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December 12, 2006
Robert Manne has an op- ed on Kevin Rudd's willingness to engage in a battle of ideas in The Age. In this battle of ideas Rudd is begining the difficult process of counteracting the way that the ALP has ceded the Australian traditions of informal mateship, nationality and family to John Howard in the last decade.
Manne describes the conflict of ideas, as seen from Rudd's perspective, thusly:
Rudd's vision outlined last week can, then, best be summarised like this. Because we are now balanced between Howard's neo-liberal and his own social-democratic future, where the value of freedom is balanced against equality, and the animal energy of the market is tempered by the virtue of compassion, Rudd believes we have reached what he famously called a "fork in the road". Because for him the ugliness of the neo-liberal future is symbolised by the Howard Government's new anti-family workplace laws, he believes we have already crossed what he called "a bridge too far". Because he has married the ideas of social justice and the idea of the defence of family and community with the old Australian idea of an intelligent, activist state and the more recent commitment to fiscal conservatism, he has begun to fashion what he thinks of as an unfamiliar centre ground of politics, potentially taking his party and his country to a new territory, beyond both left and right.
This accurate account leaves out the national security state, the protection of our borders from terrorists and Muslim immigration. Wouldn't these be a core part of the centre? This is not reduciible to the mishandling of the Iraq war--it is more the war on terror and the poltics of fear of the other. In this arena some conservatives cannot accept the possibility of plurality of values and cultures in a society. Isn't this an issue for the ALP?
Rudd downplays conservatism, for all his referencing of Edmund Burke and the conservative critique of the free market. Manne says that 'for those who long to see Australia change direction, Rudd deserves, in my opinion, not the customary carping of the intelligentsia but our wholehearted support.Yet there is a flaw here.' Manne is aware of the contradiction between neo-liberalism and conservatism as he says that for Rudd:
Howard's market fundamentalism is flawed by a fatal contradiction at its heart. As a neo-liberal, John Howard is a believer in the pre-eminence of the individual and in the power of the market. Unlike his mentor, however, he is also a social conservative, who believes in tradition, family and community. What Howard cannot, or will not, see is that the two halves of his political identity cannot be reconciled. There is no greater revolutionary force than the brutal power of the unrestrained market when it is finally unleashed.
Sure Rudd is setting up Howard's market fundamentalism -- in which he reduces employees to the status of just another tradeable commodity--- as the antithesis of family-values conservatism as a wedge. More broadly, the argument being made is that neo-liberal market economy is incompatible with Australia's way of life. This is designed to appeal to the older ex-Labor socially conservative voters who yearn for a bygone age, and those parents who are willing to trade money for more family time; and to wean both away from the Coalition.
However, in concentrating on neo-liberalism Rudd ignores a conservatism that is more than family values; ignores it even though Howard's strategy is to retain power by exploiting tensions in the national community to create a fundamental divide within the community. This is a conservatism premised on partisan difference even as it speaks the language of homogeneity integration or assimilation), unity and social cohesion. By concentrating on neo-liberalism Rudd concedes the terrain to one nation conservatism---ie., protecting Australia from terrorism with gratuitous encroachments on civil liberties and extensions of executive power. I suspect that Rudd has conceded this national-security ground by design, not default. It is a ground signposted not by Burkean conservatism, but by the names of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt.
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Gary, Have you seen Martin Krygier's article on Quadrant in the new edition of the Monthly.