An interesting talk by Judith Brett. The Protestant/ Catholic divide in Australian history is one that I don't really understand that well. My parents migrated from Europe in the sixties.

I find the Liberal Party understanding of an individual to be strangely artificial and as bone dry as a skeleton. The WorkChoice changes to IR draw on their strange idea of an individual. As if a corporation with funds for legal teams, HR departments, etc, can be classed as an 'Individual' that a potential employee, alone, can negotiate with on an equal footing. Employers can act every bit as much as if they were a collective - that demand obedience and submission. The Liberal Party are at an intellectual impasse, as this paper discusses.

The spectulative model for liberalism that I am working on takes the modern state as the starting point. The Individual is a construct that counter-balances the POWER of the state. Human rights, the rule of law, individual freedoms etc are needed within states - they go together. In the space inbetween the individual and the state there are the many social spaces where identity can flourish. A person is born into society, is socialised, etc.

Its strange how some ideologies can make some people completely deaf to human stories and human lives...

Robert, I can recall being surprised at the Protestant(Liberal)/Catholic(Labor) divide when reading Brett's book. As to Howard's individualism, I dont believe it is that at all. I think it is trying to create an environment where deflationary pressure can be put on commodity labor.

We are in an extended boom; labor and skills have come in high demand. I think this is motivated by stopping wage inflation by neutering unions, and exposing commodity labor to AWAs from more powerful and organized business groups. It wont be lawyers that suffer, but commodity skills like call centres, retail etc.

At a time when these folks should be cashing in on Australia's prosperity through a scarce labor market, the goalposts are being moved by the government.

Gary, I recall reading in one book about "Planetary Republicanism". Which is a kind of post-national liberalism. Though it could be argued that "international liberalism" is a rejection of the power politics of nationalism and global order.

Cameron,
the particularity of Australian liberalism, or liberalism within the bounds of the nation-state, is at odds with the univeralism of liberalism (eg. a rights based liberalism).

It is interesting to watch those who say they are liberals and proudly stand in the liberal tradition (the Costello strand of the Liberal Party) turn around and bash the hell of the human rights liberals. Their language then is a conservative not a liberal one; then they switch to the economy and rave on about individual liberty.

They are not even aware of the contradiction.

The Liberal Party seems to be stuck in a kind of old-fashioned liberalism where there are only individuals and states, but no such thing as society [Thatcher's Ghost -even if she is still alive at the moment].

The latest post on my blog tries to put this into some kind of a perspective, if that is possible:
http://pharoz.blogspot.com/2005/11/his-story-becomes-di-verse.html

As Judith Brett says in her speech above, people in the Liberal Party don't seem to have thought about their position too deeply, as you also point out above...

Robert
Judith Brett sees the Liberal Party as trapped--her paper is about the limits of liberalism. She says:

"But clearly the Liberal Party is blocked at the moment, and everybody must realise they have got to do something. Somebody will come up as a circuit-breaker and may be able to regenerate the traditions of liberalism carried by the party."

I would argue that the limits of liberalism mean that some in the Liberal and National Parties have transgressed those limits and embraced consevatism.

Robert,
It was interesting that the role of religion was downplayed in the political history and architecture of Old Parliament House

Maybe Cameron saw it?

I found this suprising because religion has been very influential in Australia's political history. It has created all sorts of frissures and fractures

Gary,
Judith Brett's speech was delivered in June 2001, before 9/11 and before Tampa, and it does sound dated.
Since then Howard has gone the whole hog on national security and protecting borders, etc, and so his actions have moved the Liberal Party out of the stuck place that it was when the article was written.

I think that it is clear that Howard moved in the wrong direction, as you say, by transgressing the boundaries of liberalism into a lawless kind of nationalism [I probably wouldn't even credit it with calling it conservative - because it isn't - it has more to do with Hanson's early political career].

Howard is a very clever politician. He was able to turn the common feeling for a fair go, against those very people in our society who were in most need - and who depend on help from the Commonwealth. He personalised the issues. Rather than framing welfare in truely liberal ways as being about an equality of opportunity, he turned it into a question of an equality of handouts. The poor are now really struggling while middle class and corporate welfare has ballooned.

With the refugees he used the lies about them throwing kids into the ocean as a kind of moral justification for throwing them into detention. We don't want people like that coming here, that kind of thing. There is a common sense logic of being fair behind the way that that lie was used to have them treated inhumanely. Convoluted as it may seem.

These are serious transgressions of liberalism, and I see few people in the Liberal Party [there are some notable exceptions], who are strong enough to stand up for the rule of law and human rights, which together are a solid basis for the Australian notion of a fair go.

Howard is not a liberal, and he is not a conservative. Once the public cotton on, the Liberal Party is going to be in trouble - big time. They will be waiting a long time to get back into power. As you noted above Gary, Costello doesn't seem to know what is going on, unfortunately for him.

Gary, nope. Old Parliament House's displays were a-religious. Then again, nearly all the displays were played down from any sort of enthusiasm. The only two I can think that had any fervour at all were the anti-communits chants in the newsreel on the Petrov affair, and the ABC foreign correspondant display.

Robert,
I guess Brett's article was a looking backwards to the protestant moral middle class. She saw the limits of liberalism in terms of the issues raised by Marbo, bringing the indigenous children home, and to Indigenous political demands,etc.

But she did not see the liberal Party's shift to a conservative One Nation nationalism in reponse to Hanson and the economic effects of globalization on the manufacturing industry and te blue collar workers in the mid-late 1990s.

Her account is this:

the Liberal Party has been fairly easily able to accommodate the claims of ethnic communities by talking about cultural rights, which are then reconceptualised as individual rights ?---the rights of individuals to maintain or choose their cultural lifestyle.
Nope the shift was also to social cohesion, tradition, assimilation, to a social conservatism on moral issues and to family values. These are strands in a conservative discourse not a liberal one.

There are many ways the limits of liberalism were transgressed. The embrace of conservatism was one of them.