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 […]
Shorten, historicism & Whiggery
I have just published a review of David Marr’s Faction Man in The Conversation. I write these opinion articles very quickly which is a good discipline for academics. So some supplementary comments on my background thinking. I discuss how Shorten is an untroubled Labor loyalist unlike many intellectuals to whom political allegiance is a matter […]
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 […]
Class in Australia: further comments to my article
I have an article in The Conversation examining conservative responses to class in Australia. My inspiration was the rather clunky Anglo-Marxism of John Strachey and Harold Laski in the 1930s. They argued that as capitalism was in a phase of decline it could no longer afford the reforms that social democracy had offered – hence […]
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 […]
Kerry Packer & Australian conservatism
Read Paul Barry’s Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer Uncut. It sheds much light on Australian conservatism and Australian capitalism:
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 […]
Fascism: why in Europe why not in America?
New Years resolution a blog post a week so starting early and building on the political analysis in my Alfred Deakin Research Institute Working Paper American liberalism and capitalism from William Jennings Bryan to Barack Obama: Is there a new fascism on the march? Observers point to the far-right terrorism in Europe, how Islamophobia repeats […]
Working Class Culture
Recently read the 1979 collection of essays Working Class Culture on the British working class. A product of the famous Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies it was published in the year of Thatcher’s election and recalls a lost era.