Mr Howard also predicted a short political career for Senate kingmaker Clive Palmer because voters would eventually see through the mining magnate's lack of policy consistency.

Fairfax Media spoke to Mr Abbott's Liberal predecessors as prime minister – John Howard and Malcolm Fraser – to reflect on the government's record since it took power a year ago.

Mr Howard, prime minister from 1996 to 2007, said Mr Abbott had performed "remarkably well" in his first year and had exceeded his expectations on stopping the boats.

"I think he's done a very effective job in his first year," Mr Howard said. "The government has restored common sense to the management of the economy and is very correctly identifying a debt and deficit problem that will only get worse if it is not tackled now.

"The government has had strong success with border protection, better than even I had dared to hope might be the case."

Mr Howard also praised the government for its response to the threat of home-grown terrorism and the MH17 plane crash.

He said he supported introducing a Medicare co-payment and allowing universities to set their own fees, even though his own government declined to introduce such sweeping changes to health and education.

"You have to free up the universities and the Labor Party proposed a co-payment 20 years ago," he said.

"We have a price signal on pharmaceuticals; I don't see [a co-payment] as in any way destroying Medicare."

Mr Howard said he did not find Clive Palmer "particularly impressive" and criticised the Palmer United Party leader for his populism.

"He doesn't seem to stand for anything and you don't succeed in the long term by not standing for anything," he said.

Mr Howard advised Mr Abbott to ignore the opinion polls, which showed the Coalition trailing Labor in almost every survey since the election, and maintain his focus on serious policy reform.

"People should not be getting the least bit preoccupied by polls a year, two years before an election," he said.

Mr Fraser, prime minister from 1975 to 1983, gave Mr Abbott "full marks" for leading the international effort to recover the bodies from the MH17 plane crash in east Ukraine.

But he criticised Mr Abbott's decision to send Australian military trainers and advisers to help Ukraine combat Russia's aggression.

"What is Australia doing taking on a combat role in the Ukraine for God's sake?" Mr Fraser said. "We should not be on one side or the other. We're not a world power and we have problems in our own backyard we should pay more attention to."

While noting Labor also supported offshore processing, Mr Fraser said stopping the boats had come at too high a cost and that the government should stop processing at Nauru and Manus Island.

"The more it goes on the more we discover about the brutality in those places," he said, referring to the deaths of two asylum seekers held at Manus Island.

"How can someone be a Christian for one hour a week?"

Mr Fraser – who quit the Liberal Party in 2010 because he thought it had become too conservative – criticised the government for its close relationship with the Rajapaksa government in Sri Lanka.

He said Mr Abbott should have joined with his British and Canadian counterparts to support an international investigation into alleged war crimes by the government and the Tamil Tigers.

"Instead we are pretending everything is fine and giving the government patrol boats," he said.