptcy and that will mean that will have to resign his seat in
Parliament if he can't raise the money. And a lot of moderates feel very angry towards Tony Abbott and Peter Kredlin for goading lawyer Deemi into taking on this lawsuit, and so there's a lot of anger about that, I think.
So it seems like there's been a string of poor decisions with Tony Abbott's fingerprints on them. Tony Abbott famously lost his prominenceship a decade ago and then lost his seat in Parliament. So why does he still have so much influence within the party.
This is a great question, Daniel, because how could you take someone seriously who after winning a massive majority as Tony Abbott did in the twenty thirteen election. He had I think ninety seats, he had a relatively tame crossbench, yet managed to throw away the prime ministership within I think it was two years and two days that he served, and I find it difficult to understand why anyone would take Tony Abbitt seriously as a person of any kind
of political wisdom. And it wasn't just Tony Abbot managed to do it by himself. He had Peter Kredlin as his chief of staff and it is really a puzzle that these two still have any real influence in the Liberal Party. I think the reason why they've tried to hold on to a power base is one liberal put to me, It's all about revenge. It's all about Tony Abbott trying to rewrite history as to why he was
dumped by his own party. It's worth remembering that it wasn't some sort of moderate uprising that saw Tony Abbott lose the leadership. It was Tony Abbott's policy decisions, you know, things like wanting to give Prince Philip a knighthood, that disastrous first budget that he brought down in twenty fourteen, which broke so many of the promises that Tony Abbott
himself had made it the during the election campaign. You know, in the end, it was conservatives within the Liberal Party that decided they couldn't keep Tony Abbott on as leader or Prime Minister any longer, and it was them that got rid of him. But I think Tony Abbott believes that the moderates were to blame, and I think his goal is to try to cast them out of the party.
He wants to recast the Liberal Party in his own image and justify his past leadership, and I think prove that the path that voters have already rejected is the path that the Liberals should still follow.
Susan Lee is the new leader and she is a moderate. How do you expect the fact that she's in charge now to change the level of influence Tony Abbott has well.
I think Susan LEAs indicated pretty clearly that she agrees that the Liberal Party has to move back towards the center. She said that the Liberal Party has to meet voters where they are. But I think she's going to have real trouble trying to limit Tony Abbot's influence because he does have such a strong grip on a lot of sections of the party. But he's kind of doing that with the help of the Rupert Murdoch empire in Australia.
Tony Abbott is on the board of Fox International. He's very close to Lachlan Murdoch, who is the CEO and chairman of Fox Liberals that I spoke to last week said that Lachland takes far more active interest in Australian politics than his father ever did. And so I think anyone that threatens to deviate from the sort of Tony Abbott worldview risks getting slammed on the opinion pages of
the newspages of The Australian or Unsky News. So Tony Abbitt's got a lot of kind of levers that he can pull when it comes to exerting his influence within the Liberal Party, and I think Susan Lee has got a real fight on her hands trying to push back
against that. I guess the big advantage she has is she can just point to the scoreboard at the last election and show that if the Liberal Party is going to have any hope of pegging back that huge majority that Labor has at the moment, then they really do have no choice but to move back to the center. But I think Susan Lee is going to have to gear herself up for what will be a long and bruising battle.
Jason, always a pleasure speaking with you. Thank you for your time.
Daniel, thanks sir for having me.
Also in the news today, Prome Minister Anthony Alberinezi says Israel's blockade of aid in the Gaza is an outrage, calling the Israeli government's justification for stopping critical food and medical supplies quote completely untenable.
It is outrageous that there be a blockade of food and supplies to people who are in need in Gaza.
Whence come as calls are growing for Australia to join the UK, France and Canada and threatening sanctions if Israel's campaign continues, and weather conditions are expected to complicate recovery efforts on the mid north coast of New South Wales as residents recover from the devastating floods that grip through their region last week. About thirty two thousand residents from fourteen communities remain isolated even as floodwaters received This has been seven am. Thanks for listening.