Opinion & Commentary
Battle for ownership of broad non-Labour church
Malcolm Turnbull’s downfall as Liberal leader was an unusual event for right-of-centre Australian politics. A central cause was disagreement on a policy issue, the emissions trading scheme. Usually the trigger is an ambitious alternative leader exploiting weak polling. Also atypical was the role of the Liberal support base. A reported torrent of anti-ETS emails and phone calls to MPs emboldened them to act against Turnbull. Normally, Liberal members are concerned primarily with election victories.
This time, they were urging their MPs to vote down a policy that polls say two-thirds of Australians want. Without a strong leader’s discipline or the responsibilities of government, these ideological contests are likely to be common on the Australian Right during the coming years. An online poll I conducted this year, recruiting responses mainly through political blogs and websites, gives some insight into what the activists and intellectuals likely to lead these debates are thinking.
The poll gave as options four right-of-centre political labels: classical liberal, libertarian, conservative, and social conservative and economic liberal. Slightly more than 600 respondents picked one of these, with another 30 suggesting different right-of-centre labels for themselves. No one self-described as neoliberal, a favourite term of Kevin Rudd and left-wing academics.
As Liberal party turmoil suggests, the Right is very divided on climate change. Among all respondents accepting the major right-of-centre labels, 12 per cent deny climate change is happening and the rest are split almost equally between natural and human causes. Half oppose action on climate change, either because they think it is not happening or because they believe the costs exceed the benefits. Of those favouring action, more want a carbon tax than an emissions trading scheme. There is nothing approaching consensus on either cause or cure.
A more detailed analysis shows the divisions partly reflect differences of opinion between conservatives on the one hand and liberals and libertarians on the other. A plurality of classical liberals and libertarians think climate change has human causes, while a majority of conservatives think it has natural causes. Following from these beliefs, most conservatives oppose policy action while most classical liberals and libertarians support it, but without agreeing on a policy mechanism.
While views on climate change are unusual in the degree of polarisation and the passion with which opinions are held, the survey suggests there are many issues up for contest on the Right, not just between but also within the various ideological groupings.
The social democrats in the survey were by comparison much more consistent in delivering clear majority support on most of the issues raised by the survey.
Surprisingly large minorities of economic liberals – people choosing the classical liberal, libertarian or economic liberal and social conservative labels – support the interventionist side in contentious industrial relations issues. Nearly half favour minimum wage laws, though a third concede that such laws risk jobs. Support for unfair dismissal laws is at 40 per cent, though most support small business exemptions.
Only on penalty rates do economic liberals overwhelmingly favour leaving the issue to the market. The survey suggests that typically economic liberals fall short of the ‘free-market fundamentalist’ image painted in the Prime Minister’s February Monthly essay condemning free-market reformers.
Despite the policy caution on display here, labour market re-regulation under the Rudd government may stir the political Right. The rush of pre-Christmas strikes has already given the impression that the bad old days of regular union disruption are back. The HR Nicholls Society, which led the intellectual charge against union power in the 1980s, may rise again if Labor – like the Coalition before it – has overreached on industrial relations.
On school education, the survey reveals signs that the political Right may push back against the centralising policies of both the Rudd government and its Liberal predecessor. None of the right-of-centre ideological groupings supports the national curriculum, with its dangers of politicisation and the loss of diversity and experimentation that occurs in more decentralised models. A majority of classical liberals and libertarians support competitive curriculums, to give schools and parents greater choice beyond either national or state-based curriculums.
Though there are issues – of which schooling is one – on which conservatives can find common ground with classical liberals and libertarians, there are dangers for the Liberal Party heading too far down a populist conservative path unattractive to the Right’s more liberal elements.
Even before Tony Abbott’s leadership, this survey shows the Coalition does not speak for those who are active on the broad centre-right. While more than three-quarters of respondents accepting one of the conservative labels support the Coalition, that is so for only half of classical liberals and a third of libertarians. Nearly one-in-five classical liberals say they usually vote Labor.
Responses to a range of questions in the survey help explain this resistance to backing the Coalition. Most classical liberals and libertarians favour substantial reductions in government spending, in contrast to the spendthrift last years of the Howard government. Their strongly liberal views on marijuana use, censorship and gay relationships put them at odds with Coalition’s social conservatism under John Howard, and perhaps more so under Abbott.
Senator Stephen Conroy’s internet censorship plans provide the new Liberal leader with an early chance to give the liberal Right reason to back the Coalition against Labor. If Abbott can restrain his big-government conservative instincts – his book Battlelines proposes even more family spending – he can appeal to activists and intellectuals unhappy with Labor’s large expansion in government spending.
As these examples suggest, ‘what’s Right?’ in the coming years will be determined at least in part by ‘what’s Left?’. Labor initiatives and their consequences will shape the political contest in the coming years, and the Right will need to respond. This will provide political and policy opportunities for right-of-centre parties, activists and intellectuals. But as the politics of climate change have shown already, Labor can also exacerbate existing deep divisions on the Right. On that issue, the question ‘what’s Right?’ has far too many answers.
Andrew Norton is a Research Fellow with The Centre for Independent Studies.
