August 8, 2007
An essay by Robert Dean entitled Betraying the Menzies vision in The Age addresses the Liberal heritage and the Howard government's relationship to it. Dean says:
The recent decisions of the Federal Government ditch Dr Haneef's right to the presumption of innocence, a fair trial and natural justice and its decisions to abandon cooperative federalism on the Murray-Darling Basin and at Tasmania's Mersey Hospital, in favour of further centralised power in the hands of Canberra.... are stark reminders of just how far the present Liberal Government in Canberra has strayed from the principles on which the party was founded, expressed so clearly by its creator Robert Menzies....The present Liberal government is not a "liberal" government as envisaged by the party's founder. It is a Conservative government which has more in common with the British Tory Conservatives than Menzies' Australian liberals.
I concur. Howard is a conservative.
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