The victory of Cameron’s Conservatives in Britain was surprising and a challenge to opinion pollsters. One recent analysis of the post-election British Election Survey has these findings on the Conservative victory: Polls had almost without exception shown that 2010 Lib Dems voters that had switched to one of the two larger parties had overwhelmingly […]
Abbott & Hockey as neoliberals
Considering Joe Hockey’s farewell to parliamentary politics. How are we to explain the close alliance between him and Tony Abbott? Hockey after all was Turnbull lite in the eyes of the media with a charmingly multicultural background. Hockey supported the Republic against Abbott and continues to provide tepid support for this cause. My view is […]
The end of Catholic reconservatism: reblogged from 2010
The appointment of George Pell to a position in the Vatican (as a budget-cutting manager) reminds us of the interminable debate about the power of Catholic conservatism in Australia. Back in 2010 I wrote the following for this blog (and it was published on a Deakin site that has since disappeared). Events since then have […]
Libertarians for sexual assault?
Why are libertarians so conservative? Libertarian intellectuals usually deny this insisting that they are beyond left and right, but libertarianism as a mass movement sits squarely on the right of the political spectrum as demonstrated by Ron Paul. One noteworthy example has been in debates about legislation proposed in Virginia to require women to undergo […]
From Freidrich Hayek to Ron Paul & Rick Santorum
How are we understand divisions in American conservatism? Of the top three candidates in the Iowa caucuses two, Ron Paul & Rick Santorum, have expressed dissent with aspects of contemporary American conservatism. The key to understanding conservative politics is that conservatism is a disposition, conservatives know what they are against rather than what they are […]
Has American liberalism a future?
An extract from my soon to be published Alfred Deakin Research Institute Working Paper on American liberalism: American liberalism has been shaped by both the crises and triumphs of capitalism. In the 1970s Democratic President Jimmy Carter like Grover Cleveland in the 1890s was unable to effectively respond to an economic crisis and thus encouraged […]
Conservatism and authority in industrial relations
Work leaves me little time to blog. However Qantas dispute and the revival of conservative anti-unionism are of note. It represents the latest manifestation of a liberal-conservative tradition in Australia which I discuss below in an extract from a paper of mine under review. This tradition is hostile to unions on conservative grounds that they […]
NSW Labor 1911-2011, Labor & radical liberalism: two papers
I attended Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and the Australian Political Studies Association recently. Both papers inspired by contemporary issues. My ASSLH paper examined career of Richard Crouch the Deakinite Liberal who after losing Corio to Labor in 1910 joined the ALP as a result of his experiences at Gallipoli. Crouch was […]
European fascism & Australian liberal-conservatism
The Oslo murders recall an older Europe: an act of fascist terror committed against supporters of a left-wing political party, indeed because of the killers concern with government policy he was more likely to attack supporters of a moderate left party because he saw it as having an impact on politics.
Julia Gillard and the 1960s
Julia Gillard’s recent declarations of cultural conservatism are curious and hardly worth taking seriously, apparently gay marriage is an enemy of ‘thrift’. It is part of a pattern of some on the centre-left imagining a mythic socially conservative past for the left before the 1960s appeared. It is quite fictitious if we consider the Curtin-Chifley […]