Australian Conservative political movements are no strangers to irrationality and fear. Their most celebrated doyens, the alumni of the Howard Government, were exceptionally adept at wielding fear as a political weapon. They did so regularly in scare campaigns over everything from taxes to terrorists to refugees.
But, that generation of Conservative politics was also only using fear. They did not believe in it. Behind the veneer of rhetorical doom, they regularly acted in good faith to address the Australian national interest.
For instance, the Howard Government attacked Islam but it also fought a justifiable war against global terror networks (with some glaring and very large mistakes). It attacked Labor reform proposals but also installed a very useful GST. It attacked refugees but also expanded immigration intakes through proper channels. It stood for liberalism but also rolled back gun laws to protect the community against libertarian loons.
Undoubtedly, Howardism led to many consequences that many of us would like to unwind today. Not least being corrosive individualism, excessive financialisation, class warfare tax distortions etc. But these were, again, arguable positions based on an identifiable ideology reasoned from enlightenment values and policy process.
But something went very wrong over the years. Each successive Conservative electoral fear campaign attracted a new generation of crazies to its ranks that believed in fear as an end in itself. They wielded a pre-modern sensibility that exalted in superstition, hypocrisy and a self-aggrandisement appointed by god.
This is the rule of Australian Conservatism today. It has dragged its anchor entirely and the ship of enlightenment values is going under. Today Australian Conservatism stands for nothing but an atavistic desire for power to promote an intrinsic brand of fear that is a throwback to the dark ages.
Take the newsflow of just a few weeks.
Yesterday a progressive Australian billionaire launched a $28bn takeover of a household name energy firm that is completely paralysed by legacy coal assets. This takeover is classic capitalism in action. Big capital can see the immense money-making opportunity in a stalled energy transition and wants to invest a staggering sum to turn it into a renewables profit monster. The economics of the play are crystal clear. A Howard/Costello regime of conservatism would have lapped it up.
Yet what is today’s liberal government’s response to it? Fear. Fear for its own sake. Not fear for the energy grid or the national interest. Fear because it is afraid. Afraid of jeopardising the bribes it has taken from fossil fuel outfits. Afraid of change to a cleaner grid. Afraid of its own prospects for a post-political sinecure. Afraid most of all of losing power.
Another policy example is the astonishing rise of sexual assault in the Australian Parliament. This is not coincidental. Those that operate from fear project it onto all others. They especially do so to those that are different to themselves. For example, women in power. They also do so because those in control of the fear offer no guiding hand of decency, nor moral restraint.
Can anybody seriously put the proposition forward that Australian Conservatism in the Howard era would have tolerated twenty-something sexual assaults in the parliament and then buried justice afterward? The Howard Government sacked seven MPs in a matter of months for a few travel rorts. Seven MPs!
Yet not one single sexual assault allegation has been brought to a head of accountability under the Morrison regime. It is a damning acknowledgment of how it all happened in the first place. There has been nothing but obfuscation, sleazy backgrounding and vicious politicking. In short, fear, fear and more fear.
Then there is our national security. Once upon a time, diplomacy was the key tool of soft power. It was the mechanism by which the nation communicated and prosecuted its interests. It was a very carefully managed process, bipartisan and specialised, that sought to further a world view that benefited and protected Australians.
The Howard era diminished this process but it did not turf it out. On the contrary, agree with the decisions or not, they were made rationally and justifiably from an identifiable and assertive basis of values and reason. They led Australia through a tumultuous period of global non-state warfare with results that spoke for themselves.
Compare this with Australian Conservatism today. The Morrison Government operates entirely on the basis of what advances its interests, not the nation’s.
For instance, China. There is no doubt that China changed its spots and became more aggressive under Xi Jinping. But, equally, there is no doubt that contemporary Australian Conservatism also changed under Scott Morrison. Gone was the rational engagement of overlooking trivia, tending to deeper interests and playing down differences. Instead, we got the daily blandishments of a motormouth slob glibly dismembering thirty years of engagement.
I mean what I say when I reckon that the dissolution of the Australia/China relationship was only thanks to good luck, not good planning, or reasoning. It was the fallout of Australian Conservatism’s touchstone of fear. I cheer it on because it is necessary. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think that the Morrison Government is doing anything at all to prepare the nation for it. Subs in thirty years!? No rebuilding of industry. No push to secure supply chains and critical commodity supplies. No reassessment of the migration plan. Gladys Liu holding the balance of power!
Or, try the manner in which the Morrison Government throws casual insults at dangerously nuclear-armed foreign despots like it is insulting some kid from a different denomination in the playground. Once, nuclear geopolitics was governed by very carefully managed mutually assured destruction (MAD). Now it’s just suicidal self-destruction and plain mad.
I could on in terms of policy. Think of the unbelievable sequence of pandemic failure for instance. The sacrifice of robust policy process and science at the alter of god-given narcissism, leading to catastrophic misjudgment. Energy policy is catastrophic. Immigration policy is a disaster. Housing. Corporate greed and corruption. The collapse of reform. So on and so forth.
But there is no need. Medieval fear is in everything that Australian Conservatism now touches. And for the final proof of this new Dark Age we need only look within the movement itself.
The most compelling evidence of the substitution of reason with superstition is the core operations of the Liberal Party disgorged daily to a hungry press.
The LNP recently aimed to pass dead of night legislation misnamed as a bill about religious freedom. It was no such thing. We already have freedom of religion enshrined in law in Australia. This new bill was nothing short of an attempt to legalise the persecution of those deemed sexually deviant by churches. Thankfully, the result showed that enlightenment values are not entirely dead within the LNP when a phalanx of MPs crossed the floor to kill the legislation. This headed off a series of sleaze cults in the community that had already jumped the shark in imposing their Sharia-like laws.
Again, the heart of it was nothing but fear. Fear of difference. Fear of progressiveness. Fear of their own twisted sexualities. Fear as a weapon of institutional power.
Second, there is the extraordinary civil war that has erupted within the NSW Liberal Party. A few months out from a federal election, a swathe of NSW has electorates have no LNP candidates. Why? Because the high priests of fear in the Morrison Government, the Pentecostals, want to protect themselves over the party, as well as parachute other like-minded crazies into parliament. Their agenda is pure fear. The preparation of the world for the Second Coming. A brand of whacko sectarian activists prosecuting armageddon as personal enrichment.
The NSW branch of the party is now taking these fearmongers to court to protect itself. That’s how far Australian Conservatism has fallen from reason to sorcery. Its primary branch has retreated to the last bastion of structural modernity, the law, the protect itself from an insurgency of missionary loons who have not the slightest connection to a world of evidential force.
Australians have taken all of this in their stride. But they are boiling frogs. If any of the above fearmongering had baldly presented itself a decade or two ago it would have shocked us to the core. Including Australian conservatives. After years of abuse at the hands of debased pontiffs, it is now accepted as the norm. It’s just politicians, we say.
But it isn’t the norm and it isn’t just politicians. This is something new. It is a reformation of primitive conservatism that wears the suit of modernity but has the heart of a 15th century inquisitor capable of homicidal hypocrisy.
Australian Conservatism has entered some new kind of Dark Age and it has no place whatsoever in our modern, secular state.
