Paul Thomas: Don't underestimate Mad Monk

This week's disarming but perhaps damaging admission by Australian opposition leader Tony Abbott that his public utterances come in two distinct forms - prepared, scripted statements which should be treated as gospel, and off-the-cuff remarks which can be taken with a pinch of salt - wouldn't have come as a surprise to long-time observers.

Abbott's career, indeed his life, has been studded with dramas which, in different ways, boiled down to questions of truth.

At 19, his girlfriend got pregnant. She wanted to get married, he didn't; she left and gave birth to a son, whom she adopted out.

What became of him remained a mystery until 2004, when it emerged that he and Abbott worked in the same building - Parliament House, Canberra.

DNA tests subsequently proved Abbott was not the father.

In 1999 Bob Ellis, a scriptwriter, film director and sometime speechwriter for Australian Labor Party heavyweights, published a political memoir Goodbye, Jerusalem.

Given Ellis' ratbag tendencies (and appearance: he was once described as looking like "a possum erupting from a Glad bag"), you'd have expected the manuscript to have been lawyered to within an inch of its life.

But publisher Random House and its legal advisers obviously didn't read the manuscript as carefully as former New South Wales Premier Neville Wran, QC, who warned that it contained passages "the libel lawyers might, with more wisdom, not have let through".

Ellis quoted a prominent Labourite as saying Abbott, by then a member of Cabinet, and Deputy Prime Minister Peter Costello were as young men members of the ALP until they (separately) slept with a woman who enticed them into the Liberal Party, and whom one of them later married.

In 33 words, Ellis managed to defame four people since, by not actually identifying the woman, he slandered both men's wives.

The prominent Labourite denied he'd said any such thing. Ignoring the axiom that, if you're in a hole, the sensible thing to do is stop digging, Ellis and Random decided to see Abbott and Costello in court.

The crux of their defence was the plaintiffs hadn't been defamed since the community no longer regarded sex outside marriage or changing one's political allegiance as contemptible or ridiculous.

That didn't fly, nor did Plan B which was to portray Ellis as a literary gadfly (as opposed to a political commentator), whose words shouldn't be taken too literally. The Abbotts and the Costellos were awarded damages of $345,000 plus costs.

Shortly after Abbott became Liberal leader, a women's magazine asked him what advice he would give his daughters regarding pre-marital sex. He would tell them, he said, that sex was "the greatest gift you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving, and don't give it to someone lightly".

The response was predictably scornful. "Australian women are smart and capable and will make their own personal choices without Abbott telling them what to do," snorted Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

This, of course, misrepresented what Abbott said. Furthermore, the implication all Aussie women are smart and capable is fanciful, to say the least.

It's questionable whether, in this day and age, you're doing teenagers a favour by portraying sex in terms Queen Victoria might have used. You certainly run the risk of being told to get real, given that its ubiquitousness in popular culture and rampant commercialisation are making it more mundane by the day.

But they're his kids and he's a devout Roman Catholic - he chose to be honest rather than spout mealy-mouthed, hypocritical mush. Aren't we always saying that's what we want from politicians?

The media loves reducing public figures to caricatures. In Abbott's case that's a socially conservative bruiser.

This week news reports described him as a former boxer who trained for the priesthood, hence the nickname "the Mad Monk". In fact he boxed at university while doing a double degree in law and economics and gaining a Rhodes Scholarship.

Nor was there any mention of his involvement in Aboriginal issues, nor the fact that in 2008 and 2009 he spent weeks teaching at remote settlements on Cape York.

Like his mentor John Howard, Australia's second longest-serving prime minister, Abbott's appeal may be underestimated by the metropolitan elite who have a tendency to forget that they're a minority.

Abbot understands this better than most, having co-ordinated the defeat of the campaign to make Australia a republic.

Like Howard, Abbott is a ruthless operator and a political long-distance runner. Whatever the fall-out from this so-called gaffe and the outcome of this year's election, the Mad Monk is likely to remain a force to be reckoned with.