Category: Liberalism

Liberalism and discrimination

~ Andrew Norton ~ 20 Comments

The Peel is a Melbourne gay bar that, according to its owner Tom McFeely, isn’t gay enough. He applied for an exemption to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act, legislation that would otherwise forbid him from keeping out women and straight men. And yesterday in the Victorian Civil and Administrative Appeals Tribunal he was granted that exemption.

According to The Age, the decision was not met with universal support:

WHEN Collingwood hotelier Tom McFeely decided to fight for the right to refuse entry to heterosexuals, he braced himself for a backlash. And a barrage of angry talkback callers proved him right yesterday.

But should McFeely even have had to apply for such an exemption? Anti-discrimination law is an issue that has divided liberals. There is a version of liberalism which holds that the way the state should treat its citizens – as impartially as possible – is a model for all institutions in civil society as well. Liberal states create space for people to live according to their own assessment of what makes for a good life, whether or not other people approve of it. But in a liberal society, the state may be the most powerful single institution, but private power has a large impact as well. To create space for the liberal individual, private as well as public power needs to be regulated. In alliance with egalitarian philosophies, this liberal idea helps explain why we have legislation prohibiting discrimination based on a wide variety of attributes.

Another version of liberalism holds that anti-discrimination law undermines freedom of association, the right to choose who we associate with and on what terms. Continue reading “Liberalism and discrimination” →

Libertarians for oppression?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

One for the beyond wrong file:

The libertarian logic is that, since personal freedom and the existence of free markets are inextricably intertwined, and since as [Robert H.] Bork puts it ‘vigorous’ economies are vulnerable to being ‘enfeebled’ by particular cultural practices, then the champions of personal freedom have a licence to police cultural practices – in the interests of freedom and economic vigour. Thus libertarians can reason that difference (for example multiculturalism, homosexuality) must be eliminated so that the economy can function better…

That’s from Christine Wallace’s ‘Libertarian nation by stealth’, in the latest Griffith Review. In the unlikely event that you want to read a dozen or so pages of ignorance and silliness, you can download it here. This is normally a reasonably good magazine, but Julianne Schultz must have been sleepediting when she approved this article for publication.

What should liberals think about marriage?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 35 Comments

Andrew is right, classical liberalism does not immediately supply a compelling reason to reject ‘gay marriage’, … except in necessarily narrow and unconvincing terms. This is because it is a political theory, not a moral philosophy.

Thus, while classical liberals can gesture toward love, as Andrew does, they cannot speak to what most couples, certainly all religious couples, and most societies know about marriage: the biological, emotional and sacramental realities merely secular critiques too often ignore. Classical liberals say ‘marriage’ but they mean something else. What they really describe is more precisely a registry office event – one where the witnesses, and indeed the law, are blind to the genitals, hearts and (too often) children (including in potentia) of the parties involved.

John Heard in responding to my critique of his objections to gay marriage.

Indeed, from the liberal state’s perspective a church wedding is just a registry office with stained glass windows, and the priest just a celebrant wearing strange clothes. That’s how it has to be in a society in which religion has lost its hold over the population, with 60% of marriages now performed by celebrants – and with many of the people who do get married in a church making a rare appearance there to do so. Marriage can have ‘sacramental realities’, but like children and even sex these are optional extras. The law does not require any of them, even though children ‘in potentia’ (or these days, watching mum and dad get married) are used as a reason for distinguishing gay from straight relationships.

But why in a liberal society should the law have anything to do with this aspect of people’s private lives? Why isn’t ‘marriage’ just a particularly intense form of friendship, in which the parties get to make up their own rules without any outside interference or involvement? Or why, as David Boaz from Cato has suggested, shouldn’t marriage just be another private contract, enforceable by the state, but according to terms decided by the parties rather than by the template provided in the law of marriage and (more importantly, in practice) divorce?
Continue reading “What should liberals think about marriage?” →

The invisible classical liberals

~ Andrew Norton ~ 15 Comments

I’m no fan of identity politics, but it can get a little frustrating when people won’t recognise my political position. Even when a newspaper gives a generally uncritical summary of something I have written (my big government conservatism Policy article), they can open by saying:

IT’S a turn up for the books when a right-wing think-tank launches an attack on the Howard Government.

But as it turns out, hell hath no fury like a conservative scorned. (emphasis added)

So even in an article expressly criticising conservatism I still get classed as a ‘conservative’.

Bryan Palmer’s Australian Politics Quiz caused similar dissatisfaction this week among my fellow classical liberals, who were classed as ‘left’ on ‘traditional’ values (as I was when I took the test), though few of us would ever regard ourselves as ‘left’ in any way. At Club Troppo, Mark Bahnisch explained the situation this way:

The thing is though that libertarians traditionally are a very small current in what is a very statist political culture on both sides of the aisle in Australia.

