It appears that the left puts me dead in the centre of Australia's public policy environment -- I, it appears, can take the credit for almost every policy reform over the last two decades.
If contemporary politics and public debate is about constructing "narratives", then the left has a distinct advantage over the right. With the steady stream of left-leaning books, studies, long-form essays and retrospectives pushed out by publishers like Melbourne University Press and Allen & Unwin, constructing a history of the last decade can be as simple as mixing and matching secondary sources.
Two new books -- Mark Davis' The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s and Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe's The Times Will Suit Them: Postmodern Conservatism in Australia -- use this advantage to good effect. While there are original arguments in both works, like so many similar analyses they suffer from an over-reliance on previous writers whose ideological views they comfortably share -- a practice which does little more than magnify the spurious arguments and tenuous hypotheses of earlier authors.
But if their endnotes are anything to go by, their actual research on the right wing they purport to unveil is fleeting at best. This failure to adequately study their subject is disappointing, to say the least -- there is more than enough material in the archives of my blog, or Quadrant, or the Centre for Independent Studies' journal Policy, to drive left wing critics absolutely nuts.
The poverty of much left-wing analysis of contemporary politics is even more starkly illustrated by a recent article published in the Australian Journal of Political Science by two RMIT academics Marcus Smith and Peter Marden, "Conservative Think Tanks and Public Politics", which purports to expose the "network of interests" that dominate die public debate. Here the analysis is even more derivative and speculative. Like the work of Davis and Boucher and Sharpe, actual material by think tanks is conspicuously absent from their study -- in a reference list of 64 works, only six are identifiably from the Australian think tank community.
These three works are hardly unique. But a year after the fall of the Howard Government, and at a time when commentators -- and governments -- are declaring the end of the neo-liberal settlement, taken together they provide a picture of how incoherently the left sees the Howard era, and how incoherently they see their contemporary opponents.
Turns out: they're not fans. Lacking a firm understanding of the intellectual sources of modern Australia liberal and conservative thought, left-wing critics are quick to retreat into conspiracy theorising.
In The Land of Plenty, Mark Davis provides an unfortunately typical argument. Davis poses an important question: given that the general Australian public seems to oppose the radical nature of privatisation and liberalisation expounded by neo-liberal policy wonks, how have these policies been so influential? The answer, according to Davis, is race. Selling off electricity generators might not be popular, but verbally bashing Aborigines is. Davis argues that conservative activists and politicians were only able to harness enough political capital to push through their economic policies by whipping up popular prejudice about Aboriginal "dole-bludgers". As he writes: "In every country where there has been a conservative revolution, the political history of race and economic reform are inextricably intertwined". Support for economic reform, is, obviously, coded racism.
Certainly, the think tanks that have pushed for economic, social and political liberty have appropriately had a lot to say about the policy settings effecting Aboriginal welfare. I pioneered the study of Aboriginal disadvantage from a liberal perspective in the mid-to-late 1990s. The arguments I made at the time -- that many of the policy settings that support small isolated communities and encourage welfare dependency are significant contributors towards Aboriginal poverty -- are now mainstream policy views.
But Davis sees the debate over Aboriginal issues in the 1990s as both a manifestation of racism in liberal political circles and a classic bait and switch -- while one hand was pushing around Aborigines, the other hand was quietly privatising public utilities. This is a nicely pat story that will no doubt excite his readers. But discussions about how Aboriginal land rights interact with "traditional" property rights is hardly something that classical liberal economists could be expected to not discuss. Davis' argument essentially dismisses every liberal or conservative analysis of Aboriginal disadvantage as a racist smokescreen.
In The Times Will Suit Them Boucher and Sharpe put the ideas of the "New Right" at the centre of the last decade. And like Davis, Boucher and Sharpe have a creative argument. Australian conservatives are "postmodern" in the crudest sense of the term -- cultural and moral relativists.
