Category: Conservatism

How long will ‘economic conservatism’ last?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

Kevin Rudd may be reluctant to call Labor left-wing, but he’s happy to cloak himself in conservatism. It started last year when he invoked – albeit inaccurately – British conservative philosopher Michael Oakeshott in his criticism of market forces. After becoming leader, he endorsed – albeit inaccurately again – Australia’s most successful conservative leader, Robert Menzies, as preferable to Howard.

And more recently Rudd has been calling himself an ‘economic conservative’, which Josh Gordon wrote about in The Age on Saturday. As Gordon says, not so long ago this would have been a negative term, but such is the general agreement that has built up around the main component parts of ‘economic conservatism’ – Reserve Bank independence and a balanced if not surplus Budget – that ‘conservatism’ on these matters is uncontroversial.

Even Labor’ s once-true believers are getting in on the consensus. If Howard being cheered by CFMEU members was the most bizarre aspect of the 2004 campaign, for me the most bizarre aspect of the 2007 campaign was the enthusiastic applause from the party faithful at Labor’s launch when Rudd said:
Continue reading “How long will ‘economic conservatism’ last?” →

Quadrant’s vacancy filled

~ Andrew Norton ~ 42 Comments

As The Australian reports this morning, the Quadrant editorial vacancy has been filled – by controversial historian Keith Windschuttle.

Windschuttle’s first target will be the arts:

Windschuttle is not feeling charitable towards luvvies. “I’ve become concerned in recent years about the cynicism and decadence that you get in the opera, in the theatre, in other parts of high culture – even the dance companies,” he said.

Consider Wagner’s Tannhauser, that myth of the sacred and profane now on show at the Sydney Opera House. “There’s a guy painted in gold (who) stands there with a giant erection – symbolises lust or something,” Windschuttle said yesterday. “That kind of gratuitous offensiveness is almost everywhere.”

Those who have the print version of The Australian will see a photograph of Windschuttle next to one of the ‘Look Right’ warnings painted on Sydney streets, to try to reduce the number of tourists run over after forgetting which side of the road cars drive on here. That perhaps doesn’t bode well for the ‘sceptical and non-ideological’ spirit Paddy says he has tried to revive during his editorship.

The end of the Cold War made Quadrant a less necessary place for the anti-totalilatarian left (as opposed to the merely non-totalitarian left), so it was always bound to narrow ideologically in the 1990s. But it would be good to have a magazine in which genuine diversity and debate was a constant feature, even if only within the broad centre-right and right.

Are ‘left’ and ‘right’ useful political labels?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 30 Comments

As long-time readers would know, I think the labels left and right are not very useful nor descriptive as each covers such a huge range of ideas that it’s hardly useful.

That’s blogger Sacha Blumen in his comment on my post on left and right attitudes to status.

Sacha’s quite correct that the political labels ‘left’ and ‘right’ can cover a lot of territory.

According to Wikipedia, ‘left’ can cover:

social (as opposed to classical) liberalism, populism, social democracy, socialism, communism, syndicalism, communalism, communitarianism, some forms of green politics, some forms of progressivism, and some forms of anarchism.

While ‘right’ can cover:

conservatism, monarchism, fascism, libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism, reactionism, some forms of populism, the religious right, nationalism, militarism, producerism, Nativism, realism or simply the opposite of left-wing politics.

Adding further to the complexity, political parties thought to be of the ‘left’ or ‘right’ don’t always act according to stereotypes. As Paul Keating has been reminding us this week, Labor led the way with market reforms of the Australian economy, while the ‘right-wing’ Howard government has increased spending on welfare more quickly than Keating did.

Though more precise ideological descriptions are often useful, that doesn’t mean that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have no value. Continue reading “Are ‘left’ and ‘right’ useful political labels?” →

The utilitarian conservative case against gay marriage

~ Andrew Norton ~ 61 Comments

Earlier this month, The Australian published an article advocating more equal treatment of gay Australians. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that, as many such articles have been published over the years. This one attracted attention, however, because it was written by Tim Wilson, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.

This has put the IPA in the unusual position of receiving praise from the left and criticism from the right, in the form of an op-ed in today’s Australian by my friend John Heard. He’s taking a more conciliatory line toward the IPA on his blog today, but in the article he wonders why a ‘conservative’ think-tank is promoting gay marriage.

