Abbott Back to Future

When Tony Abbott released the coalition's immigration policy this week maybe he thought he was re-enacting that famous scene from Back to the Future, the one where Marty McFly travels back in time to the 1950s stands before a high school crowd, cracks out the guitar and wows the crowd with the yet-to-be released Johnny Be Good guitar riff. Maybe in his mind he was standing before a crowd of Liberals back in 2001 with a "brand new" immigration policy where refugees would be processed off-shore, family reunions would be scrapped and the fresh idea of Temporary Protection Visas.

"Amazing!" they would all gasp, "visionary!" - no doubt they would dollop praise on him just like Howard. And who knows there could be many liberals still mentally stuck in the Howard era of immigration policy that would still think this, but for the moderates in the Liberal party and many more its some kind of bizarre joke. The immigration policy has already been dubbed the "Pacific Solution mark 2" because it re-introduces the idea of getting another country (such as Nauru) to deal with the problem of processing refugees. So why release a policy... again?

Anywhere else in life appropriating some else's idea and calling it your own would be known as "cheating". But if we take a visit to Abbott's mind, if we dare, things are different. When asked about its likeness to the Howard policy, Abbott said "my values are very, very similar to those of John Howard but I am not an identikit of John Howard but where John Howard’s policies worked... I am very happy to continue them. "

So he doesn't think he is John Howard - that's a good start. The policy worked, so we'll work it again. Drag up the old dead work horse out of its grave, prop it up and make it pull another heavy political load for the coalition. Nothing wrong with that, right? But of course the horse is limp, exhausted from working so hard for Howard already. Abbott can work it again, but its power will be limited. It won't be as effective, unless of course you're able to go back in time...

So if we look into Abbott's mind again, it's obvious he knows who is his. He doesn't think he's Howard and that's reassuring. But perhaps he still doesn't quite know when he is?