Like many Australian Liberals before and since his tenure (1975–1983), Fraser believed that the Liberal Party is the custodian of the center-right tradition in politics. But he also stressed the importance of both liberal and conservative thought in shaping public policy. Liberalism “always emphasises the freedom of the individual and the absence of restraint,” Abbott approvingly quotes Fraser (and Harries) as saying. “Conservatism . . . stresses the need for a framework of stability, continuity and order not only as something desirable in itself but as a necessary condition for a free society.” And he further asserts: “The art of handling this tension, of finding that creative balance between the forces of freedom and the forces of continuity which alone allows a society to advance, is the true art of government in a country like ours.”

Again, in striking contrast, Tea Party Republicans and many conservatives inside and outside the Beltway place more stress on classical liberalism as a rigid political ideology, à la John Stuart Mill and the Enlightenment, and less emphasis on the more classical conservative virtues of prudence, stability and measured change, à la Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton. This perhaps also helps explain why Tea Party Republicans exhibit a far deeper hostility toward the state than, say, Australian or indeed most Western conservatives.

STILL, ALTHOUGH ABBOTT HAS little stomach for ideology, his political rise is attributed to his doing the very thing so many British Tories have shied away from doing in more recent times: he had the political nerve and moral conviction to sell a seemingly unpopular policy to “middle Australia,” where the center of political gravity is decidedly to the right of most editorial offices of media outlets as well as the senior common rooms of our nation’s great learned institutions.

When Kevin Rudd won power in 2007, the accepted wisdom was that the Labor leader would consign conservatives to the political wilderness for a generation, much as the American consensus predicted Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 would mark what the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had previously called a new (liberal) cycle of history in U.S. politics.

During the first two years of the Labor government, from late 2007 to late 2009, the parties that form the conservative coalition were vacillating, divided and leaderless. They proved unable to present a clear alternative to Canberra’s big-government agenda. Like David Cameron in Britain and John McCain in the United States, Australia’s conservative political leadership embraced the global-warming agenda, and essentially aped the Labor policy to introduce a cap-and-trade scheme on the eve of the UN’s Copenhagen climate conference. A gap of fifteen to twenty percentage points between the two major parties was the norm. Aussie conservatives were in the deepest political valley.

The turning point came in December 2009, when Abbott took over the Liberal leadership. His internal opponent was Malcolm Turnbull, a Mitt Romney–type figure without any conservative instincts, and he—just like McCain and Cameron—had been a willing accomplice in the other party’s agenda to price greenhouse-gas emissions in order to slash the nation’s carbon footprint.

But the (political) climate was changing, at home and abroad. For several years, from 2006 to 2009—which marked the period from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth to the U.S. House’s passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill—the global-warming debate had been conducted in a heretic-hunting and illiberal environment. It was deemed blasphemy for anyone to dare question not only the doomsday scenarios peddled by the climate alarmists but also the policy consensus to decarbonize the economy via a tax or cap-and-trade scheme. Rudd claimed that climate change was the “great moral challenge” of our time. And in clear breach of the great liberal anti-Communist Sidney Hook’s rule of controversy (“Before impugning an opponent’s motives . . . answer his arguments”), Rudd linked “world government conspiracy theorists” and “climate-change deniers” to “vested interests.”

It was in this environment that Abbott challenged the media-political zeitgeist. Cap and trade, he argued, merely amounted to economic pain for no environmental gain, especially for many Australians who were mortgaged to the hilt. The nation, having weathered both the Asian and the Anglo-American financial storms in 1997–1998 and 2008–2009, respectively, has not suffered a recession in more than two decades. But a significant segment of the electorate has been increasingly conscious of high living costs, thanks to a tight housing market and exorbitant energy prices. Add to this the fact that Australia accounts for only about 1.2 percent of global carbon emissions and depends heavily on mineral exports for growth. Abbott’s case was not an appeal to do nothing, but to avoid doing something stupid. And unilateral action to slash Australian emissions when no major emitter would follow Australia’s lead, while its trade competitors were chugging up the smoky path to prosperity, was hardly in the national interest.

Then came the failed 2009 Copenhagen summit, which exposed the Labor agenda as a sham. When the rest of the world refused to endorse the climate enthusiasts’ fanciful notions for slashing carbon emissions, Rudd imploded. Almost overnight, the Labor prime minister’s stratospheric poll numbers collapsed and he ditched his cap-and-trade scheme, his government’s keynote legislation. Labor factional warlords panicked and, in an act of brutality late one night in June 2010 that could have been mistaken for a scene from Shakespeare’sMacbeth, they knifed Rudd in an internal party coup and installed Julia Gillard as prime minister.

Undeterred, Abbott continued his relentless attacks on other key issues of principle and policy. Throughout the next three years, he opposed the Labor government’s big-spending and interventionist agenda, which had turned a multibillion-dollar surplus under the previous conservative government into skyrocketing debt and deficits, and he promised voters he would not be profligate with tax dollars. He also supported tough border-protection policies, which had traditionally helped boost public confidence in large-scale, legal immigration. So effective was Abbott in challenging Labor that the government changed leaders (again): Gillard herself was fatally knifed in June 2013—by the very man she had backstabbed three years earlier. By refusing to buckle in his opposition to Labor’s increasingly antibusiness agenda and its craven attempts to woo groups such as gays, refugees, the arts lobby and public broadcasters at the expense of its more traditional constituency of blue-collar workers, Abbott aggravated the sensibilities of the metropolitan sophisticates. But he also broadened the appeal of his conservative agenda. He subsequently set the scene for the very electoral success that his critics had predicted he would never achieve.

ON FOREIGN POLICY, and reflecting a broad bipartisan consensus, Abbott will ensure that the U.S. alliance remains the centerpiece of his foreign policy. This is no surprise. Australia is the only nation to have joined America in every major military intervention in the past century: both world wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq. It has done so for the most part out of conviction as well as calculation. When disagreements do erupt—most notably over trade, where Australia has been more committed to unilateral cuts in agricultural subsidies than America—they have been moderate and usually privately expressed. Australia has not resented its dependence on American power. It has neither sought nor received aid in return for its support. And it is one of the few U.S. allies that has not been a burden on American taxpayers. At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, Australia provided bases and other facilities to the United States. More recently, in 2011 the Labor government, supported by Abbott, agreed to what amounts to a U.S. Marine base in Darwin on the northern coast and potentially in western Australia.

The alliance is deeply embedded in the national psyche. From its birth as an independent state in 1901, Australia has always sought a close association with a great power that shares its values and interests. For the first half of the twentieth century, Britain filled that role; since the end of the war against Japanese militarism and the onset of the Cold War, it has been the United States.

The advantages of the U.S. alliance include favorable access to technology and intelligence, as well as an important security insurance policy. On the American side, the alliance is of value because Australia is a stable, reliable and significant presence. It is the twelfth-largest economy in the world and serves as a fast-expanding and wealthy market for U.S. goods and services.

“When Australian ambassadors in Washington express support for the United States, it is heartfelt and unalloyed, never the ‘yes, but’ of the other allies, perfunctory support followed by a list of complaints, slights and sage finger-wagging,” the columnist Charles Krauthammer has observed. “Australia understands America’s role and is sympathetic to its predicament as reluctant hegemon.” Abbott shares that view. “It is often thought of America, in its dealings with the wider world, that its knowledge is scanty, its attention span short, its judgment flawed, and its actions frequently counter-productive,” he wrote in his memoirs in 2009. “What can’t seriously be questioned,” he added, “is Americans’ collective desire to be a force for good.” And he declared at the Heritage Foundation in 2012: “America needs to believe in itself the way others still believe in it.”