Three months into the job, and Prime Minister Kevin Rudd should feel pleased with himself. He's made a good start at constructing his own monuments of symbolism: ratifying Kyoto, apologising to the stolen generations, and getting Cate Blanchett to chair a session at the talkfest of the country's 1000 cleverest people.
Rudd's done an even better job at demolishing John Howard's legacy. What's more, he's got federal Liberal MPs to help him. Take the ''3 Rs'' of Australian politics -- refugees, reconciliation and the republic. Howard was steadfast on each of these issues, and he spent a decade campaigning on them. With Howard gone, the Liberals have decided to agree with Labor on two of these three issues. At the weekend the Liberals announced that they accepted the shutting down of the Pacific Solution for refugees, while a fortnight ago they ultimately supported the stolen generations apology.
To this can be added a further three matters: Iraq, Kyoto and industrial relations. Rather than opposing Labor's withdrawal of combat troops from Iraq, the Liberals now claim that had they won the election they would have scaled down Australia's commitment anyway. After spending years arguing against the Kyoto Protocol, and after Howard overruled Malcolm Turnbull's suggestion that the Liberals ratify it, the party has decided that ratification is a good idea. And last week Brendan Nelson announced that his party no longer supported WorkChoices.
It's no wonder that the Liberals are doing some soul-searching. In the space of a few months the federal Liberal Party has reversed or abandoned its position on five out of six of the central policy issues of the Howard era. Whether such dramatic policy changes are justified is not the point. In some cases changes were justified and in others they weren't. The Pacific Solution had outlived its purpose, if indeed it ever had one. On the other hand, ratifying Kyoto is merely gesture politics.
Political parties are more than just their policies. A political party is as much a product of its history, its membership and its ideology. But the problem for the federal Liberals is that in the last few years of Howard's prime ministership, as the party moved away from its core principles, it was defined by its policies rather than its philosophy.
Over the past few years, sometimes the Liberals' policies were derived from their philosophy, and sometimes they weren't. For example, it often seemed as though the party paid only lip-service to federalism, and the notion that decisions should be made by the level of government closest to the people affected by those decisions. Similarly, notwithstanding the Liberals' very capable management of the economy, they didn't often enough put into practice the principles of small government, lower taxation and less regulation.
Good policy doesn't turn into bad policy overnight. If key policies can be ditched so quickly after what, in the end, proved to be a relatively narrow election loss, voters will inevitably ask whether Liberal MPs ever believed in those policies in the first place. There's also the problem of what replaces the old policies. Although the Liberals might be finished with WorkChoices, there remains the question of the party's position on further deregulation of the labour market.
None of this is to say that policies cannot ever be changed. When circumstances alter, policies should be altered. What's notable about each of the Liberals' recent policy changes is that each was done in a hurry and each was done in reaction to something that Labor did. The Liberals can't afford to be put into such a position again. But at the moment there's every chance that the Liberals will respond to Labor's moves on the republic in the same way as they responded to Labor's initiatives on the apology and the Pacific Solution.
Many Liberals would say that the very last thing they need is a divisive internal debate about the republic. But if you can't have a divisive internal debate when the party is in opposition, federally and in every state and territory, then it's legitimate to ask when would be a better time. It's a near certainty that renewed calls for a republic will come out of Labor's Canberra talkfest, even if Rudd waits until a potential second term to hold another referendum on it. The issue will not go away.
It will probably take three years for the Liberals to arrive at some sort of position on the republic. The advantage of starting the debate now is that they'll have the time to engage in analysis and reflection. It's something the party hasn't done enough of since November 24.
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