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September 09, 2005
'balancing and blending'?
It strikes me that the factions in the Liberal Party--conservative, classical liberal or libertarian and social liberal--- are more formalised than this account by Allan Moir, based on a reworking of Wassily Kadinsky:
The Liberal self-description is that the Liberal Party is a broad church or a family. But that is misleading given this Alas, none of the articles are online. So it is hard to know what they understand by Australian conservatism. I understand it as a one nation conservatism that is hostile to liberalism.
John Howard, the Prime Minister, spells out his understanding of the 'broad church':
We should never as members of the Liberal Party of Australia lose sight of the fact that we are the trustees of two great political traditions We are, of course, the custodian of the classical liberal tradition within our society, Australian Liberals should revere the contribution of John Stuart Mill to political thought. We are also the custodians of the conservative tradition in our community. And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions.Mill and Burke are interwoven into the history and the practice and the experience of our political party.
Instead of a 'balancing and blending' of economic liberal and a social conservative I see contradiction. All the proposed national security state legislation about fighting terrorism is a constraining of liberty as understood by John Stuart Mill.
The political surveillance of this conservatism is an illiberal in its restriction of our civil liberties and in targeting the Muslim community.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 9, 2005 04:16 PM
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Comments
Good point. It's a furphy for anyone to suggest that there isn't a conflict between liberalism and conservatism, particularly when the existing system is somewhat illiberal.
Posted by: Guy at September 10, 2005 09:53 AM