Category: Political parties

How should we deal with union political power?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 1 Comment

Earlier in the week, an Age report suggested that negotiations between the parties on political donations and funding laws had broken down over the issue of union affiliation fees to the ALP. The Liberal spokesman on this issue, Senator Michael Ronaldson, was reported as saying:

”It is increasingly clear that the level of union influence means that the reforms are all but dead in the water. And this is a great tragedy for this country.”

But in an Age op-ed Joo-Cheong Tham argues that union affiliation fees to political parties should be exempted from controls on political funding.

A distinction can be made, as he does, between individual or group membership of a political party – implying some general commitment to it – and ad hoc donations. But if the concern is avoiding the threats to ‘integrity’ when ‘holders of public office give undue weight to the interests of their financiers’ (Joo-Cheong’s words), it is not clear that this distinction is a difference that counts in favour of exempting union payments. Continue reading “How should we deal with union political power?” →

Classical liberals and political parties

~ Andrew Norton ~ 65 Comments

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. Continue reading “Classical liberals and political parties” →

Tony Abbott – much to like, many reasons to doubt

~ Andrew Norton ~ 33 Comments

There’s much to like about Tony Abbott. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to who has met him (I’ve known him slightly since my mid-1990s Sydney days) finds him to be engaging and affable. I find his internal struggles to reconcile his Catholicism with his political imperatives and personal desires interesting and even appealing. If other Liberals change their minds because they never believed in anything in the first place, Abbott sometimes seems to change his mind because he believes in too many things, which are competing for his loyalty.

But can things that make him attractive as a person make him successful as a Liberal leader? The pundits are saying he has trouble with women. Kerry O’Brien and Nic Economou both said this on the 7.30 Report tonight, Bernard Keane at Crikey said that he is ‘deeply unpopular with female voters due to his hardline and aggressive Catholicism’. But the evidence for this is thin. – the Newspoll this week in fact found that women voters preferred Abbott over Turnbull. We should not confuse the self-appointed feminist representatives of women with women voters. The Newspoll this week found that Abbott’s support was near identical between male and female voters.

Abbott is not a simple ideological conservative. His centralist views, for example, put him outside the conservative mainstream. In my criticism of his recent book Battlelines, I argued that the problem-solving approach he adopted as a Howard minister and still defends leads to a far larger and more interfering government than most people on the centre-right would prefer. However, this approach does reflect the Australian public’s approach to things. They want problems fixed. Continue reading “Tony Abbott – much to like, many reasons to doubt” →

Conservatism from Deakin to Howard

~ Andrew Norton ~ 6 Comments

George Brandis’s Deakin lecture is now online, courtesy The Australian.

One of his points was that John Howard was the first Liberal leader to expressly incorporate conservatism into the party ideology, describing the Liberal Party as the heir to both the conservative and liberal traditions in Australia, and himself as a social conservative and economic liberal.

So far as I can recall that it a correct observation about party rhetoric. What I am less sure of is that Howard – despite his own occasional claim to the contrary – was actually an unusually conservative Liberal prime minister.

Important elements of Liberal ideology from Deakin to Menzies owe more to conservative than liberal thinking, even if neither Deakin nor Menzies ever labelled them as such.

The stand-out example of this is the White Australia Policy. Take this passage from Afred Deakin on the WAP (quoted in Paul Kelly’s The End of Certainty): Continue reading “Conservatism from Deakin to Howard” →

Generational differences in issue opinion?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 9 Comments

At the end of another post on demographic shifts in voting patterns against the Coalition, Pollytics blogger Scott Steel says:

Think of the vast generation gap that exists between the youngest and oldest cohorts of the electoral roll on climate change, same sex marriage, censorship laws, asylum seekers, immigration policy and general technology issues – how will the Libs pivot towards Gen Y when on any of these issues the views of the party’s older membership base is incompatible with the majority view of Gen Y..

But is there a vast generaton gap on all these issues? I was particularly curious about immigration, as opinion on this issue appears to be cyclical, though this does not rule out generational effects as well.

On looking at the 2007 Australian Election Survey’s question on migration by Scott’s categories (Pre-WW2 born up to 1945, boomers born 1946 to 1964, Gen X born 1965 to 1980, and Gen Y born 1981 onwards) it does have the pattern he expects, but it does not show fundamental differences. Gen Y had a significantly larger majority in favour of saying that the current intake was about right or not large enough than the pre-WW2 generation, but they are both on the same side of the then seemingly cyclical pro-migration view.

