The best way for prime minister Tony Abbott to win the culture wars might actually be to withdraw the government from them. One of the greatest criticisms conservatives have levelled at the Howard government is that it failed to win the culture wars, despite its 11½ years in office and many other successes.
When the Coalition government fell in 2007, the ABC remained hostile to conservatives and an outpost for cultural liberals, universities continued to be a safe haven for the Left where conservatives continued to feel unwelcome and our cultural elite was dominated by prominent leftists.
Now is the time for him and his team to begin to think about what impact they will have on the culture wars, just as Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd did when they were in opposition.
To succeed where John Howard failed, Abbott will have to approach the culture wars in a totally different fashion.
Instead of trying to beat the Left at its own game, Abbott needs an agenda that fundamentally changes the culture wars, by getting the federal government out of them.
Broadly understood, the culture wars during the Howard years were about Australian identity. They were about who gets to define what it is to be an Australian, and the terms by which it was defined.
Recent history has shown that the Left is much better at using government to favour its side of the culture wars and in many ways the tactics employed by the Howard government in the culture wars actually set back the cause it was trying to advance.
For instance, the appointment of prominent conservatives to the board of the ABC was unsuccessful at changing the tune of the public broadcaster.
Instead, it just gave the Left ammunition in its argument that the Howard government had a political agenda when it came to the ABC. Of course, the Left does not need to stack the board of the ABC to ensure that coverage is sympathetic to its ideology, because most of the staff of the ABC are already of the Left.
To be clear, bias at the ABC is rarely of a crude partisan nature. It is true, as the defenders of the organisation protest, that both Labor and Liberal politicians almost always get an equally tough run on its flagship political programs.
Nor is bias at the ABC likely to be part of some conscious, sinister plot to indoctrinate the Australian people. It is simply the product of the homogenous worldview of staff who are overwhelmingly drawn from similar cultural and ideological backgrounds.
But that doesn't mean it isn't a problem. As a publicly funded broadcaster, the ABC is obliged to treat the views of all Australians with respect and ensure its reporting remains free of bias.
Instead of recommencing a futile effort to change the culture of the ABC via board appointments, prime minister Abbott should seek to reduce the public broadcaster's reliance on taxpayers' support. Further corporatisation of the ABC and a requirement that it raise more of its own revenue, such as by advertising through its high-traffic websites, would provide a much greater incentive to management to deliver content that is in demand by Australians.
And the more revenue the ABC collects in its own right, the less valid political meddling in its editorial decisions becomes.
Another example of an effort to advance a conservative agenda that backfired in the culture wars is the debate about values in education. As education minister, Brendan Nelson proposed that a statement of values, written by the federal government, should be used to ensure that appropriate values were taught in schools.
Building on this idea, his successor Julie Bishop attacked ''Maoist'' state education curriculums and suggested the solution was to hand the power to draft a curriculum for all students to the federal government.
In doing so, they handed Peter Garrett the tools to force these ''Maoist'' curriculums that applied in just some states into every classroom in the country with the highly ideological national curriculum.
While admitting that it sets out to ''shape'' students, not just teach them, the curriculum is appallingly biased and its history section either denigrates or leaves out major events in the development of Western civilisation.
Yet interwoven throughout the whole document is the importance of ''sustainability'', and highly ideological viewpoints, such as the idea that we are running out of natural resources and face an ''energy crisis'', are treated as uncontentious facts.
But instead of redrafting this curriculum with an equally ideological but conservative bent, an Abbott government should throw the curriculum out to the market, through a tender process that allows schools to choose from multiple competing private curriculums.
By taking government out of the drafting of the curriculum, except for setting broad minimum standards, the education system would become depoliticised, and parents would be given the power to choose the schooling they want for their children.
The true strength of this approach is that because of its lack of reliance on control of government spending and regulatory power to fight the culture wars, the important wins that are achieved stand a much better chance of enduring a change of government.
What's more, applying liberal philosophy to a comprehensive cultural reform agenda will also lead to much-needed sensible policy changes that will enhance individual freedom and reduce the size of government in Australia.
The clear lesson from the Howard years is that the Right should be highly wary of using the power of the state to advance its side of the culture wars. Often, it was unsuccessful. Worse, it sometimes backfired and made the job of their ideological opponents much easier.
It would be far better for an Abbott government to adopt a totally new strategy by getting government out of the culture wars.
Not only is this much more likely to advance his own side of the conflict, it is also consistent with conservative principles.
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