Now that he's a backbencher, Tony Abbott is making some good points about how to defeat Islamist terrorism. When he delivered the annual Margaret Thatcher Lecture in London last month, he said two things were required to defeat terrorism.
The first was effective military action against its perpetrators. The second was a renewed cultural self-confidence "to stand up for ourselves and for the universal decencies of mankind".
Unfortunately as prime minister, Abbott only ever acted on the first of those two things. He enthusiastically deployed Australian military forces overseas while at the same time creating the apparatus of unprecedented government surveillance of the country's citizens.
But when it came to the battle of ideas, he vacated the field. Freedom of speech is a fundamental tenet of liberal democracy. It is what Islamists abhor. Yet Abbott could never bring himself to fight to implement his election promise to repeal the legislation that makes it unlawful to insult or offend someone on the basis of their race.
Abbott's failure is also the Liberal Party's failure. His approach is not unrepresentative of the vast bulk of Liberal MPs. In August, when Abbott was still PM, Coalition MPs debated gay marriage for 5½ hours. That's fine — to many people it is an important issue.
The absence of any similar sort of debate on freedom of speech reveals a great deal about the priorities of the current crop of Coalition parliamentarians.
The British author, former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, and candidate for the Liberal Democrats at the last British election, Maajid Nawaz, puts it as, "... if liberty means anything at all, it is the right to express oneself without being killed for it. It follows, therefore, that any liberal naturally concerned with a fair society must be the first to openly defend against the erosion of free speech, especially when deceptively done in the name of minority groups".
Over their party's history, many Liberals have been more comfortable advocating the resort to force in foreign lands in place of using the power of argument at home.
At the press conference to repudiate his election promise Abbott said his attempted reform was a "needless complication" in the government's relationship with the Muslim community. Sadly, freedom of speech is not a "needless complication" for the Palestinian artist Ashraf Fayadh who last week was sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia for apostasy.
By privileging the views of Muslims the way he did, Abbott acknowledged they deserve to be treated differently from other Australians and thus abandoning the idea that all citizens should be equal under the law.
BATTLE OF IDEAS
Abbott's position was actually out of step with community attitudes. A recent survey from the Pew Research Centre revealed 56 per cent of Australians believe people should be free to express an opinion, even if it's offensive to minority groups.
The current Prime Minister has "no plans ... at all" to make good on Abbott's broken election promise.
It's not just on freedom of speech that the Coalition is refusing to engage in the battle of ideas. All federal and state Coalition education ministers support the content of the national curriculum.
Built as it is on the premise that all cultures are equal, the national curriculum is unlikely to convince marginalised youths from particular ethnic and religious communities that liberal democracy is better than the alternatives.
It's no surprise that a 2014 a poll by the Lowy Institute found only 42 per cent of Australians between 18 and 29 years of age believed "democracy is preferable to any other kind of government".
Over recent years, the political left in Australia has successfully intimidated the Liberal Party into not fighting "the culture wars". Too many Liberal MPs have convinced themselves "the culture wars" are a sideshow of interest only to ideological zealots.
However, that's not what the left thinks. Which is why the left puts so much effort into winning the culture wars. In the end, culture is everything, and in any case "the culture wars" is simply another term for "the battle of ideas".
In the light of what is happening around the world, it's relevant to ask who in today's Liberal Party is committed to winning that battle.
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