From The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (Mark Davis, 2008) pp 38-41
The story of Australia’s conservative ascendancy isn’t only a story of a few hard-working rebels with a cause. It’s the story of how Australia became what it is today. On the one hand it’s a genuinely heroic story. There’s little doubt that without some sort of economic reform of the ilk that the New Right pushed so hard for, Australia would have remained an economic basket case. On the other hand it’s a tragic story, because the particular forms that economic reform have taken in Australia, as in the rest of the world, are highly ideological. More counter-revolution than revolution, in the hands of radical conservative activists, free-market economic theory has been used as a political weapon to undo the historic democratic gains of the second half of the twentieth century. The same arguments that have been used to justify economic reform have been used in an all-out attack on almost every major social movement, from feminism to unionism, to environmentalism, to the very notion of human rights. The New Right’s struggle for economic reform was merely the pointy end of a much wider agenda. Like their US and counterparts, its adherents saw themselves as engaged in a ‘war of ideas’ to be fought down to the last institution: a war on Keynesianism, a war on the welfare state, a war on the left, a war on environmentalism, a war on Aboriginal land rights, a war on non-governmental organisations (NGOs), a war on feminism, a war on received notions of social justice. It wasn’t simply an economic revolution they were after so much as a revolution of the spirit that would change people’s attitudes on work, welfare, corporations, profits, minority rights, and the way in which democracy was configured. Government and its ‘rent-seeking’ progressive clients would be taken out of the picture. The ‘hidden hand’ of the market would do the rest.
But the conservative ascendancy would never have been possible had its opponents been able to articulate an alternative. Ultimately, the New Right gained the upper hand because they addressed economic and social issues that the progressive left barely countenanced. There has been no progressive model for economic reform that doesn’t make overly grand assumptions about the power of the state to intervene in wealth redistribution, and most progressives fail to take commerce seriously. Progressive prescriptions about how to manage racial difference in a postcolonial, globalised nation, too, tend to fall back on formulaic ideas of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ that don’t address fundamental questions about how to manage difference when fundamental belief systems and social priorities clash, and that don’t see much need to define overarching national values and social meanings. The conservative answers might have been backwards-looking and regressive, but they at least had something substantial to say.
Almost forty years after the conservative revolution began, its answers are being found wanting. The economic results have been mixed. Australia still relies mainly on primary commodities to support an economy that is in many ways no less dysfunctional now than it was in the 1980s. Its current account deficit grows ever larger, and foreign debt continues to balloon, driven by unsustainable levels of household debt. Bigger gaps have opened up between rich and poor, and Australia is increasingly a two-tiered society, much less cohesive than it once was, marked by Class and ethnic divisions, Yet the progressive left still has no Alternative model that doesn’t rely on nostalgia for the old, and the public and commentators alike tend to understand politics in terms of changes of government, as if new leaders and their parties aren’t subject to the same pressures and aren’t beholden to the same overarching ideological cultures as old ones. No matter who you vote for, a version of the same consensus gets in. So far as economic issues are concerned, the difference is mostly style, image-making and rhetoric.
The triumph of the New Right is that Australia’s postwar Keynesian consensus has been comprehensively broken, and it defenders have since been in more or less permanent retreat, Much as politicians pay lip service to ‘fairness’ or ‘working families’ or traditional Australian egalitarian virtues, governments of all stripes now look to the market and to business in the first instance. Traditional mechanisms of wealth distribution such as the progressive tax system, and the education, health and welfare systems, have been undermined or privatised. Even where free-market ideas were strongly contested and even departed from by government—and they often are—they nevertheless formed the default ‘common sense’ position in areas such as economic policy industrial relations policy and welfare policy.
Whatever we are now, the New Right made us. Without FA Hayek or Milton Friedman or Hugh Morgan or John Stone of Bert Kelly or Keith Joseph or George Wallace or PP McGuinness or Ray Evans and the activists of the HR Nicholls Society and the Crossroads Group, or the IPA or the CIS, or the writers of Quadrant, Australia wouldn’t be what it is today. Yet, oddly, most of us have little idea who these people are.
But there’s another problem with all this. The above tale of the founding of Australia’s radical conservative movement leaves out half the story. It was one thing, in the 1980s, to outline a problem to policy elites and to sell radical new ideas to politicians and public servants, and quite another to gain public backing for those ideas, let alone to crack open the longstanding political conventions of postwar consensus politics so as to gain electoral support for a political agenda that involved far more than mere economic reform, In Australia, as in the United States and the UK, the answer to this problem was race.
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