Commenter Ute Man asks
At what point would Andrew Norton abandon the Liberal party …. Surely the Abbott inspired lunacy that encouraged Barnaby Joyce to publically voice his CEC conspiracies was a breaking point for anybody who even pretended to be rational. … Surely, at this point, it is impossible for the “last classical liberal” to deny the four-square conservatism (or idiocy, I can’t decide) of Abbott and his unannounced, unfunded policies to continue to support this party. Or are you just another prisoner to tribalism?
I’ve had many questions like this over the years. After all, in the thirty or so years that I have been a Liberal supporter the party has stood for the Australian Settlement minus the White Australia policy (Fraser), vacuous soft-right progressivism (Peacock), suburban conservatism (Howard), free-market liberalism (Hewson), upper-class conservatism with bad jokes (Downer), everything-depending-on-what-day-of-the week-it was (Nelson), market-leaning social liberalism (Turnbull) and now Tony Abbott’s big government conservatism. At the state level, the party often seems to stand for nothing at all, or at least there is no theme I can extract from their ad hoc point scoring against Labor.
Clearly for those – like much of the Australian Left – who see politics as self-expression, as part of showing what kind of person they are, this ideological variety would be intolerable. Indeed, with this view on politics involvement with any major party would be impossible, since both major parties are ‘broad church’ institutions incorporating a wide range of interests and beliefs. Which group is most dominant, or at least most obvious, will change over time with their numbers in the party, their skill, the political cycle, and luck.
While I do enjoy reading about and discussing classical liberal ideas even when there is no contemporary political relevance, I also think that classical liberals should get involved in real-world current politics. Given that classical liberals are a tiny minority of the electorate, I don’t think setting up a classical liberal party is likely to be a successful strategy. The alternative is to join one of the major parties. We are never likely to see a classical liberal government, but classical liberals can help nudge broad-church parties in a classical liberal direction.
But which party? The answer to that question is not as clear as I would like it to be. The Liberal Party has fewer ideological obstacles to supporting smaller government, but the actual historical record, at least since the 1980s, is more mixed, largely due to the Hawke and Keating governments.
For many classical liberals, it will come down to matters of personal history. I formed my party allegiances in a middle-class Liberal voting family, at the time church attending, both kids at private school, both parents working in the private sector, in the aftermath of the Whitlam government, at a time when strikes caused almost weekly disruption in Australia. The chances of such a person being a Labor supporter were very low, and unsurprisingly I did not become one. Friends with different personal histories joined the ALP. In this sense, Ute Man is right that there is a ‘tribal’ aspect to political loyalties. Allegiances are based on much more than just ideological fit.
Clearly I am not going to go off in a huff just because the latest leader has policies I don’t agree with – especially as we are likely to be several Liberal leaders away from a Liberal PM anyway. But would there be a point where I quit the Liberals completely? I would find it very hard to walk away after being involved for so long. I think it is only likely to happen at some major turning point in centre-right politics – like 1908-09 or the early 1940s – when circumstances dictated that we need to start again with some new form of political organisation.
Andrew Norton 
For the forseeable future we have to do the best we can with the parties that we have. The biggest problem for the non Labor side at present is the ongoing result of the siesmic shift in political allegiance of the educated middle class that Menzies precipitated by conscripting children for Vietnam.
As von Mises insisted, in the long run it is the battle of ideas that matters, and classical liberalism has got the ideas, we just have to get Labs and Libs of good will to understand.
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More effort needs to be made to centralise education efforts. Rather than a smattering of blogs Australia would benefit greatly from an LVMI equivalent.
Political parties such as LDP are indeed pointless as preferrential and compulsory voting entrench the 2 party system and reward the most accurate predictor of the median voter. Its up to us to shift the entire continuum towards liberty.
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The original idea behind the LDP was not to gain political power in Australia, but to offer another avenue for people to discover classical liberal ideas. Some people have found the LDP, been interested in the ideas, and ended up looking more closely at classical liberalism. I think that is a good thing.
Membership of a major party is a different sort of activity. It is about forming government and being a part of a larger organisation. Obviously, the bigger an organisation, the more differences and disagreements there will be, but there are also benefits from larger organisations.
I think both are legitimate strategies.
