After Malcolm Turnbull announced he was challenging PM Tony Abbott on Monday afternoon, commentators were unanimous in their speculation that Abbott would not go down without a fight.
The pugnaciousness that characterised his political style is also part of the playbook of Canadian PM Stephen Harper which – in common with Abbott's – bases interaction with political adversaries on their 'standing', and is less concerned with debating policy.
In Canada, former academic and public intellectual Michael Ignatieff became the leader of Canada's Opposition and the country's centre-left Liberal Party in 2009.
Ignatieff's story — recounted in his short but compelling memoir Fire and Ashes: success and failure in politics — offered some valuable lessons for Abbott era Australian politics. In particular, he highlights how politics waged as 'war' undermines civic discourse and stymies the democratic development of new policy.
Politics, Ignatieff argues, should be thought of as a calling where 'you put your own immodest ambitions in the service of others'. As such, participation in public life entails recognition that one lives in a diverse society where constituents will hold competing and potentially irreconcilable views on contentious issues. For Ignatieff, an ill-conceived foray into the debate surrounding Israel's conduct in the 2006 war in Lebanon managed to offend both Jewish and Lebanese constituencies and to serve as a reminder of the need to avoid 'inflam[ing] discord with ill-chosen words'.
The moral of Ignatieff's story is not to avoid adopting positions on contentious or divisive issues. Partisanship has also has its time and place. Rather, he points to the dangers of viewing politics as a battle in which one's opponents are defined as enemies. Such an outlook, he writes, 'legitimises a "take no prisoners" approach' and 'has the effect of defining compromises and deals — the humble trade plied in most democratic legislatures — as betrayal or treachery'.
Politics conceived as warfare inevitably sees attacks based on 'standing' rather than policy content. Combatants become fixated on undermining their opponent's very right to contribute to public debate, rather than critiquing competing views of the world. As Ignatieff writes, 'once you've denied people's standing, you no longer have to rebut what they say. You only have to tarnish who they are'. Harper, for example, attacked Ignatieff's credibility on the basis that the Liberal leader had previously spent considerable time working and living in the United States rather than Canada. A shallow slogan devised by the Conservatives — 'Michael Ignatieff.