Having said that, certainly social liberalism is more in evidence now and can be found in all political parties, as can social conservatism (at least in the majors).

I still think consistent economic/social liberals are pretty rare in Australian politics, and getting rarer. As I

The rise of ‘market fundamentalism’

~ Andrew Norton ~ 17 Comments

Back in 2001, I wrote an article for Quadrant titled ‘Naming the Right’ (pdf) which tracked the changing terminology used to describe the free-market right. It argued that ‘New Right’ had largely gone out of fashion, and that though ‘neoliberalism’ was on the rise, ‘economic rationalism’ was the still the most common label. Re-reading it now there is a striking omission: ‘market fundamentalism’, which has attracted recent attention from Kevin Rudd’s use of it in his Monthly article and his CIS lecture (pdf), along with critical commentary from Jason Soon in the blogosphere and Tony Abbott in the SMH.

Market opponents have long used religious allusions in describing market supporters, branding them ‘zealots’ believing in an ‘orthodoxy’ of ‘sacrosanct’ markets as a ‘path to salvation’, including using the phrase ‘economic fundamentalism’ (these are all from a paper on economic rationalism I wrote in the early 1990s). But I am pretty sure that in omitting ‘market fundamentalism’ in my 2001 article I was not making a lexicographical blunder. It just hadn’t caught on then.

These days put ‘market fundamentalism’ in www.google.com.au and you will still be going with new examples tens of Google’s pages later. I found only one use, from 1999, that pre-dated my Quadrant piece, though search engines are not ideal for research stretching back into the days before putting things on the web was standard practice. The 1999 link referred to zillionaire speculator and would-be public intellectual George Soros who is fond of using the term; it was also popularised by the poorer but academically far superior Joseph Stiglitz.

As others have pointed out, the term itself cannot withstand much scrutiny in the way Rudd uses it. What interests me here is the sharp shift in the connotations attached to the labels for free-marketeers. We have gone straight from a term that alludes to the anti-religious forces of reason, ‘economic rationalism’, to one that alludes to the irrational dogmatism of religion, ‘market fundamentalism’.
Continue reading “The rise of ‘market fundamentalism’” →

Sphere crossing

~ Andrew Norton ~ 21 Comments

How many organisations give platforms to their critics? That’s what the CIS did when Kevin Rudd delivered this speech (pdf) last Thursday. Much of it is a critique of Friedrich Hayek. But the part that caught my eye was a common criticism of markets, that its self-interested values invade other spheres where other values ought to prevail. Rudd is unconvinced by what he regards Hayek’s ‘ex cathedra pronouncements’ that the family and the market can be maintained as separate moral realms, as different ‘orders’, a ‘private’ order for the family and ‘extended’ order for market where altruistic values are less applicable. Rudd says:

…this is formalistic nonsense given that Hayek’s fundamental concern is individual liberty and the same individuals are who are participants in family life are active in the market. Is it seriously contended that behaviours in one sphere do not affect behaviours in the other?

In a quote from David McKnight, he elaborates on the problem:

We must be ruthlessly self-interested in the market and sweetly caring in the family, greedy at work, selfless at home.

I don’t think Rudd realises the difficulties this critique creates for his own position. After all, he does not oppose the market. He maintains that ‘social democrats maintain a robust support for the market economy’, just not of the neo-liberal minimal state variety. Yet this would surely mean that everyone would still have their principal exposure to the self-interested values of the market, ie as consumers. Don’t we all like to get a bargain? How often do we really consider the full implications of our purchases for other people or the environment?
Continue reading “Sphere crossing” →

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.

Were the 1980s the ‘last great period of reform’?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 12 Comments

It’s common enough in right-of-centre circles to laud the economic reforms of the 1980s. A new publication from the Institute of Public Affairs, Australia Since the 1980s, is in this tradition. Its opening paragraph tells us that it is

worthwhile revisiting the last great period of reform – the 1980s.

Certainly, there were some worthwhile reforms in the 1980s: the floating of the dollar, the opening up of the financial system, and the start of phased tariff cuts among them. Yet as with some other recent IPA excursions into history (here and here), this claim doesn’t quite stack up.

The 1990s, and especially their first half, have a better claim on being the last great period of reform: the end of the two airline policy, the end of the one phone company policy, improved competition policy (admittedly, a point of dispute among liberals), more phased tariff cuts, all the major privatisations, the most significant industrial relations changes, and many other less high-profile reforms. This Industry Commission publication gives a useful timeline from the 1970s to 1997.