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A golf ball sized object through gravity can affect objects like the moon, earth and sun no matter how infinitesimally, a member of a party in some small degree determines the nature of that party, however frustrating that may be in practice.
It may be anodyne and simplistic to say so, but time will tell and change all. I don’t believe the Liberal Party of Australia is going to be anything like it is today going into the elections of 2013 and 2016.
If the Liberal Party cannot renew itself and be truly competitive by then, then it doesn’t deserve to win.
I guess the argument is whether we want a parliament full of small parties with the argy bargy that entails, or whether we accept a two party system with a policy stream moving from one factional pole to another within the party.
I personally think the two party system has done well for us. I have often yearned for a third party choice that I would be comfortable with – but that may not happen. Will not be voting for those Kropotkonite blockheads in the Greens for a long time.
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Well put! Enough said.
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Much respect for your vision in establishing the LDP john, I guess it comes down to a chicken v egg argument. Personally I believe the inclination to vote LDP or demand libertarian policies from mainstream politics stems from a pre-existing understanding of the ideals. CIS & IPA go a long way in educating the public in this regard.
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I agree that CIS & IPA are important. Indeed, the CIS was started after the failure of the first Australian libertarian party (the Workers Party, co-founded by John Singleton), and the trigger was realising that a think-tank could do more good than a minor party in progressing ideas. I think that is correct.
However, there are many people that a think-tank struggles to reach… specifically including those people who don’t care much about politics except when there is an election, and those people who aren’t interested in academic-style articles.
Also, the think-tank seen is now strong, so there no need to re-invent that wheel. A minor party might not be as important as a think-tank or vocal academics or effective journalists or even popular blogs… but I think it’s one part of the broader ideas movement and it’s better for it to exist than not exist.
Having said all of that… the major party seen (what I now call “3rd order politics”) also needs to have good people fighting the good fight. This was something I had previously under-valued. I’m currently standing on the edge of Liberal Party membership… with an urge to jump in.
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//*the major party scene*
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More long term, education should be directed formally at undergraduates. Pretty much every economist coming out of uni has been tainted with Keynesian claptrap (except perhaps sinclair davidson’s students). Aspiring journos too could use a bit more insight.
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But what of the fact that the IPA and the CIS, despite preaching ‘free market’ in the abstract, then line up writing papers that cartels are ok, that support vested interets in the destruction of the environment, and basically act as shills for the people that fund them. The only monopolies they care about are trade union ones -all the others are fine.
I’d support a genuine free market think tank if it actually existed. I’d vote for the LDP if they were going to do something about global warming, which they can’t quite do, despite the fact I secretly suspect they’d like to.
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Jason didn’t write that cartels were OK. He wrote that there is no need to make punishments more strict when the authorities weren’t even properly using the punishments already available.
I understand that many people want the government to micro-manage competition and ensure that businesses only do the “correct” (government-approved) things… and that is why they want the government to intervene to ban voluntary agreements between businesses (ie cartels). Unfortunately, the corporatist mentality is alive and well. Personally, I prefer the free market, and so I defend the right of all people to enter into any voluntary agreement.
As for your other accusations, they sound like conspiracy theories. I currently work for the CIS (for two more days) and I have only ever written what I want to write. I don’t know who funds the CIS. Likewise, my workmates write on the issues they want to write about. I imagine IPA is the same.
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1. Monopolies are created at the hands of government. A monopoly would not exist in a free-market (unless they actually satisfied all consumer desires sufficiently)
2. Consumers, by voluntarily purchasing goods and services produced environmentally responsibly, can satisfy their desires of a reduction in co2 emissions. Special interest groups forcing their values onto other consumers via the coercion of government is unethical and anti-freedom.
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“I’d vote for the LDP if they were going to do something about global warming,”
And continental drift. Let’s not forget continental drift.
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John, in response to your comment, just one example, the IPA was funded by an irrigation group, and accordingly the Murray Darling was in ‘perfect health’ see here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/vic/stories/s1124703.htm
I’ve noticed a great deal of selectivity in the ‘markets’ that the CIS and IPA have decided should be ‘free’. The labor market has to be free (except for medical specialists and pharmacists – they earn too much). Other markets – not so much.
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‘I’d vote for the LDP if they were going to do something about global warming,
And continental drift. Let’s not forget continental drift.’
