By Reuters Staff
Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott addresses members of the media after a party room meeting at Parliament House in Canberra February 9, 2015. REUTERS/Sean Davey /Files
LONDON (Reuters) – Britain named former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott as an adviser to its Board of Trade on Friday, rejecting opposition complaints that his conservative views about women, gay rights and climate change made him unfit to represent the United Kingdom.
Abbott served as Australian PM from 2013 to 2015.
* A pugnacious and socially conservative Catholic, Abbott was born in London. He graduated from the University of Sydney with a law and economics degree. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, majoring in politics, philosophy and economics, and won two awards in boxing.
* Abbott has opposed embryonic stem cell research, same-sex marriage and carbon trading to combat climate change. His book on Australian conservative politics published in 2009 was titled Battlelines.
He has provoked accusations of misogyny for suggesting that men may be better adapted to exercising authority than women, and for calling abortion the easy way out.
* Trained to be a priest at St Patricks Seminary, Sydney, in the mid-1980s, Abbott was later given the nickname The Mad Monk by his political critics. He also worked as a journalist at Australias now defunct The Bulletin monthly news magazine and wrote editorials for Rupert Murdochs The Australian newspaper.
* During the coronavirus crisis, Abbott has railed against what he calls health dictatorships, saying states across the world are ordering people about. He said that every life was precious but that families sometimes had to elect to allow elderly relatives to die as nature took its course.
* Abbott became leader of Australias centre-right opposition Liberal Party in 2009. Four years later he became prime minister, taking advantage of leadership turmoil in the governing Labor Party to score an emphatic election win, but his popularity soon waned. He was toppled two years later in a party leadership contest.read more
Factbox: Who is Australia’s ex-PM Tony Abbott, now British trade adviser? – Reuters India
