The top 20 Australian conservatives – update

Posted by Chief Blogger – 26 February, 2009

When I started compiling a list of the top 20 Australian conservatives I thought I’d struggle to find enough names to get to 20. It soon became readily apparent that I would struggle to keep the list to just 20. A reassuring outcome. The Telegraph has compiled similar lists for the UK and US conservatives and this is where the idea for my list comes from.

Conservatism in Australia has never been well defined. I suppose it didn’t need to be specifically defined, it was called being Australian. The assault on the status quo really began in the 1970s with the election of Whitlam, while Fraser seemed unable or unwilling to undo many of the left-wing reforms put in place by Whitlam. Today, part of the problem is that the Liberal Party is no longer exclusively defined by conservatism. The National Party is the only political party of prominence that could be defined almost entirely by conservatism, albeit of an agrarian kind.

To overcome this problem, I have used Ronald Reagan’s description of conservatism: the three legged stool. This includes fiscal conservatism, social conservatism and national security hawks. I add to these criteria an historical and legal component. i.e the degree to which a person holds a non-black armed view of Australian history and support Australia’s existing constitutional arrangements. That does mean a Republican could not make the list. Not all persons satisfy all criteria equally. In order to do well on the rankings one must perform well across all criteria.

Persons are ranked using a grid analysis methodology, with scores weighted by each criteria. The three legs are each given a weighting of 10, history and law are each given a weighting of 7, while an ‘impact’ factor is given a weighting of 20. This final factor is important, because a person’s ability to influence public opinion or initiate change towards conservatism is more important than a passive observer with more strident conservative views.

This will tend to favour politicians, who are more likely to state a position across a range of issues. If for any reason I am unable to tract down the position of the person on a criteria, they are given a default score of 1 for that criteria. Individual unweighted scores are given out of 10, with a maximum weighted score across all criteria equalling 640 marks.

I’ll post persons ranked 20 to 16 later on today.

  • Top Dog

    Interesting post, but I think it’s flawed. I particularly have a problem with your definition of conservatism, and the concept of the transplant and applicability of the ‘the three-legged stool’. I’ll explain why.

    The reason conservatism has never been properly defined in Australia is because Australia doesn’t have a conservative tradition, because we’re not a conservative country, and never will be. We’re too young for it. The Liberal Party is more a Disraelian Tory party, with qualified support – but support nonetheless –for the welfare state and a mild but basically rhetorical, not practical, opposition to the growing of the state, as compared to the Labor Party’s support for the growing of the state. R. G. Menzies, the great founder of the modern Liberal Party never once, not once, defined himself as a conservative. And under Howard, apparently the most ‘conservative’ PM ever, the welfare state grew so exponentially as to render his conservative credentials, as you define conservative, non-existent. I will address the rest of your claims.

    The claim that Whitlam ‘assaulted’ the status quo, whilst true, is not a repudiation of this country’s so-called conservative disposition. In fact, Harold Holt, Menzies successor, was intellectually in sympathy with much of Whitlam’s eventual agenda, as his biographer Tom Frame has argued. So any ‘assault’ on the status quo would’ve just as likely been led by the leader of our so-called conservative party.

    The National Party is a weird, reactionary collection of economic collectivists, One Nation sympathisers, and Agrarian socialists. It, too, is has nothing whatsoever in common with your three-legged stool definition, as its explicit homogeneity precludes a coherent political label.

    And your definition of conservatives as personifying the ‘the three-legged stool’ is an American transplant that has enough problems working in the United States, let alone here.
    For one thing, the Liberal Party is not socially conservative – Howard supports the status quo on abortion, and it was his government that legalised the abortion pill RU486, and his economic policies led to a proliferation of women back into the workforce, and a re-defining of the traditional family. It’s no coincidence that Bob Santamaria despised Howard, and publicly said so. Howard may be against gay marriage, but many in the Labor Party hold that view too. I doubt they could be considered conservative.