And solar fluctuations. Let’s not forget solar fluctuations. 🙂
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Relyer – The CIS has published articles critical of protected markets for medical specialists and pharmacists, along with calls for more general labour market deregulation. We may be ‘selective’ in that we are a small outfit that can only tackle a small % of total possible issues, but I think you will find a high level of consistency.
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Jennifer Marohasy (who previously wrote about environment issues at the IPA) has always believed and said that the “murray darling crisis” wasn’t a “crisis”. She writes this when nobody pays her, and she writes it irrespective of who pays her.
The “everything is a conspiracy” crowd seems to overlook the more obvious causal link. It’s not that you like something, and then pay me to write it. It is more likely that I write something and you like it, so you donate. For example, the irrigation funding you mention arrived *after* Jennifer started her project. Everybody I know in the CIS & IPA passionately believe what they write… which is why they enjoy their jobs. There is no need to invent conspiracies.
Contrary to your claim, the CIS has backed market solutions for doctors and pharmacists and many other areas. It’s not clear exactly what you are complaining about.
If you want to read about pharmacy deregulation, try here: http://www.cis.org.au/policy_monographs/pm89.pdf
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relyer, the CIS and IPA are very different beasts.
The IPA is a fully paid for mouthpiece of vested interests, not worth arguing with. The “Independent” in CIS means what it says – they impose their politics only by means of who they recruit, rather than telling those recruits what to write. Their product is consequently less predictable, and usually of a higher intellectual standard, than the IPA’s.
So I regard the CIS as a far bigger threat to social democracy in Australia than the IPA because it is more effective.
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And migratory birds, johno. Let’s not forget avian migration.
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Relyer and others.
The other side of the coin is receiving funding from the government and you end up with Stern and Garnaut reports that are basically political manifestos.
I can’t believe people think there a deep hidden conspiracies about funding of think tanks.
Would any of you actually believe there are closet big government left wingers at the CIS and IPA that have sold their soul for money and only write corrupting pieces? This is really strange.
I couldn’t imagine John H or anyone else at the CIS would write in favor of something they don’t believe in which is the same for the Australia Institute or any other group.
You should be objecting to publicly funded groups like the ABC that peddle political positions when the taxpayers are not given a choice.
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DD:
The IPA has a particular position of which there is no doubt. Does the ACTU have a position at direct odds with their paying members?
The IPA receives no government funding and doesn’t have laws that protect their “members” donors like the ACTU does. These laws actually do contribute to hardship to the unemployed as a result of creating closed shops and restrictive trade practices.
Be honest here…. which is more of a threat to our living standards and well-being… the ACTU and the protective laws or the IPA?
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oops … sorry DD.
“So I regard the CIS as a far bigger threat to social democracy in Australia than the IPA because it is more effective.”
my bad, I missed reading the last sentence in proper context.
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Andrew…
I’d hope people with your objective case-by-case rather than dogma-driven outlook on things stay in the Liberal (chortle) Party in the hope that it might be a more useful force in Australian politics by being more liberal and less conservative… unless someone starts a true party that mirrors your apparent views of liberalism with a social conscience.
But what if the Liberal Party had an effective split, down the lines between the liberal and conservatives (and analogous to the ALP/DLP split… e.g. if Turnbull/Moylan/Georgiou types formed a new party)? Would your loyalty be determined by the licensed holder of the brand name?
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While you might well stay involved behind the scenes, would you at least be cautious about actively campaigning for a party that is so far from your ideal, and not clearly more ‘classical liberal’ than the opposition?
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I have thought that 3rd order politics is important for eons. I support the existance of the LDP simply out of hope that it may in time attract sufficent interest to change the incentives for the big parties.
Perhaps you previously under valued the idea of good people working within the major parties. However be careful that you don’t now over value it.
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Robert – My ‘active campaigning’ constitutes modest donations and handing out how-to-vote cards on election day. I spend far more time discussing policy and politics with other party members than persuading outsiders to vote for it.
Dave – I think such a split is unlikely. Ideology is over-rated as an analytical tool in the Liberal Party, where personalities and other loyalties have long been more important (even in division that look like the splits are ideological, like NSW, personalities are often more important). I’d probably go with the group most likely to succeed, and worry about ideology later. Like the current Liberal Party, that would change over time.
