David and Tony
The Oxford education. The energetic commitment to running, cycling and physical self-improvement. The penchant for eye-catching photo opportunities. A common birthplace: London. And the more pressing fact that both will soon appear before their electorates at the head of a resurgent conservative party. Tony Abbott, the Liberal leader, and David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, also share a common goal: the removal of Labour governments whose prime ministers are political soul mates and regular texters.
Curiously, Tony Abbott needs less of a swing than David Cameron to win power and the electoral arithmetic works much more in his favour. Yet it is the British conservative who stands much the better chance of victory, partly because the winds of change are at his back. In Britain, no Labour government has ever won four successive victories (no Labour government had ever won a hat-trick of victories, for that matter). In Australia, you have to reach back to the Great Depression for the last single-term government.
So if these two opposition leaders were to swap notes on the eve of their respective campaigns, what might they say?
For a start, it's not such a fanciful question. At the last British general election the Conservatives imported the Sydney-based Liberal political consultant Lynton Crosby, in the hope that he could do for Michael Howard what he had done for John Howard. Crosby was a key architect of an election strategy built around immigration, a winning issue in Australia but not, as it turned out, in Britain.
The oft-heard criticism of David Cameron is that voters don't really know what he stands for, that he does not come across as a conviction politician. By contrast, Tony Abbott is often accused of having too many convictions and of lacking a self-edit function when it comes to expressing them. So perhaps Abbott would advise Cameron to be more forthcoming about the deep-held beliefs which animate his politics and, conversely, perhaps Cameron would advise Abbott to be a bit more selective when it comes to laying bare his political soul (and perhaps his flesh, as well).
On the subject of his political core values, Abbott claims to be the ideological love-child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop, a politician from the right of the party. Tellingly, David Cameron has described himself as the true heir of Tony Blair. Perhaps Abbott would tell Cameron to be less of a poll-driven pragmatist and more of a true-blue conservative. Perhaps Cameron would give Abbott precisely the opposite advice.
David Cameron's "Vote Blue, Go Green" motto would not sit too easily with Tony Abbott's one-time assertion that climate change was "absolute crap". So perhaps he would urge his Australian counterpart to clean up his environmental act. But Abbott could counter, as we have noted in previous blogs, that his criticisms of the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme not only secured him the leadership but helped put the Liberals on an upward trajectory.
Cameron might offer useful suggestions on how to appeal to female voters, a particular area of vulnerability for Abbott. He might also recommend that the modern-day Liberal Party should more closely resemble modern-day Australia in its ethnic make-up.
In turn, I suppose, Abbott might tell Cameron he needs to be more Broken Hill than Notting Hill.
Or perhaps they won't confer at all. Cameron, you sense, was more of a Turnbull man, a politician who not only went to the same university, but even the same college.
I'm 
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