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January 10, 2007
Mark Davis has an interesting paragraph in his op-ed in the Sydney Morning Herald about understanding how our political parties are seen by voters. He says:
One theory, proffered by the commentator Don Arthur, is that the left-right divisions of Australian politics have been replaced. Instead, voters see Labor as the caring and nurturing party, better suited to state issues such as health and education, while the Liberals are seen as the strict father, best put in charge of the nation’s finances and defence and border protection. If such a political climate change has occurred it will tilt the odds of federal success against Labor.
The Dad and Mum thesis, whose genealogy in Australia is traced by Andrew Norton, does have plausibility at the level of political rhetoric. But it ignores both the ALP's history as an economic reform party under Hawke and Keating, and the way that the Howard Government retains the welfare state, is a friend of Medicare redistributes taxes to middle class families---what Don Arthur calls political cross-dressing.
The Dad and Mum thesis also ignores the shift in social democracy away from the statist conception as founded in a paternal welfare state to a more libertarian and less statist social democracy which involves debates about the market is to be managed. 'Managed' means the need to moderate and control market forces.
A core idea of social democracy accepts that markets should be expanded and that markets should be managed; and a debate within this liberal tradtion is about how best to balance the two political goals. The concern is to prevent society and community from being gutted by the free market. The historic 20th century answer to civilizing capitalism was welfare capitalism, and it is this model that has been under attack by classical liberals libertarians and laissez-faire economists since the 1980s.
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I think a mummy/daddy thesis is as useful and informative as left/right. Meaning, it isn't.