Was Tony Abbot Australia’s worst prime minister?

This article argues yes. The main reasons are his disastrous and uncaring budget of 2014, but many additional reasons are given in Nikki Savva's The Road to Ruin, How Peta Credlin and Tony Abott Destroyed Their Own Goodwill.

But first some history: After graduating from Oxford, Abbott briefly trained as a Roman Catholic seminarian. He stood for the division of Warringah at the 1994 Warringah by-election, before the election of the Howard government in 1996. Following the 1998 election, Abbott was appointed Minister for Employment Services in the second Howard ministry. He was promoted in 2001 as Minister for Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Business. In 2003, Abbott became Minister for Health and Ageing, retaining this position until the defeat of the Howard government at the 2007 election. Abbot resigned from the front bench in November 2009, in protest against Turnbull's support for the Rudd government's proposed Emissions Trading Scheme. Forcing a leadership ballot on the subject, Abbott narrowly defeated Turnbull to become the party's leader and leader of the opposition. Abbott led the Liberal-National Coalition to the 2010 federal election, which resulted in a hung parliament, and an eventual victory for the Australian Labor Party. Abbott remained leader, and led the Coalition to a landslide victory at the 2013 election.

Nikki Savva writes in The Road to Ruin, winner of the 2017 Australian book industry awards, general non-fiction book of the year and winner of the 2016 Melbourne press club lifetime achievement award, that

Abbott's performances in the party-room debates on education and climate change had ranged between woeful and pathetic. He sounded desperate, he was inconsistent, and - his colleagues thought - slightly ridiculous.

The book's subtitle is How Peta Credlin and Tony Abott Destroyed Their Own Goodwill. Savva describes their relationship as simply "weird." Senior members of the government told Niki Savva, journalist for The Australian, that they tried to get Abbott to sack Credlin and avoid losing the leadership. Savva writes that one of Abbott's most loyal lieutenants, conservative New South Wales Liberal Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, sounded the warning the night before the first attempt to oust Mr Abbott as leader in February 2015.

This writer's main objection was Tony Abott's budget with Treasurer Joe Hockey in 2014 which was a disaster. Political journalist Chris Uhlmann says the "catastrophe" was "he broke a slew of promises". Delivered barely nine months into his term, it was the beginning of the end.

The budget was an extraordinarily inequitable attempt to repair Australia's finances, offending the egalitarian streak that still runs deep in the Australian psyche.

Low-income families were hit hard, the middle class even harder, sole parents hardest of all. The incomes of the wealthiest 20 per cent of Australians were largely protected, declining by just 0.2 per cent.

Nikki Savva's book describes the budget as harsh, full of broken promises (which) "contributed to Abbott and Hockey's steep decline".

Abbott was defeated in the 2019 election and thrown out of office by an independent. On election night, as Australia voted to return the Liberal-National Party government of Scott Morrison, one seat defied the trend – Warringah. Tony Abbott, former prime minster, Howard-era minister, pugilist and could have been priest, had lost this Liberal heartland seat to barrister and former Olympic skier Zali Steggall.

Warringah, running from North Sydney to Manly, up to Dee Why and then inland to Forestville, is a long-held conservative seat, never having been won before by Labor or independents in its 97-year history.

Abbott on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is another issue. Tony Abbott made ''a pledge in blood'' to repeal Labor's carbon price, which was the sweeping reform designed to transform Australia's economy and cut its greenhouse emissions. The CPRS legislation followed the Garnaut Climate Change Review. Ross Garnaut, a prominent economist, proposed emissions targets that environmentalists considered inadequate. Meanwhile industry, which would have incurred costs under the scheme, was unhappy with the limited compensation proposed.