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Jeremy
Thank you for reminding me about the migratory birds. How could I have forgotten avian migration. Duh!!
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Derrider, Relyer, I always wonder where this model that the IPA is a mouthpiece of vested interests and that we support things like professional licensing actually comes from.
It certainly doesn’t come from what the IPA actually writes – it might be worth having a read of our material from this year, if you want to continue to opine on our work. I’ll make it easy: it’s here. Who paid for my three last articles, on why the Liberals are screwed, on why human rights are being violated by Victoria’s new knife laws, and on our big dumb government? “Capital”? If only.
Still, your views would be much more convincing if, for example, there energy companies in Australia opposed the emissions trading scheme, instead of supporting it with “appropriate” compensation of course.
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Chris… you’re just saying that because you were paid by Monty Burns and Satan you evil whale-hunting, baby-seal-clubbing, co2-breathing, gun-totting, redneck hippie. Why would anybody actually bother responding to your arguments when they can just dismiss you out of hand. Be gone foul abomination!
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Robert Wiblin says:
While you might well stay involved behind the scenes, would you at least be cautious about actively campaigning for a party that is so far from your ideal, and not clearly more ‘classical liberal’ than the opposition?
Is it. So far Abbott has not disclosed the party’s emissions policy saying that it will be coming out in the early part of the new year. As far as his support for freer labor markets goes, that at least indicates the party is has a semblance of free market thinking.
Frankly the ETS is a fatally flawed abomination that can’t achieve the goals without nuclear power, which the Libs say they now support.
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Andrew, politics is a blood sport pure and simple. If you’re not getting your hands dirty and doing people-in, you’re simply a sideline watcher, even policy advisers fall into this category. Either get in the game or watch, but you can’t do both. It essentially comes down to how many heads are you prepared to lop-off to have some victories. The brutal nature of politics is the buzz and the repellant all in one. You can’t divorce yourself from it. Those that do have a limited life span. It sounds to me like you’re a watcher (like me). I think that is both empowering and also means your not an insider … let’s face it do have what it takes to do number, stack branches, get a seat and build a base. It sounds like you need a benefactor ….
Put it this way my family grew up playing for Port Football Club, so I am a supporter of the Power, but I’m a watcher. Do you want more?
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Corin – I don’t think my comparative advantage is as a grassroots polllie. I don’t have the personality or the physical stamina. My main political contribution will be in issue politics. But I also believe that a strong centre-right party is needed, and I am happy to make a small contribution to achieving that goal.
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That’s fair, but your comparative advantage is more as critic than cheer squad. I’m not sure you can pull punches if that’s your comparative advantage.
I think there is a role for a ‘Liberal’ party that seeks to win about 25 lower house seats and 6 to 10 senate seats. It could easily join either Labor or Liberal in a Coalition depending on which at any point was most in keeping with it.
Reading your blog, I think you are a lot more conservative than you think! Put it this way, Liberals are as likely to trade off pure market/small Govt policies for social liberalism as they are to trade their social liberalism for small Govt outcomes. Frankly, the competition of bothe parties for regulating everything that moves is hardly inspiring no matter which side you choose.
Ross Garnaut has said that economic liberals have either got to choose Labor or Liberal and can fit in both, frankly that was an Australia of a reformist period. We are far from it now …
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Heh heh, continental drift, migratory birds, heh heh good one guys.
Yep, global warming is a scam, and all the scientists are wrong. They just want big government. What we need to do now is send these witticisms to the families that died in the vicious record breaking heatwave in Melbourne – these wimps are obviously part of the big government conspiracy to panic us. As if global warming would be linked with heat deaths!
I mean, anything that might require government regulation of vested interests conflicts with right wing philosophy and therefore can’t possibly exist. Therefore the disappearing arctic ice, heatwaves and heat deaths are simply false!
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Andrew, I think if you follow John Humphreys, I agree you enter the abyss of permanent irrelevance. It seems to me that liberalism must be comforted and softened by dealing with marked inequality. You need a bit of Rawls as well as Friedman. There is a role for a party in the genuine reformist centre …. not the fringes! Whilst it would still be a party of inner-urban elite, it would or could gain 10% or more of the vote and win seats liek wentworth, Sydney, Melbourne, Goldstein, Kooyong, Adelaide, Sturt, Boothby – it could certainly win these if it finishes second in tpp. As for Senate, you have to think 2 from every state is possible.
