It was the morning after Tony Abbott’s Budget reply, in which he had declared “the die is cast” and that the election would be fought on the Rudd government’s RSPT.  But Abbott’s declaration of war over the mining tax had been overshadowed by the lack of content in the speech, his “hospital pass” to Joe Hockey on the detail of the Coalition’s savings commitments, and revelations that Abbott had been rolled by shadow cabinet over a proposal to give $10,000 to stay-at-home mothers.

Abbott joined deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard for their normal Friday morning debate on Nine’s Today show and quickly found himself questioned about the handout that he was unable to sell his colleagues on. “Look,” Abbott said, in his endearing and frustrating trademark stutter, “we have, we threw around a whole lot of policy ideas in a very wide ranging shadow cabinet discussion … what matters is what we decided to do and that’s what I announced last night.”

A smiling Gillard laid into the Opposition leader. “I reckon that’s a yes. I think what, that was pollie speak for Tony went in with a big spending idea and even his shadow cabinet recognised how reckless and how big a risk he is and has obviously piffed the idea out the door.”

Host Karl Stefanovic put to Gillard that most stay-at-home mothers would be happy to get the handout. She was unfazed. “And what Australian is going to say it’s OK for Tony Abbott to keep dreaming up Budget-busting ideas and having to be restrained by his shadow cabinet. That’s reckless.”

Abbott tried to find a line of defence and reached for the RSPT. “Look, um, you know, we are always open, ah, to good ideas but in the end you’ve got to be responsible and the most irresponsible thing about the Budget is the fact that they’re going to kill the goose that’s laid the golden egg for Australia. Now it is just the very midsummer of madness to suddenly stop the mining boom stone dead … I’m very happy for the, for the, for the election to be a referendum on Labor’s great, big new tax.”

“I think that was a diversion from the $10,000 idea that got knocked off, Tony,” the Deputy Prime Minister shot back.

It was classic Gillard — focused on her opponent with laser-like intensity, sticking rigidly to her brief but thinking on her feet but getting her message across in an engaging manner — one that stood in stark contrast to her leader, Kevin Rudd, whose communication skills had traced a steady path down into incomprehensibility and tedium from the moment he defeated John Howard.

But the exchange also summed up Tony Abbott. Defeated on a big-spending welfare policy by his colleagues, hesitant on his own policy — under pressure, he didn’t point to his own paid parental leave scheme launched eight weeks earlier — Abbott instinctively fell back on what he is best at, relentless and highly effective attacks on his opponents.

For all the superficial similarities — they are both novice leaders and both reached the top job by knifing their predecessors — Tony Abbott and Julia Gillard are strikingly different politicians. No comparative biography could ever encompass “Gillard and Abbott” in the way Michael Duffy tried with Latham and Abbott.

Three aspects of Abbott’s political personality will bear strongly on how he performs in the election campaign, and what sort of Prime Minister he will be in the event he achieves a remarkable victory.

First, Abbott is a poor ideological fit with his party. Many political leaders are unusual within their parties, or succeed despite being at odds with a substantial number of their colleagues. But the difference is rarely on fundamental party principles. The Liberal Party is, famously, a “broad church” of liberals and conservatives, but Abbott’s intellectual pedigree is firmly derived from the right-wing of the labour movement, in which B.A. Santamaria, and Labor figures such as NSW Right leader and conservative Catholic Johno Johnson played important roles. Abbott’s social conservatism fits as well in the right of the ALP as it does in the right of his own party.

However, his belief in the power of state intervention is much more at odds with the core philosophy of the Liberal Party.  John Howard had a similar commitment to big government, which also sat poorly with his party’s professed commitment to small government. But Howard’s was born of pragmatism and a deliberate political strategy of buying electoral support with middle-class welfare and pork-barrelling.

Abbott’s state interventionism is born of a conviction — one that Labor still holds, to the extent that party has any core convictions of its own any more — that governments can play an important role in shaping social and economic outcomes. Handouts to stay-at-home mothers, which have none of the workforce participation benefits of the paid parental leave scheme, exemplify this conviction that intervention and redistribution should be used aggressively by the state.

Similarly on climate change, Abbott proposes large government programs to drive action, rather than a price mechanism to enable market forces to drive change.

On one issue, federalism, Abbott in fact goes considerably further than Howard, and wrote in his book Battlelines about his aggressively centralist instincts — views that if ever implemented would take him far beyond any previous Prime Minister, Liberal or Labor, in aggrandising the role of Canberra over that of the states.

