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February 29, 2008
Unlike William F. Buckley Australian conservatives are not known for their love of ideas, enthusiatically engaging with ideas or debating their opponents ideas. They are a practical lot with little tolerance for the intellectual life. Biffing is more their style not civility in political discourse or intellectual honesty.
They basically see Rudd's 2020 Summit as a talk feast in which a lot of wild and dangerous ideas will surface. It smells too much of participatory democracy and the mob, who have no place in the political governance of the nation state. Governance is the terrain for the political elites--- elected representatives and their deliberation in parliament in a liberal democracy. That place is the clearing house of ideas in the nation.
If there is a disengagement from democracy by citizens then so be it. If democracy is premised on the exercise of power by and for a demos, then democracy is procedural not substantive. Effectiveness of governance is what matters especially around the economy, wealth creation and national prosperity. No one wants to be a hostage to bad ideas, especially those from the political agenda of the cosmopolitan, social liberal Left.
This conservative's position is one in which policy is, and should be, shaped by powerful economic interests behind the scenes and not by any consideration of a wider public interest. On their account everyone in public life is self-interested, and dishonest about their real motives. So no-one is believed to advocate a course of action because it is right, but only because it will benefit them. Politics is an elaborate charade whereby private interests masquerade as the public interest.
The Howard Government's resistance to the need to respond to climate change in order to protect the intensive energy users is a classic example of this. These energy users and lobbyists wrote the Howard Government's greenhouse policy. The aim was to keep everyone else powerless and in a state of subjection, and to push the traditional democratic processes of deliberation and consent into the background as irrelevant and unnecessary.
Parliament is no longer the clearing house of ideas: the executive dominates parliament, what happens in parliament is increasingly stage managed, whilst the media has embraced infotainment with enthusiasm. So how do we enrich deliberative democracy? Is the 2020 Summit a step in this direction? If so, how?
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Shanahan was demented on this today. Rudd apparently risks being seen as elitist and also adopting extremist flakey ideas.
This is the worst of all possible worlds - one where the prime minister is willing to consider ideas offered by citizens other than the conservative media. Heaven forbid. It's bound to end in tears.