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Corin:
You seem to be hankering that the conservatives be more like Labor as that will satisfy your own political bias.
Not going to happen.
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JC, more that real Liberalism is a centrist reformist group not dependent on either organised labour or rent seeking business for legitimacy. You guys need to escape the dark ages of Reagan and Thatcher and a hankering to hold onto certainty over political progress – you’re as bad as Labor in the 60s. It is easy to write off the centrist as satisfying no-one … also just because I worked for an ALP Minister doesn’t make me want to turn conservatism wet … I just think you will, eventually. More precisely I think someone like Andrew has in reality more in common with me than John Howard. Also I’d say I have more in common with him than Kim Carr. This is a kind of Darth Vader moment – join me … etc. But hey give it 5 more years and you’ll be ready.
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Corin – The scenario you outline requires a different electoral system (say like Germany, where the FDP performs something like the role you mention) and frankly a re-start of political history. While in theory pro-market social liberals and market-leaning social democrats should be with each other rather than with the conservatives on one side and quasi-socialists on the other, it’s hard to see how we would get the simultaneous meltdown of both major parties that would permit such a realignment.
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septimus – If human activity did cause Melbourne’s high temperatures, then our little joke would have been in very bad taste and would not have been made. But you are correct when you say human induced catastrophic global warming is a scam. The farce in Copenhagen is just another act in this long running tragic comedy. Ask yourself this question. If our Dear Leader Krudd actually believed human activity was causing catastrophic global warming, why is his carbon footprint from his overseas travel this year 280 times that of the average Australian household? (See Herald Sun 16 Dec 2009. Can’t find a link. Sorry.) Every other Australian Prime Minister has been able to conduct foreign affairs without such excessive travel. If he truly believed AGW was real he would be aiming to do less, not more overseas travelling. And he would certainly not have flown to the other side of the world to attend the Climate Change summit TWICE in two weeks. That’s right. Count them. He was there at the start, then he came back for Bob Hawke’s stripper and then he flew back again. He has a very strange way of tackling the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. AGW is a joke and it should be treated as such before it becomes a very expensive joke.
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Johno
Kevin Rudd is a politician, not a scientist. The fact that one of the proponents of AGW who happens to be a politician is a hypocrite doesn’t mean that AGW is wrong. If that is the sort of lame argument that ‘sceptics’ are coming up with now they can easily be dismissed as clowns.
Equally clownish is the argument that trying to manage AGW is equivalent to trying to manage contintental drift and ‘control the weather’, another stupid meme that is going around anti-science conservatives nowadays. Good AGW theorists do not deny that there may be other factors influencing climate change including solar activity. The issue is whether human activity is itself causing additional disturbances which can lead to long run disequlibrating impacts on the climate even taking account of natural factors causing climate change. If there is significant human impact then it may make sense to manage that particular contributing factor.
The theory of AGW goes all the way back to Arhennius, the founder of physical chemistry and back to the insight, to simplify things, that CO2 traps heat, a fact that is verified by experiments. When you put this together with the fact that human industrialisation has led to an unprecedented release of CO2 you get the possibility of AGW. It is in this respect that the science is settled. What isn’t so settled is the overall magnitude of the impact which may well be more or less depending on other positive and negative feedback effects. I am by no means a believer in every IPCC projection but the existence of the effect itself is settled.
The infuriating thing which suggests to me that with a few exceptions, most conservative climate sceptics are being completely intellectually dishonest or tribalistic is that I know many of them would have had no interest in science of any kind until recently and would be hard pressed to tell Arhennius from their arses. Not surprising as most conservative sceptics seem to get their science from journaistic hacks like Andrew Bolt or theatre critics like Mark Steyn i.e. in short are innumerate literati luddites ignorant of science much like the Luvvies they love to ridicule.
Also the level of ignorance displayed about such things as emissions schemes (which were used successfully to resolve acid rain problem in the US) has been breathtaking. And I wonder how the same sceptics would have thought about CFCs (which were also managed by global coordination) and how much egg would be on their faces today if they had resorted to the same childish tactics in arguing against intervention on the CFC intervention or acid rain (through SO2 trading schemes).