Boucher and Sharpe argue that postmodern conservatives predominantly define themselves by a shifting pastiche of opponents -- terrorists, people smugglers, cultural elites, even post-modernists themselves -- not by the fixed and universal moral values that perhaps defined Menzies-era conservatism. In this new view, the world comprises of local, incommensurable cultures which cannot help but talk past each other. While they share this position with the postmodern left, postmodern conservatives have the obstinacy to identify with their culture and fight for it. Boucher and Sharpe claim to stand against both postmodernisms.
Despite the ingenuity of branding the right with one of the labels they like to apply to their opponents, the book quickly degenerates into the same tedious left-wing narrative that characterises its shelf-mates. It cursorily introduces the New Right, before liberally scattering unexamined references to Hayek and Friedman throughout its typical tale of the Howard years. But Boucher and Sharpe casually undermine themselves when they note that the Howard Government hardly pursed a radical small government agenda. The evidence they marshal to show just how high-taxing the former government actually was comes from the same think tanks that they claim provided the government its ideological support.
But at least, on that occasion, they were reading the work of the Australian right. In Marcus Smith and Peter Marden's "Conservative Think Tanks and Public Politics" the absence of relevant research has a surrealistic effect. Smith and Marden's article is a collage of complaints about the two major Australian free market public intellectuals, most of which bear no resemblance to their targets.
According to Smith and Marsden, I am at the forefront of the "renewal of forms of social conservatism" in Australia. The authors also ping me for apparently representing a rejuvenation of the Christian Right.
This accusation is remarkably hard to square with my output. While social policy is not a focus of my work, when it has been tackled, it has been tackled from both conservative and liberal perspectives. In recent years, I wrote in The Australian in 2007 that "debate on gay marriage has been suffocated by a failing to consider why government is regulating marriage in the first place". I wrote in a Howard Government retrospective that in the future, free marketeers need to develop a social policy informed by liberalism, not conservatism. These articles are hardly indicative of a public intellectual that is dominated by the "neoconservative Christian Right".
So why do Smith and Marden spend so much time tackling what is obviously a straw man? It is hard not to conclude that the regular claims by Australian leftists that our political system is being quietly corrupted by an insidious religious right is, oddly, wishful thinking -- the concept seems to have been imported from the United States and dumped, with not much thought, into our public debate.
But it only takes a brief glance at the policy platforms of Australian political parties to realise that the religious right, if it exists, has little influence -- the Liberal, Labor and National parties may have a preference for the status quo when it comes to social policy, but not much more than that. And the policies of Family First are almost clones of the Labor Party's.
Smith and Marden's article is full of bizarre diversions, but their central claim is that Australia's free market think tanks dominate the public debate because of their "commanding and authoritative voices" and their claim to represent commonsense and the "public interest". Flattering perhaps, but wrong. It is a common view of left wing activists that the left just needs to set up a progressive think tank to "retake" the public debate. But what would they say that isn't said a dozen times a day in a dozen different newspapers around the country? Free market think tanks are successful in broadcasting their message largely because that message is so different to the one repeated by universities, lobbyists and public interest groups. The number of newspaper columnists, academics and ABC broadcasters who argue that the government should spend more money on public transport is nearly infinite, but the principled dissenting voice -- that the government should not use transport as a form of social engineering -- is rare.
Unfortunately, what ties these three works closest together is their lack of understanding of the Australian right. Part of the confusion is caused by the conflation of political actors with commentators and intellectuals -- Andrew Bolt is not John Howard any more than Kerry O'Brien is Peter Garrett. To translate the actions of one through the commentary of the other just invites misinterpretation. A further confusion is created by the terminology that groups atheist libertarians with Christian traditionalists undet the umbrella term "conservatives". While they often share offices in political parties and non-government organisations, their motivations can be drastically different.
But the biggest problem with these three works is that they view Australia's right-wing through a glass that more reflects their individual prejudices, than it lets light through.
Perhaps the first step would be to read some of our material.
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