Now this is a stellar read on the Australian major parties - their origins and what is driving them on an ideological level now - as told by a public policy lecturer at ANU (bit of cred but at the end of the day everyones got different interpretations i guess). One little quote from an article with lots of quotable lines: What, then, is so odious about the Labor party? While the parties have converged on many issues, the ALP remains (however feebly) wedded to a mildly redistributive program, which cuts across the now universal neoliberal paradigm of government that is the new orthodoxy of the Liberal party. This – essentially an argument about the appropriate role and size of government in the economy, including in industrial relations – is the main area of contention today. The Labor party still sees government as a means of achieving social progress. The Liberal party wants small government, as they favour the market driving economic decisions (even though the market has so many failings and big business is the real driver small government), and as this guy argues - all they are about is keeping Labor out of government, whilst the Labor party is about distributing social benefit via government, even though in my opinion (and a bunch of others) they have caved on so many of their principles that they look more and more like the Liberal party day to day. Another idea old mate touched on that i liked was this: the Liberal party remains a curious beast: frustratingly elusive, little understood and not a little contradictory. It is emphatically not given to reflection, and certainly not to remorse. It differs starkly in this regard from its principal foe, the Labor party, prone to a fault to navel gaze, over-analyse and second guess itself. But this difference is itself part of a strange but enduring paradox, and a kind of symbiosis: without a Labor party there would probably be no need for a Liberal party.
Posted on: Tue, 13 May 2014 07:21:00 +0000
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