George Osborne gave a surprising speech earlier this month. The Shadow Chancellor spoke about the egalitarian philosopher John Rawls and called for greater equality of opportunity. He praised Swedish educational reforms and argued that parents should be able to choose a school for their child. And he insisted the government needed to put a price on carbon to protect future generations from the costs of global warming.

At the same time, he reaffirmed the Tories’ belief in free markets and the liberalism of Friedrich Hayek. While arguing for greater fairness and social mobility, he insisted that these could only be achieved by conservative means. This sounds a lot like the ‘progressive fusionism‘ promoted by the Cato Institute’s Brink Lindsey. In a 2006 essay for the New Republic, Brink described it as “A movement that, at the philosophical level, seeks some kind of reconciliation between Hayek and Rawls.”

You might expect that a British conservative would struggle most with the Rawlsian part of this philosophical fusion. But surprisingly, it is Hayek’s ideas that Osborne chokes on. In his speech, he seems to deliberately avoid confronting one of Hayek’s most important insights.

Osborne insists that a “a fair society is one where people are properly rewarded for their effort and ability” and that “the free market economy is the fairest way of rewarding people for their efforts.” But Hayek argued that markets can never be fair in this sense. As Hayek scholar Jeremy Shearmur writes:

… Hayek argued — pace the wishful thinking of some conservatives — there simply is no moral merit to the distribution of wealth within such a society, and that one cost of such a society may thus be that it generates forms of economic inequality that we find morally unattractive (p 153).

Markets are efficient, but they are not engines of distributive justice. No doubt that’s a tough message to sell to a focus group.

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Labor-leaning Sunday Territorian columnist Scott Stirling wrote last week about the challenges facing the CLP Opposition.  However, they pale by comparison with the situation faced by the Henderson government.

Some are purely political problems in the wake of Labors recent close encounter with electoral oblivion. However, the really big challenges are fiscal and policy ones.  The largest are in education and indigenous affairs, signalled by PM Kevin Rudd’s announcement this week of the next stage of his “Education Revolution”.

Although partly a calculated distraction from gathering economic storm clouds, Rudd shows every sign of being serious about forcing the States and Territories to publish data on comparative school performance, pay teachers on merit, and insist that welfare entitlements are tied to school attendance.  Each element poses problems for the NT Labor government.

Paul Henderson lost no time in claiming publicly that Territory parents already have access to detailed data on schools’ performance.  All they had to do, he said, was phone their local school principal. Curious parents might want to try this and see how they go.  I dont fancy their chances of obtaining meaningful comparative information.

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“The rich beauty of Dr. James Orbinskis writing contrasts with the stark poverty and suffering of the people he has served. . . . This book exposes truths most of us would rather not know. Do not put it down. . . . See who you become after reading it.

Canadian Medical Association Journal

I was equally moved by an interview with the author on tonight’s LNL. The unsparing clarity of his insight into suffering and redemption after years on the frontline with MSF in Rwanda, Somalia and Afghanistan is a dark and beautiful gift.