Yet those who imagine we are in for the Spanish Inquisition have him entirely wrong. We are in for a wild ride, hardly ever in a straight line, and most likely never towards any certain destination.

Senior public servants and his old cabinet colleagues know that he does not have a fiscally responsible bone in his body. His entire ministerial career has consisted of throwing large sums of money at problems, aided and encouraged by his mentor, another supposed conservative, John Howard. His grasp of classical economic theory (despite a university degree in the subject, to add to a law degree) may be sound in rhetoric but is very slim in practice. Joe Hockey has the same problem. Howard, in theory far more fiscally conservative, was so pragmatic that he turned automatically to spending whenever he thought himself in political trouble. For most of his premiership, once he had restored Australia's economic house and was coasting on the commodity boom, he was squandering surpluses, as often as not through his pet Abbott. This infuriated Peter Costello and other financial conservatives, including, as often as not, the minister for finance, Nick Minchin.

Howard and Abbott reached the heights of their irresponsibility with health expenditure - not only with promises unable to be achieved at the 2004 election, but with an erratic and silly offer to take over a northern Tasmanian hospital in 2007. Had Howard been re-elected, that would have derailed two decades of very modest achievements in health expenditure reform.

Abbott has been known to boast that the Democratic Labor Party was alive and well and living in the Liberal Party. He was thinking also of Kevin Andrews, the man whose evisceration at a political Isandlwana last week laid the basis for yesterday's Rorke's Drift. But he must have in mind the entryism of the Dave Clarke group of militantly conservative Catholics into the NSW Liberal Party. Abbott is closely connected with this very dangerous, even sinister, push, and it is their extremism, rather than the supposed climate change extremism of the Nationals or Minchin, that represents the greatest threat to his leadership.

By now a majority of Australian voters have no actual memory of the DLP. It was a largely clerical Catholic party which split off from the Australian Labor Party in the 1950s over the issue of communist penetration of the trade union movement. Its power base was in Victoria; in NSW, its influence was more limited because the Sydney bishops urged Catholics to stay inside Labor and fight.

Under the spiritual leadership of Bob Santamaria (as it happens a non-member), the DLP is now chiefly known for its success in keeping Labor out of power at federal level for 16 years. At one stage it had six senators, and generally sided with the Liberals, but, from time to time, supported Labor initiatives. The party deserves renewed study for its generally socially progressive approach to social welfare issues (including immigration where it was, for most of the time, well to the left of the ALP). But that was combined with its moral conservatism, particularly on any issues involving sexuality and its anti-communism.

The DLP ceased to have a direct influence in federal politics from 1974, although Brian Harradine, the influential independent from Tasmania reflected many of its ideas into the 1990s. Its eclipse masked the fact that by then it had become respectable for upwardly mobile Catholics, who had moved out of the working classes into the professions and the managerial classes, to support anti-Labor parties. Even in the 1960s some DLP types such as Kevin Cairns, a dentist, had gone over to the Liberals, and become ministers. By the 1980s, the children of Catholic doctors, lawyers and businessmen, particularly those who had gone to elite Catholic schools, were identifying fairly automatically with the Liberal Party, which had, until the 1950s, represented the Protestant establishment. By 2000, many of Howard's senior ministers were Catholic and, yesterday, two were fighting to take the leadership from a third, a man who had defeated another Catholic last week. At just the time of such transitions, the moral universe was changing, even for Catholics, with wider access to contraception, the dismantlement of old institutions, and the development of a more aggressive humanism, secularism and, some would say, moral relativism. If this change was embraced by many, it was also resisted, and by people from both sides of politics. But it is the conservatives who tend to have the running on a yearning for a return to traditional values. But, as right-wing parties have discovered elsewhere, the marriage between economic liberalism and moral conservatism, and the jostle between the authoritarian and the libertarian state can be a rocky one.

It is complicated by the fact that moralism of an entirely different sort on issues such as the environment, human rights and geopolitical conflicts tends to strike few chords with those worried about personal morality. And vice versa.

That Abbott is by no means black and white, and is often tentative and uncertain, in his moralism makes him more complicated. But also, to his detractors, less safe and predictable. Abbott has a deep interest in Aboriginal affairs and was, at one stage, a leading wet on the subject. He has agonised over it, and has shifted to the tough love model, but without great conviction. Likewise, though he was a strong supporter of the ''war against terror'', he was one to muse aloud that the war was a struggle for minds not bodies, a debate the West was scarcely even trying to win.

Abbott is a decent man. He has a high degree of personal honour, if less than an average quantity of political decency. He can rationalise his opportunism and carelessness with promises and positions as a function of the fact that politics is worldly, and an intrinsically untidy, and often dishonourable process. A good man should seek generally good goals, achieving them may necessarily mean fighting dirty, deception, dirt, and blood, and, sometimes, the trampling of innocents.

Abbot has all of the ruthlessness to play King Herod. But not, probably, the intellectual dishonesty to pretend that the carnage was necessary,. indeed desirable, for the outcome in view.

Normally, even the most jaded observer would watch such an amazing election with wonder about where he would take his troops. With Abbott, the answer is fairly obvious: it will be over a cliff, probably sooner rather than later. The curiosity is more about who and how will prop before they jump with him.

Jack Waterford is Editor-at-Large.