The Prime Minister has not moved to the right. It is the moral middle class that has moved to the left.
The claim that under John Howard the Liberal Party has moved away from its middle-class base is wrong. In fact, the opposite has occurred. The middle class is fracturing and sections of it -- those that place a higher priority on conspicuous compassion -- are shifting their political allegiance from the Liberals to the ALP, and increasingly to the Greens.
It is not that Howard has moved to the right, but rather that sections of the middle class have moved to the left. Menzies rallied the middle class, what he famously called "the forgotten people", around some key issues on which there was community agreement. The importance of the family, an emphasis on personal responsibility, and a stress on national security provided the bedrock of the Liberals' electoral support throughout the 1950s and '60s. They are the same themes Howard has been talking about ever since he became prime minister. And yet somehow, Howard is accused of abandoning the legacy of Menzies. On the contrary. Ideologically, Howard is the direct descendant of Menzies.
In the 1980s the terms of the economic debate in Australia shifted to the right. Ideas such as financial deregulation and the elimination of tariffs, that were regarded as extreme a few years earlier, won widespread acceptance. The development of "economic rationalism" has been widely documented.
What has received far less attention is what happened in other policy areas. Middle-class attitudes on social issues moved to the left. This was a process that began with the social revolution of the 1960s. The goal of personal liberation replaced the traditional ties of commitment to family, the church, and to country. Vietnam and Watergate dissolved allegiances to existing authority.
As the electorate moved to the left on social policy, so did both of our major political parties. The Liberals, under Gorton, were well to the left of where they had been under Menzies. In much the same way, Whitlam's ALP was more left-wing than it had been under Calwell or even Evatt.
By the 1980s, the protesters of the '70s had become the middle class. The rise of parties outside of the mainstream, not just in Australia, but internationally, can be dated from the maturing of the leaders of radical student groups, nearly all of whom came from middle-class backgrounds. At first, the outlet for their energies was the peace and nuclear disarmament movements. Later the environment became their cause. It is ironic that the prosperous conditions of the 1980s helped fuel the rise of the Greens.
As the middle class became financially more secure it could afford to express its concerns about matters other than the economy. The Democrats and the Greens are an entirely middle-class phenomenon because only the middle class can afford the cost of their policies -- the working class can't.
This raises the issue of the reason for the attraction of John Howard to the so-called "working class". To many academics and media commentators this is a mystery. It shouldn't be. Just as Menzies did, Howard expresses in simple terms the aspirations of those Australians who want a better life for themselves and for their children. The difference between the two classes is not in their objectives.
What separates them is that in the 1950s, Menzies' message appealed to the middle class and the working class. If it were not for the support of significant sections of the working class, Menzies could not have sustained his success. Half a century later the message is the same, but while it continues to appeal to the working class it is becoming less attractive to sections of the middle class.
Menzies had a certainty of vision about communism, as Howard has a certainty of vision about the war on terrorism. Both succeeded in infuriating their opponents. It is true that some of the criticism directed at Howard, over, for example, his support for the Iraq war, has come from those who regard themselves as middle class. That this is happening says more about the middle class than it does about the Liberal Party. What has occurred is that the moral equivocating that characterised the left in Menzies' time is now also a feature of the middle class.
Despite what some might wish to believe, the middle class doesn't have a mortgage on morality -- and John Howard knows it.
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