Abbott’s background as a journalist — which shows through in the engaging and well-written Battlelines — is another crucial element of his political persona.  It is not necessarily a positive. His hesitant communication style seems the very embodiment of his famous choice between being a commentator on politics and a participant in politics.  And in Abbott’s two very public meltdowns in May during interviews with Neil Mitchell (shortly after his Today show encounter with Gillard) and Kerry O’Brien, he was at his worst when he seemed to actually withdraw from the role of politician and start commenting on his own plight, declaring “I’m being a wimp” to Mitchell and explaining to O’Brien in some detail his now famous division between his scripted statements and his off-the-cuff comments.

But his background also gives Abbott an instinctive ability to frame a political narrative and use it to attack his opponents.  It was this knack of knowing how to tell an effective political story about Kevin Rudd that, as much as Labor’s powerbrokers and nervous backbenchers, wrecked Rudd’s prime ministership. Abbott’s reformulation of the ETS debate away from climate change — which he has repeatedly stated he does not believe in — and the minutiae of emissions trading to the far simpler “great big new tax” narrative was canny. It didn’t matter that the CPRS was anything but a tax — in fact it would have sucked billions out of the Budget in its early stages. Labor never developed an effective response. The narrative was so effective, Rudd abandoned plans for a double dissolution election that he would have comfortably won.

However, Abbott has not yet been able to apply this skill to presenting positive policy.  Part of this is surely his open discomfort with economics — first spotted by Peter Costello in the early stages of Howard’s promotion of Abbott as a possible rival to his deputy — which remains at the centre of Australian political debate. But as leader his efforts to offer positive policy proposals have ended messily — paid parental leave drew business criticism, received a hostile reception from Liberals and undermined his “great big new tax” attack line.  His “direct action” climate policy, based principally on the drawing-board science of soil carbon, was immediately discredited by experts. Only his proposal to increase spending on mental health was trouble-free.

By Abbott’s own ready admission, this emphasis on the negative has harmed his image in the eyes of voters.  This is partly the fault of Abbott’s own colleagues. Under Howard, Abbott himself played the role of attack dog, savaging his mentor’s foes (whichever party they were in). As leader, he has kept up the same role, which should have been delegated to his frontbench.  Unfortunately, in Joe Hockey, Julie Bishop, Christopher Pyne and Peter Dutton, he has a team that would struggle to muster an ounce of mongrel between them, while Andrew Robb’s role and skill is to bring economic credibility to the Coalition, not tear Labor asunder.

Whether Abbott will be able to throw the switch to “positive” in time for the election campaign remains to be seen. In the early days of the campaign, Abbott’s initial policy framework is almost entirely negative, based on something between a slogan and a dot-point policy document — “end … stop … pay back … stop …”

Abbott’s religion is the third critical component of his political persona.  The self-described “Captain Catholic” is only one of a large number of religious politicians, but he is by far the highest-profile.  The profile is not because he has ever used religion in a partisan  way — in fact he specifically rejects partisan uses of religion — but primarily because as a health minister in the Howard government, he based key decisions or his public statements in relation to Medicare funding of abortion, RU-486 and stem cell research on his own spiritual values, despite denying he had entered politics to be “a public Catholic”.

Abbott isn’t alone in confusing his public role with his faith.  South Australian Labor powerbroker Don Farrell, for example, a leader of the conservative and Catholic-dominated ALP Right in that state, terminated the career of moderate senator Linda Kirk after she voted contrary to his wishes on the stem cell issue, and he himself replaced her.  However, it is historically rare at ministerial level.

But the tendency to portray Abbott as a right-wing Catholic ogre is at odds with the more complex reality of a passionate, thoughtful man.  He is a comparative rarity on the conservative side in articulating his views in book form (and Battlelines is a very engaging work). And it is little known that Abbott walked in the Sydney Harbour Bridge reconciliation march in 2000, amidst controversy about Prime Minister’s Howard opposition to Costello doing the same. His commitment to make a real difference for indigenous Australians is passionate.

In the aftermath of the Little Children Are Sacred report, health minister Abbott gave the impression he personally wanted to go to remote communities and dish out a hiding to child abusers. That would not have been entirely out of character — several people who declined to be named have told Crikey of having arguments with Abbott that ended with him demanding they go outside and settle the matter physically — and on each occasion an abashed Abbott later profusely and charmingly apologised.

Abbott’s unwillingness to decouple his faith and executive responsibilities in the past doesn’t mean he will do the same in the future. As minister under Howard, Abbott had the luxury of a protective mentor (indeed, some of Abbott’s colleagues grew tired of his habit of bringing poor submissions to cabinet, which Howard indulged). But as Prime Minister, Abbott would have to bring his political judgement about his government’s interests into consideration, just as Howard did in permitting conscience votes on issues such as RU-486. In that equation, Abbott’s faith is likely to play less of a role.

Part 2 tomorrow: Julia Gillard, the embodiment of modern Labor.