Tony Abbott attacks coronavirus 'hysteria' and 'health despotism' in IPA video

Tony Abbott has blasted “virus hysteria and health despotism” in a video spruiking his new role with the Institute of Public Affairs, which is focused on “saving the Australian way of life”.

The former Liberal prime minister has become a “distinguished fellow” of the rightwing thinktank and used the occasion to argue the coronavirus is “dominating” people’s lives. Abbott also said Australia was complacent on China and had “imported fads like sports stars taking a knee” from overseas.

Abbott’s wide range of complaints – which echo some preoccupations of former US president Donald Trump – accompanied the publication of an IPA report claiming Australia’s quality of life had declined by 28.5% since 2000.

The report is based on 25 measures including household debt, home ownership, under-utilisation of workers, worsening vocational skills and the incarceration rate.

Related: Tony Abbott: some elderly Covid patients could be left to die naturally

The IPA recognised its choice of metrics reflected normative judgments about what constituted a good life. It included measures that arguably have conservative bias such as car ownership, regulation, government debt, marriage rates and “prime-age men in fulltime work”.

In the video, released ahead of Australia Day, Abbott said Australia has “much to be proud of” although he acknowledged Indigenous disadvantage remained a “grievous blot on our national record”.

Abbott warned that even if coronavirus rules were introduced “for our own good” it was possible “freedom and self-reliance can evaporate” as a result.

He cited public health rules to “form orderly and socially distanced queues” and bans on activities such as sitting in the front seat of a taxi, “singing, dancing, and having too many friends and family round for a barbecue”.

In April, the IPA led an unsuccessful push to weaken Australia’s national restrictions on economic and social activity that effectively suppressed the spread of coronavirus.

Abbott acknowledged the rules were designed to cope with “a deadly disease” and Australia had “certainly saved lives” with a response that was better than almost any other country.

But he argued “virus hysteria and health despotism” had resulted in Australians being “barred from Victoria without first getting a visa and barred altogether from Western Australia due to just a few cases of disease with an infection fatality rate for people under 50 of less than one in 5,000”.

Abbott said rules had damaged lives as well – including those of elderly people in enforced isolation in aged care, families separated by “capricious border closures”, “businesses ruined and jobs lost in a stop-start economy” and the psychological impact of rules that “seemed absurd like wearing a face mask while driving alone”.

Abbott – whose government dismantled carbon pricing in 2014 despite experts rating it the best policy to prevent global heating – argued Australians had become “conditioned to have experts give us all the answers” and governments “then telling us what to do”.

He warned Australia could not “take for granted that our region will remain peaceful, especially if China tries to take Taiwan by force”.

“But how ready are we to join our allies to stop any attempt to crush a free people and, like our forebears, to put lives on the line in a good cause?”

Abbott argued that economic reforms were increasingly difficult “with a Senate where a government can almost never count on a majority and a federation in which … states still hold the whip hand”.

Abbott complained that there were “Indigenous, sustainability and Asian perspectives” embedded in the school curriculum and argued that explorer James Cook, New South Wales governor Arthur Phillip, general Sir John Monash and pharmacologist Howard Florey should also be put on a pedestal.

“It is time for a reset, but not the politically woke reset that seems to be brewing,” he said.

The former politician said he would help the IPA consider “cultural issues upstream of politics” like “what we were, what we are and what we should be”.

Abbott said Australia must “strengthen our culture”, which “won’t come from deconstructing our history, or our heroes, or imported fads like sports stars taking a knee”.

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The IPA report – The fair go - going, gone: the decline of the Australian way of life – states that gross government debt reached a high of 34.5% of GDP in 2019-20. It rated this a net negative despite the fact the debt pays for health, education and economic support that underpin Australia’s high quality of living, and that borrowing costs are down due to record low interest rates.

Using figures from the 2019 ANU election study, the IPA also claimed trust in government had declined, ignoring more recent studies that trust surged during the coronavirus pandemic.

The report found the few metrics to have improved Australia’s quality of life since 2010 were increasing rates of car ownership and a high ratio of jobs to the level of immigration.