So why do people keep talking about the 1980s as the period of reform? There are several possible explanations. It was certainly the start of a major period of reform, the unravelling of the ‘Australian Settlement’ that had governed economic policy since the first decade of the 20th century. And arguably it is a little artificial to distinguish between the two decades; the ‘1980s’ can be used figuratively to refer to later, related periods too (just as some of the important trends of the ‘1960s’ peaked in the first half of the 1970s).

But I think there could be other reasons relating to the culture of the right. The 1980s was the time when the right was on the intellectual offensive, and the left shell-shocked. In Australia, they simply weren’t used to the right having a specific programme of reform. In 1987, an edited collection from various Labor and left figures, The New Right’s Australian Fantasy, said on the back cover that its contributors ‘feel strongly about the need to safeguard what is best about this place.’ The left being reduced to a conservative argument like this was something few people would have predicted 15 years earlier, when the left’s time seem to have come. This first phase of economic reform, superbly recorded in Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty, was as exciting for the right as it was depressing for the left.

Though the reform programme continued even more quickly in the 1990s, the political dynamic changed. The dreadful early 1990s recession gave the opponents of economic reform a plausible (if wrong) argument that the economic reform programme was a failure, and vocal opposition arose from conservatives as well as leftists. The Paul Keating Prime Ministership also divided the right. Many pro-economic reform cultural conservatives hated his non-economic agenda so much that they could barely give him credit for the good things he was doing. And then he defeated Liberal leader John Hewson and his radical reform agenda Fightback! in the 1993 election. The reform movement didn’t die with Fightback!, but it marked the end of manifesto politics. So while the 1990s were important years for economic reform, they didn’t feel as good as the 1980s had.

Surveys suggest that people tend to look back fondly on their years of early adulthood, and I think the same might be true of political movements as well. The future remains an exciting possibility, free of the messy realities of trying to make things work. This is why the free-market right views the ‘1980s’ with nostalgia. But we should not pretend that these memories are accurate history.

Am I Carltons lone libertarian?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 34 Comments

I’ve never won any competition I entered, but now it seems I have won a competition I did not know I was in: I have been named as one of Australia’s top libertarian identities. Don Arthur thinks that surely there must have been some mistake, citing these words I wrote last year explaining why I was not a libertarian:

Classical liberals are certainly at the libertarian end of the political spectrum. In practice, though, I am uncomfortable with the label. Libertarians tend to have a rights-based view of the world (in this they parallel modern left-liberals, though their lists of rights are different). Personally, I don’t find rights theories or, for that matter any foundationalist theory, convincing. So while I favour the institutions of classical liberalism – limited government, the rule of law, protection of personal freedoms, the market etc – I have an more intellectually eclectic set of justifications than a simple assertion of rights. In practice, this leads to more pragmatic political positions than libertarians.

For example, while maintaing due scepiticism I basically agree with the line that Gerard Henderson has been pushing (eg today???s SMH) that in times of threat the government can reduce some people???s civil liberties if a strong enough case can be made that they are a threat to Australia???s security. In the libertarian view, rights are rights, regardless of circumstances.

Jason Soon thinks that in this passage I am defining libertarianism too narrowly as a rights-based philosophy, when it could have utilitarian derivations as well:

On that reading, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman wouldn???t be classified as libertarians, nor would Friedman???s son, David Friedman who is fundamentally a utilitarian but has also written one of the most convincing books on anarcho-capitalism that I have ever read

John Humphreys agrees with Jason. He thinks that:

If somebody really wanted to make a distinction between ???classical liberal??? and ???libertarian??? it is probably fair to note that ???classical liberals??? are normally on the moderate corner of the libertarian circle (sic), but that doesn???t stop them from being libertarian.

If libertarianism and classical liberalism are not identical twins they are at least first cousins, which is why classical liberals can end up appearing like ‘moderate’ libertarians. Yet I still think that there are some distinctions that often if not always apply, and mean I am more comfortable self-describing as a ‘classical liberal’:

1) Underlying philosophy. Jason insists that libertarianism can rely on utilitarian as well as rights-based arguments. I think he is right that libertarians use utilitarian arguments, but I feel more to find stronger justifications than natural rights theories for the same freedoms as rights protect than as a real inquiry into what would maximise utility. Libertarians end up arguing against things like seat belt laws, random breath testing or gun control, which I think are tough arguments on utilitarian grounds alone. I think classical liberals tend to be more open to going where utilitarian arguments might take them, which is why I made the point about national security laws in the passage that Don quoted.