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The scenario you outline requires a different electoral system (say like Germany, where the FDP performs something like the role you mention) and frankly a re-start of political history. While in theory pro-market social liberals and market-leaning social democrats should be with each other rather than with the conservatives on one side and quasi-socialists on the other
The deposing of Turnbull from the Libs and his replacement with the DLP duo Abbott and Joyce and anti-science cranks like Minchin has convinced me this is now needed more than ever.
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Andrew, you have the senate in Oz. If a centrist Turnbull-Keating like party couldn’t get at least 10 per cent of the national vote and significant pockets, I’d go to the South Pole.
Clearly it would be mainstream. Also the Lib-Dems in Britain get 50 seats or so regularly, though they are far too left-wing to be centrist.
Personally where I differ to you is that I think the German FDP are too far from the mainstream for Australia, but in Oz there is a role for a market based socially reformist party.
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Corin – There might be 10% of voters whose views align with such a party. But the organisational challenge in establishing such a party is massive. There is no existing social movement from which it can build. It’s hard enough running a small classical liberal think-tank, let alone a political party that would need thousands of activists and millions of dollars to even get noticed. There is no sign that significant numbers of existing Liberal or Labor members are sufficiently dissatisfied with their parties to leave (I’m not).
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Andrew, give it time … what you need is a couple of big names from business and public life and Rupert Murdoch’s empire to give some support. I’d say you could rely on interest from the media in spades. You would also easily raise money from business on the basis that you argue you won’t have to deal with the Greens in the Senate. I’d be amazed if the major parties didn’t give you Senate preferences above the Greens as well. It would give them the best Senate for a Government.
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Septimus,
I was mocking the idea that the earth has a single human-manipulable thermostat that the LDP could move if it wanted to.
There is buggerall connection between the bushfires which happened last year and current changes in the earth’s climate. I lived through the 1993 Sydney bushfires and the 2003 Canberra bushfires – np-one blamed them on anthropogenic global warming.
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Ok, the comment was though that there is actually a market for a genuine free market party, if it was prepared to be sensible about climate change etc. The usual extreme ‘its all a scam’ comments on this board show that such a policy will never happen, and the party will be occupied by the usual anti intellectual trolls that will make the conservatives unelectable.
And this is the problem. I believe in free markets too – I think the LDP has some good policies – but I can’t support the ‘let it burn’ craziness on the right, which, lets face it, will pretty much stuff any economy – no jobs on a dead planet, after all. As Jason says, you just can’t get away from the fact that Co2 traps heat.
At Saturdays rally in Melbourne 40,000 wanted to do something about climate change vs 10 larouchites saying it was a scam. And these are the people the conservative wing are lining up with.
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I was mocking the idea that the earth has a single human-manipulable thermostat that the LDP could move if it wanted
Which i repeat from my comment above, is not what sensible proponents of intervention on AGW believe. Ever heard of ceteris paribus Jeremy? I thought you were an economist. So by that same logic, changing price incentives cannot change behaviour since so many other things may influence human conduct besides the price signals?
While nothing is ever ‘proven’ with certainty because science is not theorems, it is highly unlikely given that (again to use shorthand in case I am misrepresented but you can find more detailed explanations of the physics online) CO2 traps heat and industrialisation has led to a lot of CO2 release that this isn’t contributing to a net trapping of heat because of human impact.
None of which is to argue against industrialisation of which you couldn’t find a larger proponent than me.
I am really sick of the intellectually dishonest rhetoric of climate change skeptics who years ago would be hardpressed to be found reading any books on science suddenly turning into armchair theorists who know better than researchers on the ground.
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Jason do you think it’s possible for a climate change sceptic to be intellectually honest?
Do you think it’s possible for a ‘researcher on the ground’ to be intellectually dishonest?
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Jason do you think it’s possible for a climate change sceptic to be intellectually honest
Yes, Dover Beach on Catallaxy is a good example of an intellectually honest climate sceptic. Bulldust about managing AGW being equivalent to believing in a ‘a single human-manipulable thermostat’ is not intellectually honest.
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The idea that there is a vast conspiracty of field workers falsifying data (for what end?) is also either intellectually dishonest or grounds for commitment.
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