    The vague label of ‘fiscal conservative’ has little application here too, as the Liberal Party and John Howard, especially the latter’s, spending splurge at the 2007 election, confirmed.
    Howard and his supposedly conservative right-hand man Tony Abbott also used to proudly boast that ‘the Howard Government is the best friend that Medicare has ever had’. State-run health-care, by the way, is not a policy which fiscal conservatives value, and it’s highly improbable that Hayek or Friedman would’ve approved of it. Yet Howard and the Liberal did. How does this fit in with the ‘three-legged stool’? There is also funding for state schools, the ubiquity of middle class welfare which Howard and co. encouraged, and the still relatively high business tax rates they left in place. None is the terrain of the fiscal conservative.

    National security hawks, another vague and silly American transplant, has little bearing here too. What does it mean to be a national security hawk? Is it to start the process of a security pact with the United States, like the Labor Party did in the early 2oth century, which the Liberal Party also embraced? Is to unashamedly and independently put this country’s interests before those of any other country, like Labor’s John Curtin did? Or is to embarrassingly sub-contract this country’s dignity and admit to being a ‘deputy sheriff’ like Howard did? Being a subservient lackey to an incompetent is quite distinct from being a hawk for this nation’s security, but thanks all the same.

    So according to your own definition of conservatism, Howard and the modern Liberal Party do not even quite fit the mould. This makes sense, as the Australian political tradition is much, much different from the American political tradition with which you’re so obviously enamoured, but which you unfortunately don’t seem to quite understand.

    So try to understand this: American conservatism is a political movement based on disparate political constituencies in the USA; it’s not a coherent political ideology that can easily be transplanted here. I’ll quickly summarise and explain why it can’t: it started in 64 with the Goldwater loss, which introduced West Coast libertarianism into the Republican Party, which had hitherto been a Rockefeller liberal Republicanism which accepted the New Deal and Great Society. This is where conservatism gets its ‘fiscal conservative’ element from, the Goldwater campaign – but the libertarians were never social conservatives, as Barry Goldwater personified and Ronald Reagan’ stint as governor confirmed. It was only later as President in order to win southerners that Reagan turned this around, rather opportunistically. But there was always friction between libertarians and social conservatives.

    Then Nixon won in 68 on the back of corrosive social unrest due to the Civil Rights agenda of LBJ and wars in Indo-China – but Nixon won only by appealing to suburban, middle class families, and southern whites, the latter hitherto Democrats, now Republicans. Google the “Southern Strategy” to find out more. These southerners were social conservatives on moral issues and race, but were not fiscal conservatives, as they came from the poorest part of the United States and relied on the state for assistance to offset inequalities and indigence. This is where conservatism gets its ‘social conservative’ element from, but there are perennial tensions between it and fiscal conservative because of their competing demographics and economic situation.

    The last element, national security hawk, was very much a product of the Cold War, and was the unifying issue for all: all were anti-communist, and all despised the USSR. This is what held the competing groupings together. But: with the disintegration of the USSR, their tensions came to the fore, and the coherent political outfit doesn’t look so coherent. Libertarians don’t like social conservatism, and it’s a mutual distaste, and the now-national security hawks, who are basically East Coast academics journalist-intellectuals – the ‘neo-conservatives’ – aren’t known for being fiscally conservative, through the demands for constant increased defence spending, or for being overly socially conservative, as their liberal views on issues as varied as gay marriage and abortion testify to.

    Thus, what I’m trying to say in a very long and convoluted way: conservatism as you define it is very much an American phenomenon which has an American heritage, American contradictions, and is now dying an American death. It cannot easily be transplanted here because it’s foreign to our political culture, our political history, and most importantly, our political debate. And to try and rate Australian ‘conservatives’ on this very shaky basis is, I think , a waste of time as its based on a flawed premise and thereby will only lead to a flawed outcome, as your concept of conservatism is nothing more than an aggregation of American political constituencies which don’t really like each other, let alone have the coherence to form a singular ideology.