Tony Abbott

Submission 14,752

Overview

Tony Abbott is an Australian politician and the former Prime Minister of Australia from 2013 to 2015. He is known for his socially conservative views and his representation of the Australian Liberal/National Coalition.

History

Tony Abbott was born in London in 1957, and emigrated to Sydney in 1960. He was raised as a Roman Catholic, and trained as a seminarian before he was elected to the Australian Parliament in 1994. After serving several ministerial positions in Australian government, he became the Prime Minister in 2013, leading the Coalition, a formal alliance of centrist conservative parties, to victory.^[1]

He's known for his strong conservative views on the affairs of the indigenous peoples of Australia, climate change, same-sex marriage, and feminism. On September 14th, 2015, Abbott lost a spill vote, where Malcolm Turnbull, the Minister of Communications, challenged Abbott's leadership of the Liberal/National Coalition. He made his final speech as Prime Minister on September 15th, 2015.^[1]

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Online Presence

Tony Abbot created an official Twitter account on December 1st, 2009, and he has over 557,000 followers as of September 2015.^[2] His official Facebook profile, which began around the same period, is liked by over 458,000 people as of September 2015.^[3]

Tony Abbot's Version of David Cameron's Phone Call

David Cameron's Phone Call refers to a photo fad initiated by a photo of British Prime Minister David Cameron on the phone. On April 9th, 2014 5:01 AM EST, Australian prime minister Tony Abbott's official Twitter account posted a photo of him getting an update on the search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370. Within 24 hours, the photo had gained over 120 favorites and over 180 retweets. Shortly after Abbott's photo was tweeted out, Australian Twitter users began tweeting their own photos at Abbott pretending to be the person on the other end of the phone. At 5:30 AM (ET), Twitter user Slipperyseal tweeted a photo of himself holding an electric toothbrush to his ear as if he were speaking on the phone with Abbott.

Tony Abbott's Nice Meme

On September 17th, Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott posted a photograph of himself posing with two young aboriginal children in Arnhem Land, Australia to his official Facebook page. That day, Redditor OrangeMemes_2 linked to the photo in a post titled "Everybody let Tony Abbott know how nice his meme is by commenting 'nice meme' on this post" to the /r/braveryjerk^[4] subreddit. The Facebook photo was subsequently flooded with users commenting "nice meme," gathering upwards of 2,500 comments in the next six months. That day, BuzzFeed posted an article about the incident.

Put Out Your Onions

During his tenure as Prime Minister, Tony Abbott was filmed eating onions raw, skin and all, at various onion farms in Australia and Tasmania. These videos, posted on Vine by ABC News, both received millions of loops.

Before he officially left the Prime Minister position, Australians started a photo fad on Twitter using the hashtag #putoutyouronions as a reference to these incidents.^[5] The hashtag was used over 8,000 times between September 12th and September 16th, 2015.^[4]