My essay on the future of Australian conservatism was recently published by Meanjin magazine, which is a journal of the University of Melbourne.
I have only recently written, at all, on Australian politics, so it was an honour to be offered the opportunity to be published by Meanjin, which I first read as an Arts student at the University of Sydney in the 1990s. To be offered the chance to be published in the same pages as once appeared Geoffrey Serle, whose John Monash: A Biography is one of the best biographies ever written, was something I could not pass up.
In my Meanjin piece, I examine the history and future of Australian conservatism, especially given the brief Abbott prime ministership that, in my view, was both un-conservative and harmful to the conservative cause.
To my surprise, however, I received no arguments from readers as to my view that political conservatism's trident has 3 prongs: (1) the maintenance of traditional values, based on Judeo-Christian principles, (2) the maintenance of national solvency, and (3) the maintenance of national security. This Tridentine Conservatism™ may be summarised as "God, gold and guns" or, because politics sound all the more weighty in German, "Gott, geld & krieg".
There are, it is true, innate tensions among those whose major concern is only one of these three objectives. For example, economic conservatives may be socially liberal, aka 'free traders for gay marriage' and especially permissive on drug legalisation, often owing to their own extensive personal use. Some national security conservatives may, in Reaganesque fashion, care less for balanced budgets than for rebuilding an arsenal and for the sort of moral, patriotic society that would support and populate a national security state. Some social conservatives may favour Government encouraging families by having subsidies paid, directly or indirectly, to families with young children so one parent can stay at home, which is a policy that will send some fiscal conservatives into apoplexy.
Nonetheless, these periodic internal squabbles to one side, the incredible electoral success of right-of-centre parties since the advent of universal suffrage in the English-speaking world shows that if conservative groupings coalesce and hold together, then Tridentine conservatives should always win elections or at least come very close. Certainly the relative rarity of right of centre parties losing landslide elections in the last century throughout the English speaking world - in the manner that left of centre parties so often have - is reflective of the Right's capacity to develop sound, sensible if unexciting policies that mostly resonate with most voters, most of the time.
Since the piece was published, I have been asked by a number of readers why, given the electoral success of Australian conservatism, there are in fact few Australian 'public' conservatives (or, to use the argot of our times, "out conservatives"). Conservatism is, from what I gather, the Australian political cause that dare not speak its name. As I explore in my essay there are reasons for this, not least of which is conservatism's own culture, which emphasises prudence and sobriety, and which also frowns upon "inspiring personal stories" and any phrase with the word "journey" in it. For an Australian political culture and media that leans Left, is intensely conformist and seems addicted to raising endless grievances in a country that refugees literally die trying to get to, it is hard also for conservatives to see engaging with the hyperbolic and overly emotional as worthwhile.
However, all this said, I would concede that, compared to local proponents of social democracy, Greenism or even socialism, the conservative cause in Australia suffers from a lack of public voices. Those who argue publicly for positions that are on what is the political Right here, tend to be economic conservatives, supportive of (if not always well informed on) national security matters, but otherwise social liberals/libertarians. There are few actual Tridentine conservatives. The locally dominant Right of centre thinking is economically 'dry' / socially 'wet' - what was once called "moist", and thus Australia's visible Right is populated by those whose prime concern is a 'government out of my wallet and out of my bedroom'. While superficially attractive as a means of extracting oneself from messy debates on abortion, gay marriage, euthansia, divorce, the sexualisation of pretty much everything etc, the "moist" view of politics ultimately reduces rather than enhances the broad Right's capacity to offer a competing vision of the 'good society' given the Left has no qualms about promoting a more permissive approach on both social and economic issues. It is a form of argumentative disarmament to try and explain the virtues of financial prudence and individual liberty without any resort to a moral language. It also fails to account about what should be done for those who are sick, disabled or have other miseries of life heaped upon them, and how and why we, as a society with limited resources, choose who we help and, especially, who we do not.
Moreover, as the Left's historic position is that whatever happens in the bedroom should also be paid for out of all of our wallets as a matter of 'social justice', the separation of private and public moralities is very difficult to sustain in a polity where the poor life choices of an increasing minority will be paid for by the revenues extracted from the ever increasingly taxed and sensible many. The Victorians understood that a wealthy and free society could not sustain itself without a public morality that emphasised duties rather than rights, obligations instead of liberties, an unapologetically judgemental and sensible order of things, not an ethics of DIY: "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." (Judges 21:25) The problems inherent in the "moist" approach, which predominates the Right here, are obvious for all but those required by the nature of their employment to espouse the latest manifesto of the WEIRD culture.
Nonetheless, in an Australia where the 11th commandment remains, as one Christian minister put it when I was at university, "thou shalt not judge me nor shalt thou make me feel the consequences of my misguided actions", conservatism will always have to make the unfashionable case that it has always made, whereby, "we each have duties, we each have responsibilities and just because you can, does not mean you should." If there is, however, to be a (re)birth of a true conservatism, whether in Australia or elsewhere, it can only occur by accepting that the moral, social and economic domains are all interconnected. While I am not one to quote Lenin, he was right to (apparently) say "everything is connected with everything else". It is.