As I have pointed out before, there is some confusion in the IPA between liberalism and conservatism, but I think like much of the right we could say that they are economically liberal but have more diverse views on social issues, ranging from libertarianism to conservatism. I don’t think the liberal tradition provides any intellectual resources for discrimination against gay people, but clearly the conservative tradition does, and that’s what John is appealing to in his article – though on the gay marriage issue, not on superannuation laws and other ‘minor injustices’, as he calls them.

As John’s blog post clarifies but the op-ed does not, Wilson did not actually support gay marriage in his article. But John’s arguments against are still worth considering. His most general statement of principle is:

A “homo-con” like me would likely look at how many people are being affected by the apparent injustice and which wider goals are served by the same.

If the net result is a gain for the common good, then the discrimination is, far from an injustice, rather a boon for families and an exercise in good government.

Continue reading “The utilitarian conservative case against gay marriage” →

The political case against big-government conservatism

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

I’ve posted regularly on the Howard government’s big spending habits. While I think much of this spending is unwarranted on policy grounds, it’s going to be hard to resist while Liberals still believe that it works politically. In this morning’s Weekend Australian I outline an argument as to why big-government conservatism isn’t a viable long-term strategy for the centre-right (there’s more detail in my Policy article).

The argument has parallels with the mummy party/daddy party thesis. Voters view political parties in stereotypical terms, seeing Labor as stronger on ‘welfare’ issues such as health, education and social security, and the Liberals as stronger on tax, defence and immigration (Newspoll’s list is the most accessible). Like most stereotyped views they are not completely immune to reality, but as the general public often has a poor grasp of actual trends they tend to form judgments based on their general perceptions of the parties, rather than their real record or (for Oppositions) their alternative policies.

This is one reason why despite increasing spending more quickly than the Keating government on education, health and social security over the last few years, and at a considerable rate by any standard, the Coalition still trails Labor as the better party on these issues. Using the Australian Election Study measure, the Coalition has recovered some of the ground lost as they cut the Budget deficit in the mid-1990s, but they are not back to their 1996 position. And as I say in the Weekend Oz:

Continue reading “The political case against big-government conservatism” →

How many people read The Monthly?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 24 Comments

If you are still reading The Monthly, you’re part of a pretty exclusive group – just 42,000 people, or 0.2% of the population, according to the Roy Morgan Readership Survey. Admittedly, Morgan’s call centre would have to ring a lot of people before they found any readers of the magazine I edit, but then again Policy never set out to be an antipodean Atlantic Monthly.

Apart from lacking the Atlantic Monthly‘s circulation, this month’s Monthly was lacking The New Yorker’s famous fact checkers. Crikey had a go at them for publishing Mungo MacCullum’s claim that Robert Menzies had an affair with Elizabeth Fairfax, wife of media proprietor Warwick Fairfax. There is no evidence that such an affair ever took place.

Several people (including me) have criticised Kevin Rudd’s article ‘Howard’s Brutopia: The Battle of Ideas in Australian Politics’. But none of us have yet challenged the claimed origins of the term ‘brutopia’:

Contemporary British conservatives such as Michael Oakeshott have starkly warned against a ‘brutopia’ of unchecked market forces.

It is some years since I have read Oakeshott in detail, but I doubt this is true. Oakeshott wrote little on economics, but what he did – such as ‘The Political Economy of Freedom’ in Rationalism in Politics – is generally sympathetic to markets, though in a non-ideological way. More to the point, it is hard to imagine an elegant writer like Oakeshott using an ugly neologism like ‘brutopia’. And he wasn’t really the type to quote from Donald Duck comics, where the term originated in the late 1950s, in a clear reference not to market dystopias but a dystopia lacking markets, the Soviet Union. Putting pop culture references into academic writing did not start until decades after Oakeshott did his main work.

If it wasn’t Oakeshott, who was it? The closest I can get via Google to a ‘British’ reference is a 2000 article by an academic in Belfast. Rudd clearly defines ‘contemporary’ rather broadly (Oakeshott died in 1990) so perhaps it was a print only usage. But like Mungo’s Menzies affair, Rudd’s conservatives warning of market brutopias sounds like something New Yorker-style fact checkers wouldn’t have allowed into print.

The War on ‘Democracy’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 32 Comments

Crikey reported during the week that Gerard Henderson was threatening to sue UWA Press over their triple-titled The War on Democracy/Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press/A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Conservative Dream. But it’s in the bookshops, and that’s where it should stay, so that it can sink under the weight of its own silliness.

