A year of Tony Abbott

SYDNEY — Tony Abbott has never been a popular politician. Throughout his career, Abbott, now Australia’s prime minister, has rarely cracked 40 percent in public approval ratings. His chilly media manners have been lampooned in an endless number of YouTube videos. And his disparaging comments about his predecessor Julia Gillard and women in general have earned him international ire.

Heading into last September’s national elections, Abbott’s positions on some of the country’s most hotly debated issues were anathema to many voters. He staked out strong opposition to climate-change research (which he called an “inexact science”), gay marriage (a “radical change based on the fashion of the moment”) and a tax on carbon emissions. Combined with his personal unpopularity, those policy stances made it seem unlikely that Abbott, of the country’s politically conservative Liberal Party, could win Australia’s top office.

But Gillard’s party was riven with infighting, and in June 2013 her Labor rival Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister, ousted her in a party putsch. It was the Labor Party’s dysfunction, political observers say, as well as the solid campaigning of Abbott, that handed victory to the opposition leader and his conservative coalition.

As he marked his first year in office this month, Abbott touted his achievements. His government abolished the three-year-old carbon tax. He cracked down on asylum seekers entering Australian waters, passed free-trade agreements and created 100,000 jobs, he says. But critics say his first year has reinforced their worst fears — massive reductions in education spending, cuts to health and social services, a dismantling of the government infrastructure for tackling climate change and economic policies that have benefited already successful companies while the country’s manufacturing sector receives little support.

Within weeks of taking office, Abbott followed through on a vow to stop asylum seekers heading to Australia. The issue is among the most polarizing in the country; both the Liberal and Labor parties have faced criticism for their harsh policies, but tough stances on asylum seekers have helped politicians at the ballot box. Abbott hammered out agreements with Indonesia to help the archipelago better police its shores and with Cambodia to take in some of the asylum seekers who are intercepted at sea. He was later able to claim that no refugees had attempted the treacherous open-water journey from South Asia for six months.

But his stop-the-boats policy hasn’t been without controversy. The country’s highest court will soon hear the case of 157 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers kept at sea by Australian authorities for weeks before eventually being taken to an offshore detention facility.

In August, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison announced that children under the age of 10 held in detention centers would be resettled. But the announcement applied only to children already on the mainland — some 150 of the 876 children currently in detention centers. There are more than 6,000 people in immigration detention facilities in mainland Australia as well as on Christmas Island, the island of Nauru and Manus province in Papua New Guinea.

Abbott and his governing coalition were also quick to crack down on climate research. He did not appoint a science minister to his Cabinet, leaving Australia without someone in the position for the first time since the job was created in 1931. Days after the election Abbott abolished the Climate Commission, an independent body of scientists set up by the previous government to provide the public with information on global warming.

“To understand what is happening in Australia, it would be like if Sarah Palin was elected,” said Tim Flannery, a former head of the Climate Commission. “They shut us down and immediately shut down our website. It was pretty vindictive.”

Shortly after losing his job, Flannery and other scientists created the Climate Council, a nonprofit group with goals similar to the Climate Commission’s. Through crowdsourcing, they raised more than $1 million for a new website presenting the commission’s research. Said Flannery, “People wanted the information we were providing.”

Members of Abbott’s Cabinet are ideologues, he added, and they haven’t been shy about articulating their anti-climate-change views. Last year Maurice Newman, head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, wrote in The Guardian that Australia had become “hostage to climate change madness.” Not only was the planet not warming, he insisted, but “credible” scientists are saying “the global temperature will drop until 2100 to a value corresponding to the Little Ice Age of 1870.” 

Abbott’s other anti-environment policies include the fulfillment of, as he put it in 2011, a “pledge in blood” to revoke Australia’s carbon tax — a move that critics say has isolated the country internationally. In addition, he directed his Cabinet to draw up legislation to scrap the Clean Energy Finance Corp., a government-funded group that would provide $10 billion over five years to support private business investment in renewable energy. 

Most recently, Abbott spearheaded the repeal of a law levying a 30 percent tax on profits from coal and iron-ore mining. To push through the bill, his government struck a deal with mining tycoon Clive Palmer, now a senator whose political party holds the balance of power in Australia’s upper house.

The dealmaking Abbott has been forced to engage in to pass legislation has angered some of his supporters. His budget, for example, contains not only deep cost-cutting measures but also provisions he campaigned against, including some tax hikes. Some controversial measures, like charging Australians $7 each time they see a doctor, are still stalled, months after they were announced.

“I don’t like everything the government does, but I’d like to see a couple of things go their way instead of having them compromise too much,” said Tony Spink, a semiretired architect in Sydney. “That’s not necessarily great when you’re trying to run a country.”

If there’s one area where Abbott has won voters’ grudging support, it’s foreign policy. Last year Australia was hit by its own spying scandal after former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden revealed that Australian spy agencies tried to listen in on the personal phone calls of Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and other senior Indonesian government officials. Abbott and his Cabinet, wary of upsetting their neighbor, particularly given its cooperation on the asylum issue, scrambled to salvage the relationship.

“I’d say they did OK on that,” said Sam Rogeveen, an editor with the Lowy Institute, an independent think tank in Sydney. “It was clear when the government was presented with that dilemma, it took the line ‘We are sticking with this intelligence relationship, which is at the heart of the alliance.’”

Abbott and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop’s deft handling of the spy scandal ultimately led to a new agreement between Australia and Indonesia for more intelligence sharing. And the administration’s cooperation with the Netherlands to send emergency response crews to Ukraine after the downing of a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet, whose victims included at least 28 Australians, also helped boost the prime minister’s public standing.

His next big challenge will be striking a balance between U.S. and Chinese influence. Australia has long courted Chinese business investment while cleaving to the United States, with which it has a long-standing security partnership.

As part of its so-called pivot to Asia, the United States announced in 2011 that it would station about 2,500 Marines in the northern Australian town of Darwin. Analysts say the move is designed to secure international waterways, particularly in the disputed South China Sea, and to beef up U.S. military presence in the region in the face of China’s growing influence.

China, meanwhile, continues to spend big in Australia, investing in property, casinos, rail infrastructure and iron-ore mining. Chinese demand for Australia’s primary resources largely kept the global financial crisis at bay.

So far, those economic and security relationships have co-existed on parallel tracks, but that could change as China’s influence grows.

Abbott has “embraced this mantra that Australia doesn’t have to choose between its history and its geography, which means it doesn’t have to choose between its trade relationship with China and its strategic relationship with the U.S.,” said Rogeveen. “It’s the dilemma that every U.S.-friendly country in the region faces.”