Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has told The Guardian he can "imagine a way" to return to frontline politics — language deliberately imprecise enough to be deniable, yet specific enough to generate the attention it was designed to generate.
Abbott left the House of Representatives in 2019, after losing the Warringah seat he had held since 1994 to independent Zali Steggall. The loss was a landmark event in Australian politics: a conservative Prime Minister and cultural war veteran voted out by his own electorate after a campaign that mobilised the communities — educated, moderate, climate-conscious — that the Liberal Party had systematically alienated.
The suggestion that he might return raises an immediate question: return where? His old seat is not available to him. Steggall has consolidated her hold on Warringah and the independent movement she represents has expanded rather than contracted since 2019. A Senate path is theoretically possible but would require either a casual vacancy or a preselection fight that the New South Wales Liberal division would need to authorise. Neither is straightforward.
This matters less than what the public musing is actually for. Abbott understands the media as well as any Australian politician of his generation. He knows that suggesting a potential return generates coverage, reframes media narrative, and — most usefully — sends signals to the Liberal base about what the party should stand for heading into the election.
The signals are clear enough. Abbott's return, were it to happen, would represent the party's hard cultural-war wing asserting primacy over the moderate direction that figures like former PM Malcolm Turnbull and former treasurer Scott Morrison's moderate-adjacent rhetoric represented. It would be a statement about identity politics, immigration, and the culture wars as the preferred terrain for a coalition campaign.
For current Liberal leader Peter Dutton, the Abbott signal is a management problem dressed up as an opportunity. Dutton has been trying to hold together a coalition that needs the hard right's energy and the moderate suburban seat-holder's votes. Abbott's emergence forces him to either embrace the former Prime Minister — which costs him moderates — or distance himself, which costs him the base that Abbott speaks to.
Australia's political geography has changed significantly since Abbott last stood for a seat. The so-called 'teal' independents, who won Liberal-held seats in 2022 on platforms of climate action and integrity, are defending their positions. They are strong in precisely the demographics where Abbott's brand is most toxic: educated, prosperous, inner-suburban and beachside electorates. An Abbott resurgence in the Liberal Party narrative is a gift to every teal incumbent in every seat the party needs to win back.
The more interesting question is what this tells us about the Liberal Party's institutional state. A party in good health, with clear strategic direction and internal unity, does not have space for a figure like Abbott to generate this kind of noise weeks before an election. The fact that he can — and that his musings get the coverage they do — is a measure of how much the party's post-2022 identity crisis remains unresolved.
Mate, here is the blunt version. Australia has a federal election coming. The Liberal Party is behind in the polls. Its most prominent former Prime Minister is telling journalists he can imagine coming back. The current leader has said nothing. If this is a pre-election reset, it is not clear what it is resetting to.