The authors, Niall Lucy, author of A Derrida Dictionary, and Steve Mickler, begin with a Humpty-Dumptyish definition of ‘democracy’:

As an idea and an ideal, then democracy acknowledges that between the many different interests in a society there are unequal relations of power, and so it acts to give power to those interests which on their own are less equal than others.

That’s hardly how most people would define democracy, which is about giving people political power, not equalising power more generally (in practice a broader equalisation of power has been a consequence of democracy, but it is not ‘democracy’ in itself). What Lucy and Mickler mean is closer to social democracy, or social justice. I can’t see any intellectual value in conflating separate concepts; the authors are confused, or perhaps they are trying to use the term as a polemical device to disassociate conservatives from something everyone believes to be A Good Thing.

‘Democracy’ is not the only eccentric definition. The first ‘conservative’ to be attacked is Luke Slattery, who I think would probably put himself somewhere on the left, and certainly would not be seen by anyone on the right as a ‘conservative’. But he gets labelled a ‘conservative’ because he is against postmodernism.

Ironically, this is because Lucy and Mickler seem to follow the logic of their own criticism of how conservatives construct the left:
Continue reading “The War on ‘Democracy’” →

John Howard, conservative social democrat #2

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

Last month I suggested that John Howard was a conservative social democrat, redistributing income as a conventional social democrat would, but giving it a conservative twist by targeting families.

An interesting presentation by Ann Harding of NATSEM at today’s Melbourne Institute/The Australian conference spells out the distributional consequences of all the extra spending.

For a single and childless person earning between $1,000 and $1,250 a week, changes in the tax and welfare systems since 1996-97 leave them 4% better off in real terms. But a couple with one earner and two children on the same income is 15% better off from tax and welfare changes, and a couple of two earners and two children is 19% better off.

These figures ignore changes in private income – they are the effects of changes in government policy alone. If increases in private earnings are included, a single adult is 15% better off and and a couple with children is 29% better off. This suggests that the market alone has not changed household relativities much, but government policy has had a big effect.

Harding also finds that when we look at equivalised household income (ie, allowing for the number of people in the household) over the last decade households in the top 20% of the income distribution have had % increases in their income that are slightly below the average, though still a good improvement – 24%. The biggest winners have been those in the middle two income deciles on 32% and 29%. Decile 2 did the worst, on 14%. Harding says this group contains a lot of old-age pensioners without private resources, so they have not directly benefited from the rise in market income or the added concessions for ‘self-funded’ retirees.

Overall, though, it supports my argument that while Howard only occasionally talks like a social democrat, he has consistently behaved like one.

Is Kevin Rudd trying to wedge the Liberals?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 13 Comments

It is no secret that the modern Liberal Party is – insofar as it can be characterised in ideological terms (always an important caveat, since few people’s views map neatly onto the organising ‘isms’ used by intellectuals) – an alliance of liberalism and conservativism. Interestingly, this is often an alliance within individuals as well as between individuals. There are social conservatives who hold essentially liberal (ie, pro-market) views on economic matters. There are social liberals who hold essentially conservative views on economic matters (ie, in favour of the old protectionist system). The Prime Minister has often discussed the liberal-conservative alliance, such as in this April 2006 speech:

The Liberal Party of Australia is the custodian of two traditions in Australian politics. It is the custodian of the classic liberal tradition, but it is also the custodian of the conservative tradition in Australian politics. You have frequently heard me use the expression the broad church. We are a broad church. We do have within our ranks people who would describe themselves as small-l liberals and we have people who would describe themselves as being more conservative. I am a small-l liberal on some issues, I am a conservative on others. I have frequently described myself unapologetically as being a social conservative and an economic liberal. Some would describe themselves as both socially conservative and economically conservative, although I think the second rung of that is a more dwindling group, but nonetheless some would regard themselves as both social and economic liberals.

In an article that is to be published in the November issue of The Monthly, but which was extracted in The Australian yesterday, Rudd trys to drive a wedge through this alliance. As Don Arthur has started to point out there is some innacurate characterisation of what ‘neoliberals’ believe, but this can be ignored as not essential to Rudd’s argument. The core of it is here:

There are no more corrosive agents at work today, on the so-called conservative institutions of family, community, church and country than the unforgiving forces of neo-liberalism, materialism and consumerism, which lay waste to anything in their way. This deep split within the Right provides new opportunities for the Labor Party to argue for a comprehensive set of values that intelligently harnesses the importance of the market and the importance of the family, community and society that markets ultimately serve.

