Quarterly Essay 38 Power Trip: The Political Journey of Kevin Rudd by David Marr

Author:David Marr [Marr, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Biography, Biography & Autobiography, Political Science, World, Writing, Australian & Oceanian, Political, Politics
ISBN: 9781921825378
Google: 6WHiAAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18267643
Publisher: Black Inc.
Published: 2010-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

WHAT’S RIGHT? Correspondence

John Hirst

John Howard was the first Australian prime minister to call himself conservative. In Australian political commentary, conservatism is usually seen as laughable or sinister and Howard’s espousal of it made denunciation of him easier. It is refreshing, then, to find Waleed Aly and the Quarterly Essay taking conservatism seriously and even quoting Howard approvingly. But this is merely a softening-up process; the criticism of Howard soon resumes because, according to Aly, Howard was not a true conservative: he was a neo-conservative. Following other critics, Aly posits a fundamental contradiction between Howard’s so-called conservatism and his commitment to a free economy, or neo-liberalism in Aly’s clas-sification. An unrestrained capitalism will have a destructive effect on the social order, so conservatives who are also neo-liberals are undermining what they should be protecting and nurturing. Faced with social dissolution of their own making, they respond with strident nationalism and pressures for conformity, and thus show themselves to be not true conservatives but neo-conservatives. This is neat, but it won’t survive scrutiny.

Consider these measures of social policy, which Howard implemented:

• Work for the dole

• Tough on drugs

• Against gay marriage

• In favour of fathers having better access to children after divorce

• Intervention in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory

• Single mothers to re-enter the workforce sooner

• Better support for families and mothers wanting to stay at home with children

How many of the situations to which these policies were directed were the result of neo-liberal policies in the economy? On my count: none. In different ways they were responding to the libertarian social revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, which was strong in Australia while the economy was still closely regulated. These policies were properly conservative in that they were not trying to restore the status quo but to limit the revolution’s effects. So single mothers are not to be stigmatised or denied government help, but they are not to model for their children a life lived on welfare. Homosexuals are not again to be criminals; they can have partners recognised by the state, but they cannot marry. Divorce is to continue on a no-fault basis, but the feminist bias of the Family Court is to be controlled.

Aly makes only one reference to what he calls the sexual revolution, although of course it was a much wider revolution than that. He considers the argument that the recent sexualisation of children might be an effect of the sexual revolution of several decades ago. He rejects this view because the effect is so long delayed; it must therefore be the result of neo-liberalism, which allows business to break any taboo for profit. Of course business has been making money out of the social revolution since it manufactured Che T-shirts and pre-faded jeans. And it is an odd view of a social movement to think its effects must be instantaneous. Social systems have a huge inertia. First a man and a woman might live openly together without being married; after two decades two men may

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