‘We are the patriot party’: Taylor sets up Albanese fight after Abbott’s Liberal rallying cry

Angus Taylor will issue a rallying cry to a shattered Liberal Party and accuse Anthony Albanese seven times in the one speech of lying to Australians about tax hikes, a day after Tony Abbott declared the party was in an existential crisis and needed to be Australia’s “patriot party”.

Abbott, elected unopposed as president on the first day of the Liberal Party’s federal council meeting in Melbourne, said he had returned to public life because “I owe the Liberal Party big time, and that’s why I regard it as my duty to serve the party in this time of existential crisis”.

“As the last successful federal leader of the opposition, I do believe that I have the ability to help Angus Taylor to be the next successful federal leader of the opposition and to become our 32nd prime minister,” Abbott said.

“We are the freedom party, the tradition party, but above all else, we are the patriot party, which is why, at our best, we should be absolutely unbeatable.”

The former prime minister, who has long been a mentor to Taylor, is widely considered to have been one of the most effective opposition leaders in Australian history, though his prime ministership ended after less than two years amid a protracted slump in the polls and a divisive 2014 budget.

He is seen by some within the Liberals as a divisive figure, and his ascent to the presidency – the most senior position in the organisational wing of the party – is a boost for the conservative faction and another sign of the stranglehold the group has over future direction.

Abbott was visibly emotional as he spoke, lamenting the fact the party would be “lucky to have 50,000 members around the country” and pointing out the Canadian conservative party had about 400,000 members.

He took a swipe at the Labor government for breaking promises not to change capital gains or negative gearing taxes and employed a series of three-word slogans strikingly similar to those he used while opposition leader more than a decade ago.

“Angus has declared an agenda for our country to stop the toxic taxes, to end mass migration, and put Australia first, to abolish net zero, and to permanently restrain big government by indexing forever the tax thresholds,” he said.

The fierce speech from the former prime minister comes against the backdrop of the Coalition securing the primary-vote support of just 23 per cent of Australians in the most Recent Political Monitor, trailing Labor on 29 per cent and One Nation on 24 per cent.

Abbott also re-ignited the culture war over Australia’s national flag – both Abbott and former leader Peter Dutton refused to stand in front of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, along with the Australian flag, at certain official events – and lashed Albanese for his “inability to stand in front of just one national flag, an inability to acknowledge that this country belongs to all Australians equally”.

Some Liberal MPs are concerned about Abbott’s elevation to the presidency, given his frequent and sometimes controversial interventions into public debate. One moderate MP, who asked not to be named so they could speak freely, suggested that Abbott’s outspokenness could create major headaches for Taylor.

But a conservative MP, who also asked not to be named, welcomed Abbott’s election and hoped the former prime minister would continue to make “muscular” contributions to public debate.

“Tony is looking to support Gus, and his election also sends a message to One Nation voters that maybe we are getting our act together at last.”

Taylor will tell the council meeting on Saturday, according to speech extracts provided to this masthead, that party members must to do everything they could to defeat the “socialist” prime minister and declared the Coalition was the only party that could remove the Labor government from power – a thinly veiled reference to One Nation.

“Labor has opened a battlefield [over tax] that it’s already regretting. Anthony Albanese has started a war on aspiration. A war on the very essence of being Australian. A war on the soul of our nation … we’re going to fight like hell and win this war. We’re going to fight like hell and defeat this rotten Labor government,” Taylor will say, in a speech that echoed both Abbott’s style and his criticism of the Albanese government.

The federal opposition leader accused Albanese of broken promises after the government introduced changes to capital gains tax and negative gearing in the budget, vowed to end the “mass migration” allowed by Labor and highlighted the opposition’s plan to index income tax rates, which would end bracket creep and give more money back to taxpayers.

“The justifiable public backlash to this budget is of a magnitude unlike any I have seen. Already, the prime minister is talking about carve-outs. But carve-outs aren’t enough. Labor’s toxic taxes need an axe.

“We will give Australians a bigger tax cut without the tax increases. Jim Chalmers has given the game away. When the treasurer says indexation will cost ‘a quarter of a trillion dollars over the decade’, that’s the figure he wants to steal from Australians through bracket creep. Jim is planning to take $250 billion extra in income tax from Australians.”

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