2) Style. Whether utilitarian or rights-based in their underlying philosophy, libertarians like deductive reasoning – applying clear principles to almost any set of facts. This is one reason, I think, that neo-classical economics and libertarianism often appeal to the same people. Deductive reasoning gives libertarianism a dogmatic character (the Randians tend to be insufferably dogmatic). Early classical liberals like Adam Smith preferred inductive reasoning; the pleasure in reading them (and talking with living classical liberals) is not just in having aspects of one’s worldview confirmed, it is in trying to find patterns and meaning in social and economic life. Where libertarians have solid principles, classical liberals have rules of thumb derived from experience: governments tend to mess things up, individuals are the best judges of their own interests, private property is essential to freedom and efficiency, etc.

3) Cultural attitudes. Libertarians tend to have a more anything goes attitude to culture than classical liberals. In this respect, classical liberals have things in common with conservatives, in believing that social order is desirable and that certain general cultural rules ought to be observed. Libertarians rush in to defend people’s freedom to say anything they like, no matter how racist, sexist, homophobic, etc. I’ll certainly argue against people who say such things being punished by law, but I don’t necessarily see anything wrong with them being ostracised for their actions. This is why I was not completely against ‘political correctness’. It is why I have a stricter comments policy than Catallaxy.

Political ideologies are very hard to pin down, and inevitably people will find exceptions – or even take exception – to my attempts to distinguish classical liberalism and libertarianism. But I have described the connotations attached to the two terms in my own mind at least. I have been called much worse things than a ‘libertarian’ – indeed, a radical libertarian once accused me of ’state worship’, which I found far more inaccurate and insulting. But given the choice, I prefer the label ‘classical liberal’.

Quadrant at 50

~ Andrew Norton ~ 11 Comments

Tonight in Sydney Quadrant is celebrating its 50th birthday. In The Australian this morning, Owen Harries and Tom Switzer offer high praise. Noting the now ‘mainstream’ nature of conservative ideas, they say that we should thank Quadrant for its part in this change:

Quadrant is the most successful and influential magazine of ideas in Australia’s history.

In Crikey, Charles Richardson is more critical. After noting its golden days as an anti-communist journal, he says:

Since then, and especially since the fall of communism, Quadrant has struggled to retain relevance. Harries and Switzer acknowledge that it “has had its ups and downs”, and mention “clashes of personalities”. But they fail to appreciate the basic dilemma that publications like Quadrant face.

Anti-communism depended on an alliance between conservatives and liberals: although philosophical enemies, they recognised that they faced a common threat, and could unite on a common program of defending western democracy. The conservative side was always the more prominent at Quadrant, but most of the time they were too busy with communism to turn their fire on the liberals.

In the last twenty years, things have changed. Communism and old-style socialism have mostly disappeared, leaving conservatives and liberals to face each other in the trenches. Quadrant has continued to produce some work of high quality, but the sort of liberals who would once have seen it as an ally in the greater struggle are now its main target.

Harries and Switzer seem oblivious to this. They see themselves as promoting “conservative ideas and those of classical liberalism”, without realising how deep the contradiction is between them.

I’m inclined to agree that Quadrant’s golden years are behind it, though this is as much due to changed technology as changed intellectual circumstances. Blogs and essays on the internet can attract much wider audiences than a $7.50 monthly magazine printed on newsprint and with terrible covers, depriving Quadrant (and other little magazines) of both writers and readers. I don’t know of anyone under 30 who reads Quadrant , so demography is very much against it in the long term.

But I disagree with Charles on the liberalism and conservatism issue. The Harries and Switzer piece does blur them more than it should, and Charles correctly notes that there are tensions between the two ideologies. But this is an opportunity for Quadrant rather than a problem. There is no need for it to be a house journal for one view or the other, and in practice it is one of the few places where in-depth liberal and conservative views can both be read.

For many on the right, this debate is as much a working out of their own inner tensions as a clash between rival tribes. If anything challenges liberal anti-paternalist views it is remote Indigenous communities, on which Tony Abbott wrote in the September issue. John Stone offered a characteristically blunt assessment of what he calls the ‘Muslim problem’, which is posing the largest intellectual and practical challenges for liberal tolerance in decades. The magazine has published many conservative views on what’s happening to the universities, but also Max Corden’s excellent liberal critique of higher education policy.

I doubt Quadrant will celebrate its 100th, but there is still a role for it.

Update: For us over 30s (actually, it’s probably mid-30s – the dividing line is likely to between those whose political views were shaped by the Cold War, ie born in the early 1970s or before, and those whose political views were formed after the collapse of European communism that began in late 1989) the IPA is also holding a Quadrant turns 50 function, on 19 October. Ken Minogue, whose lucid and insightful essays once graced the pages of Quadrant and its now-defunct upmarket English equivalent, Encounter, will also be there.