Good news everyone! Refreshed by a spell on the bench I have decided to line up with the Troppo team, or at least alongside the team. The major mission is to keep people up to date with developments in classical liberalism, critical rationalism and Austrian social studies. Just so you can't say you were never told.
To get the ball rolling I will recycle Why Labor Rules which appeared on the ABC unleashed site (now edited a bit for my own site). The suggestion is that the Liberals shot themselves in the foot when they introduced conscription during the Vietnam war. The result was to precipitate a flight of the educated middle class activists into the arms of the ALP or further to the left, with a massive delayed reaction in terms of the distribution of organisational and propaganda talent between the two major parties.
The piece was written before the NT election which almost falsified the thesis that Labor rules from coast to coast. It remains to be seen what happens in the west. Whatever happens I think the argument is sound because the Liberals have been a bit like a rugby team that can't win a scrum, a ruck or a maul, so they only get possession when the other side drops the ball. Not entirely fair, but sometimes it looks like that.
Rafe for your thesis to hold I suppose you have to analyse other western countries and see if they have more of a balance between left and right. My gut feeling is that perhaps on the US has the closer balance, and then excluding the media.
Looks like Labor could lose in WA they have suffered a substantial swing and could only survive with the support of independents or the Nats. It could even be an unstable time in WA with government possibly changing hands on the floor of parliament.
Yes, It's an interesting story, but I'm afraid I don't credit it with much explanatory value. Vietnam didn't do John Howard or Nick Greiner or Jeff Kennett any harm. They ended up doing themselves in in their various ways.
Tough argument. Wasnt that long ago (1988) that the Liberals had five states/territories to Labor's 2.
Incumbents have a large advantage in Westminster since they control the executive and legislative. They tend to be drover's dog elections at federal and state levels. If Beazley had of held the leadership for a little longer Australia would have had another 'lazarus on a triple bypass' prime minister.
I also think the adoption of economic liberalism/rationalism as the dominant economic policy meant there is smaller differentiation between the parties allowing for greater presidential politics to define parties in terms of leaders.
Pedro, a comparable "shot in the foot" phenomenon in the US was the anti-communist hysteria generated by Senator McCarthy in the earlyl 1950s. There was a legitimate problem but the mode of operation of the the rabid anti-communists generated an anti-anti-communist movement which confused the issue and provided the communists and fellow travellers with a fantastic trojan horse for their activities.
Nicholas, I think the three examples support the thesis - Howard came in after Keating antagonised the old Labor consitutuency with a suite of left-progressive issues, Kennett took over when Victoria was a basket case under the ALP and Greiner won a heap of traditional Labor seats in his first victory when the voters wanted to punish the economic rationality of the Hawke-Keating administration. That was rather amusing and the second time around Greiner only got in by about one seat.
On Cam's figures, that would have been a shorlived situation and my point is that the outcome of the conscription issue took decades to build in terms of the distribution of organistional talent and political savvy between the major parties, and also the amount of support among the writing and talking classes outside the party organisations.
The Liberal Party of Australia shot themselves in the foot when they turned and betrayed their own core values, rejected liberalism and became a social conservative party. Quoting from the official Liberal party beliefs:
John Howard introduced the anti-terrorism rules allowing individuals to be arrested and imprisoned for several weeks with no contact with the outside world, no legal representation and no actual charges. This makes a mockery of any "inalienable rights and freedoms". The government grew (especially the office of the Prime Minister) and their interference in our daily lives increased. Howard also supported the various US prison camps around the world where people were held for years without trial and tortured.
I believe that the total federal government tax income actually increased under the Howard government. I'd have to search for exact figures. Yes, personal income tax decreased (a little bit) but indirect taxes more than covered the difference.
Unless you happen to be an Indian doctor and follower of Mohamed, in which case you can get out and stay out. Oh yeah, don't try and exercise your democratic right to protest either. Ummm, and don't go on strike because we can now hit you with huge fines... have fun with whatever freedom you still have left.
The humanity and justice of cranking up mortgage interest rates so the families struggling to keep their home can pay the price for earlier years of excess indulgence. Seems to me that justice would be when the banks who offered generous loans at low rates would also be the ones to be penalised when it turned out they made some bad decisions. No worries, the mortgage belt can pick up the tab.
Education... always room for a few funding cuts in education.
They did mostly stick to this principle. However the current front page of the Liberal website http://www.liberal.org.au/ seems to be a demand for Rudd to introduce price controls. I guess now they are in opposition, the Libs don't need to worry about offering any viable solutions.
Investing federal money into oil wars instead of renewables. Sneering at the Kyoto agreement.
War in Iraq... nuff said really.
Tel says:
Tel, mind explaining when the Libs were a (l)iberal party? I have a hard time remembering that one.