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Question: Number of migrants allowed into Australia: gone much too far/ gone too far/ about right/ not gone far enough/ not gone nearly far enough. Continue reading “Generational differences in issue opinion?” →

The party paradox of donation bans

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

With political donations laws, the news only seems to get worse. Following a similar story in the AFR on Monday, the SMH today reported that the major parties are actively discussing banning both corporate and union donations. They are also discussing limiting individual donations to $1,500 to $2,000. Campaigns would rely even more on public funding.

Public funding of campaigns invariably favours incumbent parties as it is based on past electoral support. New parties will struggle to get large numbers of votes until they have significant campaign funds, but they won’t get significant campaign funds until they have large numbers of votes. It’s the current main players trying to maintain their cartel against potential competitors (again).

The downside for the major political parties is that the ban would diminish their role in political life, disconnecting them from their own supporters and the broader community. Much of what parties do between elections is, in various forms, to raise money. To the extent that this is prohibited or made unnecessary by public funding, there will be less need to organise functions and go meet people. Governments always destroy social capital when they take over the functions of NGOs and volunteers, and this would be no exception. Parties will shrink further towards being a core of state-funded apparatchiks.

It would be quite a paradoxical outcome. The major parties would be more secure than ever as controllers of parliaments, while never more lifeless and unrepresentative as organisations.

Politics & partners

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

I’ve argued that political philosophies differ in what role they see emotions playing in public life. While I suspect these differences spill over from (or into?) private life emotional styles to some extent, overall I would expect more emotional overlap in private than public.

While it’s not direct evidence, I thought a recent survey by Essential Research on qualities people seek in a partner by political affiliation was interesting. Out of 13 possible qualities respondents were asked to select the three they saw as most important (table under the fold).

With differences in order and rating, the Coalition, Labor and Green supporters all seek the same top five qualities: honesty and integrity, kind and considerate, sense of humour, similar interests, and caring friend.

The most surprising difference between them is that Greens (66%) are much less likely than Coalition (81%) or Labor (79%) supporters to put ‘honesty and integrity’ in their top three. The most sanctimonious group in public life is the most forgiving of moral failure in private life. Or perhaps Green supporters are just on average younger, and less likely to have felt the sting of romantic betrayal.
Continue reading “Politics & partners” →

What do We Believe? The George Brandis version

~ Andrew Norton ~ 5 Comments

Many years ago George Brandis and I were part of a committee to re-write the Liberal Party’s ‘We Believe’ statement, first published in 1954. Despite trying to keep it to ‘broad church’ motherhood statements the committee found it difficult to win support for its efforts. But I thought Brandis’s contributions were really good, including some elegant drafting (I don’t think many of his words are in the version on the Party’s website, which reads like it was written by – sigh – a committee).

Without the deadening effects of writing and editing by committee, he wrote an excellent chapter on John Howard in last year’s book on the Liberal Party’s future.

And I expect he will again produce a very interesting analysis for this year’s Alfred Deakin Lecture (I am a member of the Alfred Deakin Lecture Trust).

His topic “We Believe: The Liberal Party and the Liberal Cause”.

Venue: JH Mitchell Theatre, Richard Berry Building, University of Melbourne (the maths building near the main Swanston St tram stop, map here)
Date: Thursday 22 October 2009.
Time: 6:30pm

Public opinion on economic history wars

~ Andrew Norton ~ 10 Comments

Pollytics blog reports on an Essential Research survey question on the economic history wars triggered by Kevin Rudd.

The question was:

Do you think that Labor or Coalition Governments have been responsible for the most important economic reforms in Australia over the last 25 years?

I’d give it to Labor on microeconomic reform but the Coalition on macroeconomic reform, while agreeing with John Howard’s argument that favourable judgment on Labor should be qualified by noting that the Liberals co-operated with reform while in opposition while Labor largely obstructed. Labor gets high marks 1983-95, but low marks since.

However it’s not a question most voters could easily answer, and so they will rely on party stereotypes. Along with a very large (and honest) ‘don’t know’ response the small advantage for the Liberals suggests that the strong economy under the previous government still gets some public opinion credit.

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Were the Pentecostals important to Howard?

~ Andrew Norton ~ 16 Comments

Last week, commenter Krystian suggested that flat figures on party support by religious attendance suggested that groups like Hillsong had little influence on support for the Howard government. In the data I have, I can’t directly examine Hillsong, which is buried in the broader category of Pentecostal. But we can roughly estimate the electoral impact of Pentecostal churches.

As the figure below suggests, Pentecostal numbers have been increasing. Between 1996 and 2006, Pentecostal numbers increased by 26%, compared to a 10% increase in other religions. However, they are still a small proportion of all those declaring a religion in the census. In that decade, their market share went from 1.07% to 1.23%.

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Source: ABS, census, various years. Continue reading “Were the Pentecostals important to Howard?” →