Greg Ansley: Abbott needs to quickly stamp his mark

Out of chaos, order may come. The election of Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader after the most astonishing week in Australian politics for decades, even by a single vote and with the Liberal Party still riven by bitterness, may be the peg for its revival.

Abbott, a staunch Catholic conservative, is an outspoken, sometimes crude and less-than-popular champion of the right, whose victory over the moderate Malcolm Turnbull was a complete surprise.

Where Turnbull wanted to take the Liberals beyond the legacy of former Prime Minister John Howard, Abbott, one of Howard's strongmen, remains deeply rooted to many of his former boss' convictions.

And like Howard, whose sheer tenacity and political skills honed during the years of adversity eventually made him the nation's second longest-serving Prime Minister, Abbott is a fighter whose clearly articulated position throws a sharp contrast against the policies of Labor.

This is important for conservatives who have watched both sides of politics being drawn from separate poles into an increasingly centrist orbit.

Abbott is already preparing to pull out of that orbit, immediately with climate change policy but moving to other traditional battlegrounds such as industrial relations.

While it will not be a return to the Howard years - Abbott concedes that mistakes were made by an ideology that went too far - the language and policies of his leadership will be markedly different to those of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's Labor Government.

Not all Liberal voters will like what they see, but a great many will.

Improving his prospects elsewhere will be a fraught proposition. An Abbott-led Opposition will be even less likely to steal Labor supporters, and he will need to run an exceptional campaign to attract the crucial rump of swinging voters who have so strongly clung to Rudd over the past two years.

Internally, Abbott faces serious challenges and considerable dangers.

Pragmatism and common sense should dictate that critics and opponents within the party should now swallow their anger and unite - publicly at least - behind Abbott.

There is an election looming, one which may come with great speed if Rudd decides to use the Opposition's rejection of its earlier deal to pass his greenhouse emissions trading scheme as a trigger to dissolve both houses of Parliament and call an early poll.

With an electorate appalled by the political carnage of the past two weeks, any signs of continued strife within the Liberal Party, any hint that Abbott does not have complete control, will doom the Opposition to utter and crushing defeat.

Even given a facade of new unity, Abbott will be working overtime to restore his base.

Whether angry Turnbull supporters will fall fully behind this view has yet to be seen.

Abbott will also have to rapidly develop a sound and comprehensive set of policies that will be supported both by party and voters, and shore his defences against a Labor attack using the ETS debacle to portray the Opposition as a rampaging horde of crazies, deniers and troglodytes.

Life, as Howard's old boss, former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, once famously said, was never meant to be easy.