Nowhere amid the triumphalism of Howard’s recent address on the 50th anniversary of the establishment of Quadrant was there any attempt at a philosophical framework for the reconciliation of the Right’s competing neo-liberal and conservative tendencies. That battle, it seems, has already been fought and the neo-liberals have won.

Rudd is asserting here that there is fundamental contradiction in the Liberal Party, and it is the conservatives who are being dudded in this alliance – with of course the implicit (and perhaps explicit, in the full article) argument that the conservative working and lower-middle class voters who have kept Howard in power should switch to Labor, the true conservative party. He is trying to wedge the Liberals.

While Howard did not try to reconcile the competing tendencies in the Quadrant speech (his most absurdly over-analysed comments of recent times; it was a feelgood talk for the magazine’s supporters, not a statement of his governing philosophy) he has done it elsewhere. For example:

Contemporary Australian society understands that we do live in a world of change, they understand that globalism is with us forever, they may not like some aspects of it but they know they can’t change it and they therefore want a government that delivers the benefits of globalisation and not one that foolishly pretends Canute-like it can hold back the tide. They accept and they understand that. But they also want within that change, sometimes that maelstrom of economic change, they want reassurance and they want to protect and defend those institutions that have given them a sense of security and a sense of purpose over the years.

In this, Howard’s basic analysis is similar to that of Hawke and Keating. We need a flexible and dynamic economy to deliver the living standards people want and expect. But alongside the change this produces, we need stabilising influences. Hawke and Keating delivered this through reform gradualism and via the ’social wage’. Howard has been much the same in his broad thrust, though there are many differences of detail. It is why Howard has massively increased spending on families, and why he is raining cash on rural Australia, to replace the water it is not getting. It is why he slowed tariff cuts and spent up big on assistance packages for declining industries to spread out and ease the process of change. It is why he regularly refers to social cohesion, to the point of even making social democratic statements about ‘fair’ wealth distribution. Arguably, his culture wars activities are part of all this too. He saw Keating’s cultural agenda as pushing unwanted and unnecessary changes on a people already suffering reform fatigue over necessary changes.

If anything, the people who should be aggrieved in all this are not conservatives or liberal conservatives, but liberals (’neo’ or otherwise). While Howard has made some modest progress on market reform, he has entrenched high government spending and taken conservative stances on gay equality and euthanasia. But Rudd isn’t trying to create a wedge with liberals, because there are too few to affect elections, and it doesn’t allow focus on industrial relations reform, a key Labor campaign strategy.

There are interesting issues here about whether the Hawke/Keating/Howard/Rudd analysis favouring state action to counteract market dynamism is correct. I think it is greatly exaggerated – but something for another post. But I don’t think there is much ground for Rudd’s wedge strategy. Howard has delivered much to the Liberal Party’s conservative and liberal conservative support base; far too much for us in the ‘neoliberal’ wing of the party.

John Howard, conservative social democrat

~ Andrew Norton ~ 26 Comments

This morning’s Australian reports on OECD figures showing that:

Over the past 10 years of John Howard’s Government, the personal income tax burden in Australia had risen from 11.7 per cent to 12.6 per cent of GDP.

It does note that these figures are for 2004, before the 2005 and 2006 tax cuts. These cuts should bring the percentage of GDP take back to around the earlier figure, though because of rising GDP spending per person will continue to grow.

Many people have criticised the Howard government’s taxing and spending record – Des Moore’s latest critique should be on the Policy website in the next few days. I’ve been writing another for the Summer issue, focusing on the expenditure side to see just what went wrong.

What’s particularly interesting is the biggest spending area, welfare payments. Though the long economic boom should, in theory, have lessened demands on the welfare system, in fact real per capita spending in the three years ending 30 June 2005 (the latest from the ABS) increased by more than in the last three years of the Keating Labor government.

Partly, this is due to the ageing of the population. We are supporting 20% more aged pension beneficiaries now than when Howard came to office. No government can do much about these trends in the short term (though there have been fiddling at the margins policies designed to encourage people to stay in work longer).

But what really struck me was that large amounts of money are being spent because the Prime Minister, despite being a hate-figure on the left, is actually something of a social democrat, albeit of a conservative kind.

Consider this statement, from a speech in 2000:

Our social cohesion, flowing directly from a quite unique form of egalitarianism, is arguably the crowning achievement of the Australian experience over the past century. Yet this cohesion will be tested if wealth and opportunity can