The Saturday Paper‘s editorial doesn’t pull any punches: “Sometimes people end up where they belong. This is not how Tony Abbott became prime minister but it is how he found himself working at the Institute of Public Affairs. That a man can go from leading the country to making Facebook videos for a right-wing think tank is evidence of the great lack in our politics. The space between these two callings is the gap in which almost everything wrong with Australia lives. This is the space in which one might hope to find talent or vision or decency. … The IPA feeds people into politics and now they return as backwash, like spit into a milkshake. … The tragedy here is not that Tony Abbott has ended up where he belongs, working for cranks at an institute that opposes Indigenous rights and advocates selling off the ABC. The tragedy is that no one much better was waiting in the parliament to replace him, and that what he does now is not much different to what he was doing in government.”
3 February 2021