Rafe
the sort of post that shows why you should stick to Catallaxy, presuming they'd have you. It's got bugger all to do with conscription in the 60s, except as one part of a large trend - that educated people tend to be socially-liberal minded, and believe that a mixed system in which government, society and market interact is the best. They only support the libs when the libs don't mess with that too much.has In the UK David Cameron has realised that the Tories would only ever regain power by becoming a social liberal party of sorts. Hopefully the Oz libs can wander in nostalgia and confusion for another 5 years or so yet. Lets face it, if they can't win back NT and WA, they're pretty screwed.
Your conscription theory suggests you're as willing to lather in fantasy as the rest of the right
Geez, you can always tell the people who missed out on all the fun in the 60s, they're the ones still obsessed by that decade - an era by the way closer to the Great Depression than today.
And wot Norbet said. These days people tend to prefer centrist social democratic parties at the State level because they trust them more on service delivery and balancing economy against community, only chucking 'em out when they get moribund and there's a viable opposition.
"mind explaining when the Libs were a (l)iberal party? I have a hard time remembering that one."
Me too. Kennett was about the closest they got in recent years.
The main reason why the ALP rules at State level was John Howard. The main reason why the Liberals will so is Kevin Rudd.
Who knows? maybe never, I'm not old enough to know the whole history. I can read their website and the values people profess to believe, should be the value that they reveal by their actions. Someone older than me, who has spent more time involved with the Liberal Party is Malcolm Fraser, and I'll quote from this article: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/why-i-thought-of-quitting-libs/2005/11/30/1133026474721.html
There's room for argument whether Malcolm has shifted towards a belief in liberty, or whether his party has shifted towards a belief in authoritarianism, and I'm not qualified to make that distinction.
However it came to pass, their currently listed "official values" are complete hypocrisy. If they can't maintain a consistent belief system, then how does anyone know what they are voting for?
For what it's worth (probably not much), the Liberal Party do publicise a history of their own foundation and they do actually see themselves as a liberal and progressive party.
http://www.liberal.org.au/about/ourhistory.php
So there is no doubt about what they are declaring. Quite possibly they never actually managed to achieve what they set out to do (a lot of people don't) but at least in theory, their fundamental guiding principle has always been individual liberty.
See? We can all be progressive. No point standing in the way of progress is there?
Tel, the Libs have never been genuinely liberal, for all the blather on their website. While it's true that economically they've usually been more liberal than the ALP, that's where it ends. They've always been socially conservative, or at least over the time I remember (which is about 45 years).
David:
I would argue (excepting this government) the ALP has been more economically liberal at the federal level that the Libs. The libs were always railroaded by the Victorian protectionists.
Probably a question over which there's a lot of argument David and Tel - are regulations on business and corporations, which Labor tends to favor, liberal or illiberal? Are they really simple examples of economic liberalism/illiberalism? And in what ways are current progressive concerns truly liberal?
Gay marriage, for instance: is the more liberal approach to gay marriage to seek to change the definition of marriage in the legal system to allow gay marriages to take place; - to favour by government intervention activists for gay marriage in the church; - or to ignore the calls to change the definitions relating to marriage in our laws and instead work to creating a more tolerant society where gay civil unions are comparable to marriage?
And that's just ONE example of an apparently simple progressive/conservative issue.
Another thing to bear in mind is that the Libs have only really been in existence for 50/60 years, and were probably a party of compromise from the get-go - I don't know about the details of Menzies original coalition. They haven't really had any defining historical moments, unlike the Tories (D'Israeli's expansion of the vote) or the Republicans (Civil war). Perhaps a sixty year lifespan isn't really enough on which to form a judgment as to the overal liberality/otherwise of a party.
Norbert, this statement:
"that educated people tend to be socially-liberal minded, and believe that a mixed system in which government, society and market interact is the best"
is crap. But I will agree that well-educated social democrats are more likely to be politically active than well educated non-social democrats. It might also be true that social democrats are more likely to be university educated (I don't know). But that is not the same as a correlation with intelligence.
Too true JC about the protectionists. But I suspect you can only make that claim on the basis that Hawke and Whitlam lowered tariffs. The were pretty illiberal in some other ways, Whitlam more than Hawke obviously. Curtin and Chifley don't strike me as economically liberal, before that I don't know.
Protectionism isn't just an affliction of Melbourne business people. It was part of the social compact that included centralised wage-fixing and agrarian socialism.
I agree Pedro. I was thinking more of the Hawke government.
Thought as much JC. The one real light on the hill for the average schlubb wanting to get ahead through hard work.
When buying and selling are regulated, the first things to be bought and sold are always the regulators.
For some reason your aphorism reminds me of a Wordsworth aphorism:
The world is too much with us: late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.
Probably completely unrelated, though.
TimT, punctuation show-off:
I guess I really should have thrown in some ellipsis and ampersands and parenthesis to round the whole thing off, and to make things even less clear. No point in doing these things half-heartedly.