The theme that I have been exploring is the tension between the free market and democratic deliberation. My argument is that the embrace of the free market has meant putting a lid on democratic deliberation. I have called this 'putting the lid on' the conservative moment that nestles inside the libertarian market liberalism.
You can see the squashing of democratic deliberation most clearly around environmentalism because of the latter's critique of the values of economic growth that underpins neo-liberalism. Crudely put, the neo-liberalsim say that global marketplace reigns supreme. There is a lot of money to be made in biotech, in irrigated agriculture and in generating greenhouse gases. Even if those activities turn our inner and outer worlds upside down it does not matter. Money does. Case closed.
The afterword by those who make this case is that Governments should show leadership. By this is usually meant compressing democracy deliberation, constraining democratic institutions, governing through the free market, putting a lid on dissent and pushing on with reform. The job of the reforms is to ensure that the market rules supreme and that society is shaped, or adpated, to the tendencies of the global market.
It's crude I know. But that was what I had in the back of my mind when I was lookig at Chief Justice Murray Gleesons' Boyer Lectures. If the High Court was the defender of the constitution, then did that mean that the High Court was also defending democracy? The answer that I came away with was no. The High Court would defend federalism. That is not the same thing because you can have a federalism in which democracy is being hollowed out by the pressures of the global market.
Coming to that judgement made me very sad.