What next for the Iron Man: rescuing blind kittens from a tsunami?

What next for the Iron Man: rescuing blind kittens from a tsunami?
BELLA COUNIHAN

With the amount of fuss on the weekend given to Tony Abbott's Iron Man efforts, you'd think he'd held back a tsunami from drowning a group of blind kittens. The run, swim and cycle caught our imaginations like the front page of a glossy women's magazine; too fat? Too thin? Is Tony exercising too much? Too little policy work? It no doubt added to Abbott's appeal across a spectrum of voters.
But in the same week as the Iron Man competition, Tony also went on Melbourne gay radio station Joy in a seeming attempt to specifically appeal to voters in the gay community.
In Sydney, The Daily Telegraph's Malcolm Farr suggested that his Iron Man attire, a tight pink lycra worn for charity, might help him pick up some gay votes. Despite this being ridiculous - as if the only thing the gay community are looking for is a leader with tight abs - it does bring to mind the issue of Abbott's juggling act, and who he is really appealing to in of all his Iron Man and gay radio efforts?
Can he appeal to both the socially conservative Aussie hetero Iron Man wanna be, at the same time as appealing to gay Australia in the same week?
He has certainly been trying.
With the Iron Man competition, which took up the entire content of five separate interviews on Monday - including three interviews with radio station Triple M, an interview with Alan Jones and ABC Radio's Madonna King - he is building up his cred with the every day guy. Appealing to them on the level of physical exercise and taking part in a great bit of Australiana. The Triple M presenter's welcome to Tony Abbott summed it up - "Tony Abbott . . . you are an absolute legend."
But the Leader of the Opposition has also been getting out there into the gay community much more than he has before. He met earlier last week with gay rights activist Corey Irlam and the Australian Coalition for Equality, and said during his interview with Doug Pollard on Joy that he intended to "maintain a dialogue" with and "address concerns" of the gay community.
He also said in the same interview that he would be attending a gay and lesbian group's function in his own electorate.
But does this seem weird to anyone else?
Why is he trying now? No one would blame him for leaving it in the too hard basket, especially after he had only recently commented in two separate interviews that he found homosexuality "confronting" and that it challenged the "natural order of things". Going on a radio station which caters for Melbourne's gay community in the first place seems an odd choice.
Even stranger was the interview itself where he was clearly pitching to the audience, downplaying his previous comments, constantly referring to his many gay friends and even addressing the long denied federal anti-discrimination laws on sexual orientation, opposed by the Liberal government during the Howard years.
Suddenly he was giving in principle support for the idea. It was hard not to think Abbott was changing his tune to suit who he was talking to. As The Sunday Age's Josh Gordon put it, Abbott might have "a moral weather vane".
He has after all done this before. For example when he called the argument around climate change science "absolute crap" when talking to a bunch of climate unbelievers in a rural town, at home he was not nearly as forthright.
Suiting his message to his audience seems to be a trend and a criticism he and others have often levelled at Rudd.
However it is hard to think of Rudd doing such a no holds bar interview under the same circumstances despite the fact that they both have fairly similar public and private views on gay issues.
Abbott has probably not watched his words nearly as closely as Rudd who has largely kept publicly schtoom about homosexuality, apart from Rove's infamous question about who the PM would "turn for".
Maybe in trying to appeal to everybody you end up a walking contradiction, appealing to nobody.
Maybe that's why the iron man thing was so important for Abbott, that it could appeal to a wide set of voters across seemingly insurmountable political and social differences. Abbott is probably crossing his fingers, hoping the response to his policies in the future will be more like what he received from the Iron Man competition and less like the tough questions on Joy.
Bella Counihan writes for The Goanna.