The state of Australian conservatism is, in a number of respects, probably the healthiest it has been for many decades. But in spite of the progress being made on a range of public policy fronts, there are no grounds for smug complacency by conservatives. Much work remains to be done and, in some cases, the conservative cause is actually going backwards.
Business continues to be strangled by ever greater levels of red tape and regulation. Welfare expenditure continues to grow during buoyant economic conditions when it should be falling. Unemployment rates, while improving, are still too high. Much of our previously healthy civil society has been crowded out by the encroachment of government at all levels and important social institutions, such as marriage and the family, appear to be in a state of slow but steady decline.
Perhaps the main intellectual and political task facing Australian conservatives is the need to make the case for smaller, less intrusive government and to restore the pre-eminence of such notions as personal responsibility and self-reliance in Australian society. Recent events such as legislation to privatise Telstra, the announcement of a red-tape task force, and the impending industrial relations reforms are all steps in the right direction in this regard. However, much still remains to be done, particularly with regard to taxation and the size of government in the economy, which remains far too high.
It is important to note that these recent announcements are all primarily economic in nature. Another challenge for Australian conservatives is to bring about a renewed focus on social and cultural issues.
Given the nature of many of the social problems now apparent in Australian society in spite of many years of buoyant economic growth, there is a need to move away from a common mindset which claims that if you get the economy right, everything else will fall into place. Economic growth, while helpful, is not going to be enough to overcome the problems of communities such as Macquarie Fields -- the western Sydney suburb hit by riots in March this year -- parts of which are suffering from cultural breakdown.
The starting point in coming to grips with social and cultural issues lies with the state of the universities, particularly the social science and humanities faculties. Arts faculties in Australia and across the Western world have mostly abandoned their traditional role as the guardians and promoters of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as a result of being largely captured by the counter-cultural radical Left.
There has been an assumption that while the takeover of universities by left-wing radicals is annoying, it is of little real long-term consequence. The assumption is that most students, upon joining the real world of work, will leave the infantile preoccupations of university behind them, resulting in little long-term damage. Although there is a strong element of truth in this, a great deal of damage is nonetheless still being done to our culture by ideas coming out of universities.
Since their takeover by the Left, many universities have used their position to try to indoctrinate future generations of societal elites against the very values upon which our civilisation is built, which constitutes a total reversal of their original mission. There is an urgent need to think of means that would restore balance to the universities and return them to their original role as the guardians of our civilisation and culture. This is something with which conservative thinkers and policy-makers have not as yet come to grips.
Perhaps the most obvious example of the negative implications of the left-wing takeover of universities is the impact it has had on schooling. As federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson has pointed out, many university education departments have now become little more than quasi-sociology departments. Many of these departments teach their education graduates to see their mission as one of using education as a subversive vehicle to bring about radical social change, rather than to provide a traditional education for their students. The result is a generation of schoolchildren who have been fed all manner of politically correct beliefs (such as black-armband history), but who are all too often functionally illiterate and innumerate and hence incapable of playing a full role in society.
The damage wrought to our culture by the Left is also becoming increasingly prominent in the growing number of badly dysfunctional communities in Australia, perhaps best typified by Macquarie Fields, which is, however, only one of many. It seems reasonable to suggest that, in these communities, there has been a terrible cultural breakdown and a perversion of the important social values and civility that most Australians are thankfully still able to take for granted.
The challenge for Australian conservatives is to mount a sustained critique of the intellectual forces and government policies that have unleashed this chaos on our poorest and most vulnerable communities. This is a project that has been undertaken to great effect by conservatives in the US, but strangely, similar progress in Australia has not occurred.
Most thinking about the problems of our least fortunate communities has instead by and large been left to socialist academics and the social welfare lobby. Leaving this task to these representatives of the intellectual Left, which has been reduced to continually chanting the vapid slogan of social justice and asking for money to be thrown at the problem, has been nothing less than a total disaster for these communities. The conservative critique of poverty and dysfunctional communities has much more to offer than that of the political and intellectual Left in this regard. But most Australian conservatives do not take enough of an interest in these issues, perhaps finding the parts of society they personally inhabit to be more interesting and important than its other parts further out in the suburbs. This is a great shame.
The final challenge facing Australian conservatism is to become better organised. There remains a great gulf between the intellectual forces of conservatism operating in think-tanks, business groups and isolated pockets of academe on the one hand, and the political forces of conservatism sitting in the various Australian parliaments on the other. There is a need for better communication and co-ordination between the intellectual wings and the political wings of conservatism.
The intellectual side of the conservative movement in Australia is also in an institutional mess. There are too many small, underfunded organisations that are barely capable of communicating with each other, let alone providing a coherent, credible source of advice for potentially sympathetic policy-makers. There is an urgent need for a larger, better funded and more professional conservative movement in Australia, possibly loosely modelled along similar lines to the successful movement in the US.
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