He has made up his mind

Nor does he explain why parliamentarians outside of New South Wales received floods of correspondence …

Because it’s as easy to send a CC’d email to 80ish as it is to one.

whyisitso has clearly not read much JS Mill. He’d definitely be considered a lefty today – in fact in later life he described himself as a socialist. Adam Smith is a more legitimate claim for the right, but even he was not the uncritical partisan of the neoliberal worldview that caricatures of him make out.

Conservatives and classical liberals share many characteristics, but differ in others. My own beliefs are a mixture of both.

Opposition to abortion is quite a reasonable point-of-view, despite those who profess it being described as nutters by the ignorant.

The Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion stems from their reasonable religious belief that a human soul is created at the moment of conception, thus investing the foetus with its humanity.

Those opponents of abortion whose position is not religious but simply stems from logic and ethics believe that conception is the only logical dramatic starting point of a human life, more logical than birth itself and of any intermediate process. And from that starting point their position is that killing of the foetus is thus murder, a reasonable flow on from that belief. Of course there are many people in favour of abortion who accept this but are in favour of abortion nevertheless. I guess they are able to justify their apparent contradictory thinking by some form of rationalisation.

Whatever the arguments for and against abortion it doesn’t advance anything by calling adherents of beliefs you oppose nutters.

If only! Don’t we all long for the Ancien R

You are, of course, aware in the “liberal” vs. “conservative” divide that has been present in the Australian Liberal Party and its predecessors since, oh lets say, Federation?

You don’t think the name “Liberal Party” might have given that away?

I hope they split into two parties that will give people a choice so they can be properly represented.

The idea that someone who opposes Government regulation should have to vote for a nutter who also opposes abortion and doesn’t care that a large majority of Australians disagrees with him is wrong.

I disagree that that means they’ll always be in opposition. Preferential voting means that one or the other should get in in seats currently held by the LP so long as preferences are allocated properly.

It might even mean more of a share of votes for the economic conservatives since people who are currently put off by people like Abbott will be able to vote for the “liberal” party instead of Labor.

The ALP-DLP split isn’t a good precedent because that was so bitter that it lead to people voting for a party that they disagreed with in policy terms.

Truly a perversion of democracy when the bogans express their uneducated opinions.