| schema:articleBody
| - Australian former prime minister Tony Abbott Tuesday defended his "convictions" after his reported appointment as a British trade envoy prompted one critic to denounce the right-wing climate sceptic as a "Trump-worshipping misogynist". Speaking in London after obtaining special permission to leave Australia under its coronavirus lockdown rules, Abbott was grilled about media accounts that he will join Britain's Board of Trade to help strike post-Brexit deals. "Yes, I've had some discussions with members of the British government and I'm more than happy to help, but there's nothing official as yet," he told a hearing of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee. Abbott fended off questions about his past use of sexist language, and about his deployment in a speech earlier Tuesday of the term "health dictatorship", to describe the draconian pandemic policies of the Victoria state government in Australia. The term is favoured by far-right "QAnon" conspiracy theorists, and has been seen on recent anti-lockdown placards at protests in the United States and Europe. "Inevitably if you have convictions, you'll draw criticism," he said earlier at the Policy Exchange, a centre-right think-tank in London, in response to his British critics. "But if you want to get things done, you need people with convictions." The Sun newspaper first reported last week that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was set to name Abbott as joint president of the relaunched Board of Trade, "tasked with drumming up deals for Britain around the world". Australia's current premier Scott Morrison told ABC: "Well done Boris, good hire." While stopping short of confirming the appointment, Abbott said he took Morrison's comment as endorsement, and that he did not expect to need special approval from the Australian government to serve in an official capacity for Britain. For his part, Johnson's official spokesman said Tuesday: "No decisions about the Board of Trade have been made." Abbott's 2013-2015 tenure was marked by hardline policies on illegal immigration, opposition to same-sex marriage and scepticism of man-made climate change. He was famously savaged in 2012 in a viral speech about sexism by his predecessor, Julia Gillard, and more recently called Donald Trump "a very good president". Emily Thornberry, spokeswoman on trade for Britain's main opposition Labour party, called Abbott's expected appointment "absolutely staggering". "On a personal level, I am disgusted that Boris Johnson thinks this offensive, leering, cantankerous, climate change-denying, Trump-worshipping misogynist is the right person to represent our country overseas," she said last week. Abbott also talked up prospects for Britain to strike trade deals soon with Australia and Japan, and said both countries would likely welcome London into a pan-Pacific pact ratified in 2018, despite being on the other side of the world. He noted his own government had concluded a free-trade agreement with China in 2014, but said the Covid-19 pandemic and its "belligerence" in global affairs had shown the need to be "much more cautious" today about China's role in global supply chains. In negotiating trade deals, he added, it was important "not to be held up by things that are not all that important and not to be distracted by things that are not really issues of trade," such as the environment. Johnson's government, however, insists that Britain will not sacrifice environmental or labour standards in its zeal to clinch trade pacts once it finishes a post-Brexit transition out of the European Union at the end of the year. Abbott also stressed the economic dislocation of lockdown policies over the past six months, and said "surely it's time to relax the rules". jit/phz/tgb
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)